Give me a break?

I’m over the moon at the moment. Yesterday, my plaster cast was taken off my foot, and, to my delight, I haven’t even had to have an aircast boot put back on! It sounds like the bone is healing nicely (we didn’t look at the old break!) and he was happy for me to slowly build up my strength in it again. So the crutches have been discarded and I’m on the go again! I’ve even started driving short distances although am a bit wary of doing longer distances for a few days in case anything happens. The only thing is that I have to wear walking boots to do long walks for a while…… I didn’t ask about netball. I don’t want to know! I am desperate to get back to it, and am hoping that perhaps in a couple of weeks, my foot will feel strong enough to at least play a quarter of a match. Not that the team wants the responsibility of me getting it wrong, so I think I’ll have to be more sensible than I might like!

I am so lucky to have had such amazing friends though. Since I broke my foot, I have had great friends taking me to work, picking me up from work and helping wherever else they can. And poor Nick, who has recently had the luxury of a little more time from work, has spent most of his time running me or the kids around, doing shopping or other chores, or generally being my dogsbody. And most of the time he has done it with the most amazing grace! I owe him, and the others, big time. I hate taking help from people but have had no choice with this. It was worse in many ways than when I had my transplant…then I could force myself to do stuff even if it laid me up afterwards. This time, I couldn’t even drive. I lost ALL of my independence…and anyone who knows me will know how that will have affected me! But as always, I just feel blessed to have such fab friends!

So here’s to things in life starting to look up in the Gascoyne family! There is lots that could go wrong (Nick has just taken redundancy, the house is back on the market, my mum’s final coroners report is next week and there is the obvious black mark over us with my myeloma) but I feel like it is our time for things to start going right after a pretty torrid 6 months! I think we are both using this time to focus on what we really want and I hope that we’ll both make the right decisions, both workwise and personally. We normally do pretty well, so hopefully this will keep going!! Life is too short to make the wrong decisions or to be unhappy!

Working Woman

So, it is nearly exactly 2 years since I gave up ‘paid’ work for the Bank and I think I’ve done quite a lot in that two years….Chemo, Stem Cell Transplant, over £3k raised from a tabletop sale, over £30k raised from the Glitz and Glamour Ball, along with a few other bits of voluntary work to keep me ticking along.

But me being me, it just wasn’t quite enough once that all finished. I told people recently that I was applying for a role in the charity sector, a role with the Roald Dahl Marvellous Children’s Charity. I never once believed that I’d get it. It was a job I absolutely loved the sound of. It was well paid for charity work, and surely there would be ‘professional fundraisers’ who would know how to tick the boxes and have experience of all the things they were asking for. In fact, I nearly pulled out the week before as I thought that I would be wasting their time, and that they were too small and valuable a charity for me to do that (they help to support children who have rare or complex haematological or neurological conditions such as acquired brain damage, epilepsy, sickle cell). I started to get concerned about how I would fit in my family around the hours given that I still need to be around for holidays etc.

In the end and after much discussion with Nick, and much soul searching, we decided that it would still be great experience for me given that I have never applied for a role in the charity sector, and would allow me to see where the gaps were in my CV. So I went for the interview last week…..and only went and got it!! OMG! I was so shocked when they phoned to make the offer, and absolutely over the moon. I know people often say to me that I play my strengths down and should know better, but this time, I truly didn’t feel like I had given a good interview, and couldn’t see why such an amazing charity would take on me. But they are doing!

I am over the moon. They are being really flexible in considering my working hours so that I can fit work around the family – and that is pretty amazing in this day and age! It makes me so determined to do the job well for them. So for all of you out there who own businesses that aren’t flexible…..take this as a pointer….if you can be flexible in your attitude, you will probably get far more back from your employees.

The role is as a ‘Major Gifts Fundraiser’, i.e. helping to get funding and donations to support the families that the charity works with. It looks like I will work 4 days a week, with the occasional evening and weekend work. But even that work, looks like fun so it is just the most PERFECT sounding job and I am as high as a kite about it.

I know that our life will get more manic but I really feel already that I will be fulfilling my needs as well as my family’s needs and that is so important if I am going to be able to live with my condition. I hope that my myeloma won’t come back for many, many years and so I need to live life as if that is the case. Getting a job that I love doing (for the first time ever!) is the first step to this. So keep your fingers crossed for me that all goes well, that my medical doesn’t get in the way (it shouldn’t given that I am still in remission) and that April 15th sees me starting a role that will change not only my life, but I hope the life of those children living with conditions that they shouldn’t have to live with.

In the meantime, getting this job has made me realise that you can achieve anything that you want to. Also, a lovely lady who is also living with cancer, has inspired me through publishing her ‘List for Living’ or what some people less positively phrase as their ‘Bucket List’ . If I can get my ‘perfect job’ then surely I can do some of the other things that I would love to do before this cancer gets the better of me. And why wait until I relapse once or twice more, and have time constraints put on me…..so I am working on it now and will let you know when it’s done. And if anyone fancies helping me with suggestions or ways of achieving my ideas, I will happily take that help 🙂