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Shifting Gears: Removing Yourself

Hey everyone, hope you are enjoying your Saturday where ever you are. I’m making an attempt at some rest, which is long overdue. Been feeling well, a little tired from my high level of activity lately, but really well for the most part. Been around the hospital fairly consistently lately for pretty minor stuff.

My iron levels are really high, 10 times normal which is most definitely from my many blood transfusions, so to help bring the level down I have blood drained out of me. Essentially I donate blood, and they throw it in the garbage. Unfortunate but that’s the way it works for me. Everything else is good. I can say with comfort that I am now officially off all my drugs! It’s been a few weeks now but I have learned to wait until I announce these things as I’ve been fooled in the past and had to return to the drug schedule as my body wasn’t quite ready to give them up. But this time I’m good without the Prednisone, which is the tough one to stop, and then the others that can stop once I stop Prednisone.

Outside of the medical update things with RealTime Cancer(RTC) are pretty solid. We celebrated our 3rd birthday at our annual golf tournament on June 25th, it was another great day and helped to raise money to keep us going. For those of you interested to read our annual report you can see it on the web site. I would encourage you to have a look and learn about the details of what we do.

As I continue to put a serious amount of effort into planning the road ahead for RTC my mind often wanders on to other topics, and I use this forum to share my thoughts on them. As I was driving this morning the idea of “removing yourself” from a situation came to mind. It came to me with a pretty specific situation but as is often the case the specific situation can be applied to many others.

I was thinking about when we are emotionally connected to a situation, environment or person, any of those. I was thinking about how we interact with it. I was specifically thinking about that in relation to a troubling experience, one that may be causing pain and may cause even more in the future. I often think about this idea in relation to me, given that my Challenges have certainly been a source of pain for many people.

My thoughts usually begin with my situation and then I transfer out to others and how they respond and interact with me. I wonder how they experience the other side of this transaction. What’s it like to be on the other side of this equation that my life has created? I think about the many different people I’ve connected with, especially those since I’ve started RTC. And I wonder why some have jumped in face-first and why others have removed themselves. If there are counsellors, social workers, psychologists in the group I’m sure you have a collection of theories. But those theories aren’t my interest at this moment anyway.

What I want to do, as I’m sure I’ve done in the past, is to encourage you to consider jumping in face-first. I know it’s not for everyone, but I feel connecting with or growing your connection with those who may be a source of pain… that isn’t always the worst move. I know that many times we want to avoid pain and we make the effort to remove ourselves from it’s path. Sometimes we can go to great lengths to do so. But I want to suggest for our consideration that making effort to avoid the pain may not result in avoiding it at all. In fact there is a part of me that feels it may cause more pain not less.

These thoughts do come from my evolving core belief that the “bad stuff” isn’t really that bad, and truth is it can be really “good stuff” if we make the effort to see it that way.

I do recognize that I have probably presented this idea in a very abstract manner, but that is how I’m most comfortable doing it and feel I can best explain myself that way. Hope it made sense to you. Take care of you, I’ll be back soon, and…

Always…
Live life. Love life.

Geoff

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