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The thing that nearly kills me
When you are young you have no sense of your own mortality, thinking you will live forever, and that being old is some dim distant point in time. When your body turns on you, cancer, aggressive growths, autoimmune disorders, you think you will fight it and get through. I did, others have tragically not. The thing which nearly kills you is not a gun or knife or indeed another person, it is the very thing keeping you alive in the first place. Surviving that gives you a weird relationship with your body, especially when it repeatedly keeps tripping you up over the course of your life. Surviving something does not make you stronger, it makes you conscious of your own mortality, your own fragility, and most of all that you cannot implicitly trust that your body will do the thing it is supposed to do: keep you alive.
I was 15 when my body decided to do its best to unalive me. At the time I was blasé and just rolled with the medical procedures that ultimately kept my body at bay, and it took round two some twelve years later to finally get my body to stop. The thing I had was not cancer, there was no fighting it through grit and determination, and there was no bell at the end. Only a thin skull and a total ban on playing any team sport without a helmet, and even then it had to be non-contact. It ripped a huge part of me, the sporty try anything kid who was never great at sport but loved to be a…
