Happy New Beginnings

How do you view Hogmanay and New Year? Do you celebrate loudly with friends, or just a quiet night with your loved one or maybe you shut up shop and go to bed early?  Normally, we tend to have quiet affair for Hogmanay and have a family get together on New Year's Day. This Hogmanay we are having some friends over for a quiet celebration just before the bells and as usual, a get-together tomorrow with my sis, which we love.

This year as I raise my glass to see out the old and bring in the new, I will quietly be thinking about this past year. Many people have said I will be glad to get it behind me and while I am glad to have the treatment over, I am grateful for the lessons that this 'blip' has taught me. The silver lining behind my very large black cloud has always been there. I am grateful to be healthy and well and grateful for my wonderful family and their love. I will never again take good health, good friends and happiness for granted again. Things can change in the blink of an eye. The recent tragedy in George Square shows us this quite clearly. 

I love the changes that I have made in my life as a result of this breast cancer. For some time I wanted  to make dietary changes. For some time I wanted to be less stressed about the not so important details of life. For some time I wanted to find a direction in life. And as hard as it was, breast cancer has given me those things. 

As a nurse I used to work in many different specialities and daily I came across people that were sick or depressed or both about their health and lives. I used to try to advise them, but so many people refused to make their health their business. One day in a high dependency cardiac unit, the charge nurse told me that many people refuse to make changes in their life until they have had 2 or 3 heart attacks and often it is too late and the damage has been done. How sad. How sad that we choose to ignore the things that are screaming out to us to fix until it is too late.

I  blog about these things in the hope and wish that other people don't wait to make positive changes in their lives until they are faced with a diagnosis such as mine. I ignored my messages until they hit me square on. I didn't believe it could happen to me. 

New Year is a wonderful time. Fresh starts and new beginnings abound. Let's do some affirmations to create the lives we want and deserve. Let's not forget about others along the way. Let's stop focussing on the negatives and boost the positives. Let's get committed to helping ourselves and others reclaim happiness. Let's make health a normal part of our lives. Let's evolve our awareness and consciousness to higher levels. Let's not accept corporate greed as a way of life. Let's take out the garbage and make room for new growth. Let's take our dreams and make them a reality. Let's live in the now and forget about the past and the future will take care of itself.  Let's create a better world for our children.

I'm raising my glass to a wonderful 2015 and continuing to make lots of positive changes. Happy New Year!

And so this is Christmas...

Blissful ignorance last year!

The Christmas movie is on...we are singing along to the yuletide tunes. It is your typical memory inducing pre-Christmas lazy weekend. As I put up the Christmas tree with the children, I think about my blissful ignorance of the fact that my breast cancer was at this time last year, undiscovered. I had, had the BRCA gene test and was awaiting its results. I felt pretty confident that all would be fine. My Facebook timeline and pictures show my confident disregard for what would unfold. 

If you can't have a laugh at yourself...

Sometimes, when I look back I feel sad for what I have lost. I guess it is a similar feeling for those that look at old pictures to people who have passed away and feel sad that they won't be able to recreate those same feelings of good, old, happy carefree times. My feelings swing from happy to be alive to sad for past carefree times. I'm almost bipolar! Along with my hair and some body parts, I've lost a wee part of the old me. Maybe this is the silver lining. That old me was always grumbling about some ridiculous nothing or another. The new me sports a 'See You Jimmy' hair-do and more of an indifferent attitude. This is definitely a good thing...no not the 'See You Jimmy' part, that is a hair-do unto itself which will tame itself eventually! No, the indifferent part. I always wanted to be more indifferent to the small insignificant annoyances that scratch through most people's minds on a daily basis. I'm not so caught up in being annoyed about less trivial matters and I'm more grateful to the basics of life that we tend to overlook...still breathing being one of them!

Yip! it has been some year. It's time to shake off the old, put my Christmas head on and start thinking about the new...