How To Beat the Ripple Effect of Cancer

In this deeply personal and insightful episode of 'A Magical Life,' host Magic Barclay shares her experiences and observations on dealing with cancer, having faced it twice herself. She discusses the nature of cancer, the emotional turmoil of a diagnosis, and the importance of maintaining normalcy and supporting not just the patient, but also their support system. Magic emphasizes the need for honesty, emotional openness, and resilience, while providing valuable advice on how to handle the various challenges that come with a cancer diagnosis and treatment. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of cancer's impact and learn how to support yourself and your loved ones through the journey.

Transcript

Magic Barclay: 0:42

Welcome back to a Magical Life. I'm your host, magic Barclay, and today I wanna talk about cancer, the big C life, ender, disruptor, whatever you wanna see it as. It's something that most of us hopefully will never have to with. I have twice and so today. This episode is basically based on my own experience, my own observation, and something that I feel is really important for people to know, to hear, and to consider. Now whether this has affected you or your family or friends, or you've just heard of it and it's something that you fear, I really wanna take some of. What mainstream, ignore, and really, you know, dissect some ideas here. So hopefully this episode, oops. So hopefully this episode resonates with you in some way. Gets you thinking, stirs you up to consider what cancer really is. Let's get started. Cancer itself is. A diagnosis that to this day, shakes people to the core. But what is it? It is actually a collection of dead cells. It's your body's way of finding cells that are no longer productive and putting them like in a collection, in a bin. The cancer itself is the bin with the lid gaffer taped on or electrical taped or whatever, and then welded and there's some clamps on it, and it's really only when we look at cut, burn poison that it spreads. Okay, so cut being surgery, burn, meaning radiation and poison being chemo. Now settle down. Some of you're probably upset that I'm saying those things don't always work. And it's true because my first cancer, I did surgery and it didn't stop it coming back. Same spot 10 years later. So what is. A dead cell? Well, a dead cell is something that's reached its lifecycle. Cells are living, they are alive, and when they're not, they're dead. Obviously, like other organisms. Sounds like I'm making light of the situation, but I'm really not. There's a natural process in our body called apoptosis or programmed cell death. Now cells have a lifespan, a life cycle, I guess, and. They're supposed to die, but our body is supposed to be able to clear it out. What a cancer is is when there's too many dead cells. Our body says, I can't get rid of this myself. I need to plant this somewhere. Put it somewhere safe. Hopefully nothing ever happens, and you know, Bob's your uncle, you're okay. Doesn't always happen. Okay? So when we have excess toxins in our life, excess stress. Anything that we've discussed, you know, previously in, in this podcast, that toxicity creates more of a situation for cancer. So that's pretty much all the medical stuff we're going to talk about in this episode. What I really wanna touch on is what happens when you get a diagnosis now, when you get a diagnosis, first of all, your head is spinning. When I got my first cancer diagnosis, I felt like I was the girl in the Exorcist, you know, with her head spinning round on her shoulders, and there was nothing I could do to process it quickly or without emotion. Without more stress. And so this diagnosis in itself was creating toxicity in my body, but I reached out to my family, people closest to me as any normal person would do, and I did not see immediately the effect that had on people. So what I wanna talk. To you today about is it's okay if you get this diagnosis to be in your own feelings to process it your way, and it's okay to reach out to those that you love and care for knowing that they love and care for you, and everyone wants the same outcome, which is your survival. But be aware there's a flow on effect of cancer. It's not just you going through it, it's your family. Let me delve into that one a bit more. So, the first time I had cancer, my boys were young, they were 14 and 12, and I thought, you know, let's, let's shield them from what's going on. So they got a lot of mummies. Okay, mum just needs to go to the hospital for a bit, but everything's fine. Don't worry. They had their grandmother with them looking after them. She was bearing the brunt of everything and shielding them as I'd asked her to do. And then I saw that they actually knew more than I thought they did. Kids are inquisitive. You tell them something's wrong, they're going to really delve into the ifs, buts whys, and wherefores of the situation, whether you like it or not. So when I got home from hospital, I was honest with them. I said that I'd had cancer and that I'd had surgery and everything was going to be fine. And you know, just for a little while, I need to take things a little bit differently and I need their help with things and everything was fine. And then as they got a bit older, they started talking to me about the things that they were thinking and feeling. And you know what? It wasn't so much that their life had changed or you know, anything like that. They were more worried about how I was processing things. So they were turning themselves inside out with emotions. Based on how they thought I was processing it. So it's really important when we get a cancer diagnosis that we look at our support system and we make sure they have a support system too. And that may be us, and it may be the last thing we we're unwell that we wanna deal with, but we need to, everyone needs to be honest about it, say how you're feeling and work through it together. You need to support the support basically. So a second time around was quite recently, same place, you know, same kind of cancer and uh, obviously some cells had been left behind and more cells collected. And I've got another cancer this time round. My kids are in their early twenties, so I told them what it was straight away. And I told them, it's okay to be scared. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to wanna scream to the top of your lungs. Whatever you need to do, do it. We got out our boxing gloves and pads and we did a bit of a training session, and I said, get your anger out now because I need you and I need you to support me, but I also know that you need support. So we did that and we talked about it and a bit of PTSD came up for all of us. And of course when I had to be trotted off to hospital this time, no surgery, my neck did it all itself. My younger son spoke to the surgeon. So I was under observation going to have surgery, but my neck decided to open up and push the cancer out itself. Long story, but Needless to say, there were a couple of little episodes where I wasn't able to advocate for myself. So my son did it and he spoke to the surgeon and he said, listen, you guys stuffed it up last time. Don't stuff it up this time, or I'm going to come down there and be your worst nightmare, basically. And he needed to say that and he needed to vent. When I was able to, the surgeon spoke to me about it and he said, I realize this young man is traumatized. So I took his vent and let him do that, and then spoke to him calmly when he calmed down and I thanked the surgeon for it. Wonderful guy. I've spoken to him since, and he said, I could sense that your son was traumatized. So I let him work through it. Now, thank goodness for this guy, right? Thank goodness that he let my son vent and get that emotion out and not be able to twist himself in knots with it, not poison himself with the anger. Maybe you don't have someone like that. Maybe you need to create someone like that. When we're going through cancer, this is kind of the last thing we think of. We don't think of the flow on effect to our families. We're so busy thinking about our own mortality, and again, speaking from my own personal experience here, but if this resonates with you, please look after your support crew because they need support too. They don't necessarily need to book in with a psychologist and you know, do the whole formal, I need to talk to someone thing. Maybe they just need to go for a walk with you. Maybe they need to do a boxing session. Maybe they just need to scream at someone who can take it and understand it's not on them. Right? This is not directed anger. This is. Confusion and fear and you know, all the other emotions that our support crew go through. So that's when you get a diagnosis. What happens when you get some treatment? No matter what the treatment is, it's not going to be fun, right? I'm just telling you this. Now, whether you go the medical route or the natural route. It is not going to be fun. There's going to be times that you feel like crap. For me, it was the nausea, it was the being able to smell things that no one else could. It was, you know, get up from the couch, walk five steps, and feel like you're absolutely going to bring up your breakfast. Then it goes down again. Like that was horrible. Okay. But it was being honest about that with my support crew, letting them know what I was going through, because they need to know my kids could not eat certain meats in the house because. The smell would just send me off. Kind of like pregnancy, morning sickness times a thousand. So when you are going through this, be honest with what you're going through. Don't try and sugarcoat things. Don't try and shield people from anything. Let them know if they can't handle it and they disappear. That's on them now. Back in season one, I believe it might've been episode 10. I spoke to a very dear friend of mine, Sophie, who has metastasized cancer, and we spoke about this. Then go back and listen to it, but I'm going to basically say it all over again and it is when you have a cancer diagnosis, some of your friends dunno how to deal with it, and so they don't invite you to things. I. They know you're going to say no, so they just don't invite you to things or they try and shield you from things. Don't do that. Invite your person with cancer into things in your life. Give them the opportunity to, if they're having a good day to attend or give them the opportunity to decline. But give them the opportunity because when you've got cancer, you need to keep your life moving normally as much as possible. And it's the not being invited to things, the over shielding of things that hurts so much. You're already going through hell. You don't need to be emotionally dismissed or discarded as well, or overprotected, any of that. Whatever the action is coming from, from your friends, you don't need it. So tell people, treat me normally. I need to do things a bit differently. I may not be able to come, whatever, but treat me normally. Let me make the adjustments. Now, having said that, don't make too many adjustments in your life for cancer. because you are part of a family, you are part of a friendship group, you are a neighbor, you are a coworker, a colleague, you may be a boss. Whatever it is that you are, you still need to be that you are not a cancer. Person, every moment of every day, you are still you. And so you need that opportunity, but you need to give that opportunity to the people around you as well for some sort of normality in life. It's really, really important that you do not ever let cancer take over your life. So this is something else that came up. Along my journey. It was not being invited to things. It was people when they came over, really treating me like an invalid. I'm not. I'm perfectly fine apart from what's going on in my case, in my neck, and it's really important that life goes on. This is while you've got cancer. So you've had your diagnosis given to you. Now you've got the cancer, you're dealing with it. You're doing whatever treatment it is that you are doing. What happens after, and this is really important. It's really important that you get on with your life, okay? It's really important that you go, okay, I've beaten this. If it comes back, I will beat it again. I need to live my life. You need to check in with your special people, your support crew, your family, whoever it is, and you need to go. We've all been through this. I get it. It wasn't just me, but we're okay now. If your cancer is something that you can't beat. This is really important as well. It's important that you give permission to your support crew to have their emotions around you, because a lot of support crew will try not to cry in front of you. They will try not to show that they're scared or that they're angry. It's okay. For them to have emotions in front of you. It won't break you completely. You'll survive their emotions. Maybe your cancer's not something you can survive, but you need to be able to give other people a chance to have that emotional closure and emotional acceptance. Because if you are gone from this planet, you are leaving them with that, and that's not okay. This comes down to our pets as well. Now, something I noticed the last time I had cancer was my little kitten spent her whole time with her arm across my neck. We'd snuggle in bed and instead of just laying beside me, she would make sure some part of her was across my neck. Usually an arm, sometimes a tail, whatever. She felt like she needed to help heal me, to touch me, and that was okay. You know, my neck was very, very sore and had bandages on it, so you know, she wasn't gonna get any fur in it or anything, but she knew it was there. She wanted to help heal me. Allow your pets near you. You cannot live your life in sterility. You cannot live your life Worried about every single germ. And I know this is weird'cause you know, when we go to a hospital, everything's sterile and cleaned and whatever, there's other things that we get from our animals. That is the vibration of a purr or just even the love that comes from any animal. We need that and they need to give it to us. Could I have, you know, kept shooing her away from my neck? Definitely. Did it hurt a bit? Every time she put her arm across my neck? Yeah, it did. But she needed to do it. And then when I came back from hospital and I was healing, she needed to be able to sniff me and check me out and make sure that I was still me it. And then when everything healed up, it was important that our life went on as normal. Had it changed? Yes. It had definitely, but any amount of normality that you can bring back to life will help you heal. My neck is fully healed now. I'm keeping an eye on things. My kitten will still check out my neck. She'll still sniff. There's no open wounds or anything, and she'll still check it out and that's okay. She wants to make sure her mum's. Going to be fine and my kids will still eat things that make me nauseous, and that's okay. Life goes on. They will panic when I'm turning green in the gills. They'll say, are you sick again? And I'll just say, no, I actually just don't like that smell. Probably may never, ever like that smell again, but I'm just telling you I don't like it. Do they change what they're eating? No, because I haven't asked them to. I have not asked them to change their lives whatsoever. My reaction to it is my reaction to it. It doesn't need to be their problem. And I guess this is the crux of this conversation, and that is that you are not the only person dealing with the cancer. You are the person with the cancer. But you are not the only person dealing with the cancer, so be aware of the people around you. Allow them to have their emotions. Allow them to have their fears, their anxiety, whatever it is. Ask them for normality. Normality in their behavior. Normality in being invited to things, normality when people see you. Keep life going because the biggest part of a cancer diagnosis is if it's survivable. You don't want it to decimate your life. Pretty thick, heavy stuff today. And you know what? It's important that we have this conversation as always, if you like. Subscribe, share, and leave us a review of this podcast. We would be eternally grateful. And my last message is cancer does not need to be the end of you. Maybe it's the beginning of a stronger, more resilient, better. You enjoy your magical life. Don't let cancer steal it. And we'll talk to you next time. Bye.