One of our most beloved members and trustees, Sam Bryant, is running the Great South Run for us in October.

Sam has had breast cancer twice, and we met her at our first ever event – Victorious Festival in 2013. She’s helped out at many events over the years, including the Christmas market, Victorious 2014 and has also run events herself. She is inspirational, and we’re thrilled she’s running for us in this year’s GSR. You can support her via her Just Giving page

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Well done
@thelankyrunner
@pineappleliv
@intulohealth
@amatchiropractic

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We are celebrating our birthday by reminding you how valuable you are, and how important it is to have a good feel of your bits. Boys and girls both need to check the mammaries, and boys also need to have a feel down below. The earlier any lumps and bumps are checked out by a doctor, the better. Don’t be afraid – be aware.

As we head in to the next five years, we’ll continue our work on raising awareness for breast and testicular cancer in the under 50s, who don’t get regular screening. Since we started we’ve been to festivals like Victorious, won an award alongside Earth, Wool and Fire for yarnbombing the tank outside the D Day Museum in Southsea, we have our own show radio show on Lush FM with sets from Altern 8’s Mark Archer and OB1 amongst others, we have been supported by music events like Gland Rock and an all day metal gig at the Deco, had a night of opera dedicated to us, played with Rocker Soccer, received donations from the AC/DC Christmas Number One campaign, given talks in schools, colleges, universities and at private functions, attended sporting events that lovely volunteers have entered for us, held several fundraising nights like Battle of the Sexes and our Christmas quiz, and taught people how to check themselves using our special boobs and balls. We’ve been through three sets of boobs and two sets of balls, so that’s a lot of feeling in five years!

If you want to help you can raise money through our Just Giving page, you can share our posts and most importantly, you can remind others to feel themselves. You have made this campaign what it is, and we thank you from the bottom of our boobs and balls for spreading the word.

Happy Feeling day.

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Surgery, radiation therapy, miscarriage, depression, pregnancy, endocrine therapy, post-natal psychosis, hysterectomy, menopause, carpal tunnel, osteopenia and several terrifying suspect lumps. The Fear.

Five. Years.

The ‘magic’ number. That day seems at once both a distant memory and an ever-present trauma. Being diagnosed with cancer doesn’t diminish after five years, I still flinch at those memories, but it does feel further away with each passing year. So, what does five years mean, and is it something to celebrate?

For the medical profession, it means they can scale down their monitoring of your progress, decrease your contact time with consultants to every other year, discharge you from the breast clinic and remind you to be ever vigilant. They discharged me on my birthday in November, when I found another lump and the only appointment they could give me was on that day. Nervous doesn’t describe it. I was so ecstatic to find the lump was benign, probably scar tissue around a dislodged marker clip they use to highlight the original tumour bed, that I didn’t consider the implications of not being able to call my breast care nurse and wail down the phone at her anymore. I was very happy. It felt like a significant milestone to reach, and it is. Because cancer patients are told it is, and this is because the medical profession need a marker, and with costs to cut and targets to reach, the NHS needs a milestone.

I pretty much ignored the report later in November from Oxford University and Cancer Research UK which found that there is no reduction in the risk of a recurrence for twenty years after diagnosis. I saw it, but I didn’t want to see it. I was busy, because working and doing a masters part time while looking after children and maintaining a household takes a fair amount of your waking worry time. And having just been discharged I didn’t want to think about it, but it’s been lurking about in the back of my mind, though, so I’ve finally looked it up and digested what the meta-analysis of eighty eight clinical trials means.

There is no reduction in the risk of recurrence at five years. None. It is the same at twenty years as it is at five years.

The grade and size of the tumour, along with the number of lymph nodes involved, increases the risk of a recurrence, but that risk is not diminished by years. It is exactly the same.

So I’m not celebrating five years as a huge milestone, but I am counting my blessings I’m here to have dinner with my mother and my children, and finally watch the new Star Wars film with Holly. We go to see a movie on our own every year the week before Christmas, this is our tradition and we’ve been doing it since she was two years old. I am so grateful to be doing it again this year, and I will feel thankful every year that I get to do this. Hopefully till I’m in my nineties and she’s in her seventies and we can be batty old ladies at the cinema together, drinking Rose and adjusting our whistling hearing aids in our cheap OAP seats.

We often don’t consider how fragile our existence is until it’s too late. Maybe the thing cancer gave me was an appreciation of life I didn’t always have before. I am certainly calmer, more self-aware, less intolerant, and make more time to stop and see the beauty in the world instead of rushing around trying to achieve everything in a flurry of stress and pressure and missing life as it passes me by. This didn’t happen overnight. It was more than four years before I reached a place where cancer no longer defined me, where I was happy to look at my body in the mirror, and where I felt at peace with accepting that cancer happened – and could happen again any day.

I’m looking forward to re-launching Feel Yourself Campaign in the new year, with a brand spanking new website and animation by local boys, Phil Shenton of Fidgety Pixels and Simon Jacks. I don’t know if Feel Yourself will be doing festivals and events again, I need to consider that for the future. It might not be something I can stretch myself to because I’m going hell for leather for that masters, a PhD, and a career in writing. I’d also like to look into the possibility of doing talks at colleges and universities, and use that teacher training for spreading the word on awareness. But while I work it out, FYC will have an online presence with the new website and a bloody brilliant new animation. Watch this space.

I want to say a huge thank you to Lisa-Marie, who ran the original website in her spare time for me when I started the charity, created a WordPress site, and then realised I didn’t have a Scooby what I was doing. She came and rescued me and ran it all in her spare time, but since then she’s done a social work degree (and got a first, boom) and is working her arse off in a thankless profession. Everyone who has supported the charity, from running events, to trustees and members, to raising money through sponsorship, the radio show, to local business support, have at times made me cry with gratitude. People have bent over backwards to be there for me, to support Feel Yourself Campaign and to get the word out there to men and women on the importance of self-awareness. Whatever form the campaign segues into now, they are the backbone, and have been responsible for more than one person feeling themselves and going to get checked out at the doctor’s.

One of the main reasons I’m not celebrating today is because of all the others who didn’t get to see five years, those recently receiving this devastating news and those doing their best to live with metastatic cancers. Can you imagine what it takes to get up each day and keep going knowing that you are dying and that any day the news could get worse? And for the family and friends supporting people dealing with this disease, the pain of watching a loved one suffer is immeasurable. I’ve seen people diagnosed since me not make it, and I’ve made friends through social media who have travelled this journey alongside me, and been there when I’ve wobbled and picked me back up when I’ve fallen. I’m also lucky that I have amazing family and friends around me who have lifted me up and carried me when I just wasn’t able to do it myself, through the depression and the fear and the crushing awakening that cancer brings.

I’m not celebrating today, but I am so, so grateful to be here to hug my children, see the mothership, chat shit to my friends, read another book, clean my house, take my cats to the vets, and clutch my oldest child’s arm with excitement at the beginning of Episode VIII. It’s not an important milestone in terms of cancer, it doesn’t mean I’m home and dry, it doesn’t mean it’s never coming back. But for now, I’m still standing. So to cancer – and to my husband – who have both threatened to kill me in the last five years, here’s a little something that always puts a smile on face…

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The report also criticised the government for hitting women harder than men, something Jeremy Corbyn raised in the commons during his first Queen’s speech back in May. As a woman, a mother, a cancer patient and a mental health patient I’m in the front line of the Tories’ so called austerity measures.

I’ve seen my household income reduce by £6,000 in 6 years – and I’m facing further reductions later this year.

Local children’s centres have seen their budgets reduced and many have been forced to close, despite the service being used by over a million families in the UK.

Last year the government slashed £25 million from the NHS cancer drugs fund. This meant that end of life treatments for breast cancer patients were removed from the list. I can’t imagine how I’d feel knowing the Tories had stopped me spending an extra few months with my children, but that was the case for many thousands of breast, prostate and bowel cancer patients last year, and it’s ongoing.

Mental health services have been cut too. In 2015 mental health beds were cut by 8% and £35 million was shaved off NHS spending on mental health. In January David Cameron pledged £1 billion to help with the current mental health crisis in this country, but it is estimated that more than £11 billion is actually needed to tackle the problems the country faces from increased depression, suicides and reliance on antidepressant medication – all of which have shot up since the Tories started their austerity programme.

And this is before you get to the cuts to substance misuse, the changeover to the Personal Independence Payment, cuts to Police, the fire service, the loss of the Independent Living Fund for disabled people, overall NHS cuts, child benefit cuts, the slashing of the social care budget for the elderly, cuts to the domestic violence budget, the bedroom tax, the benefits cap… The list is exhaustive, and it is a bitter pill to swallow when corporations aren’t being asked to pay their taxes and the Prime Minister himself has benefited from off shore tax havens.

I’ve often felt at breaking point. I actually broke last year. I don’t blame the government for that, it was Zoladex mixed with the effects of childbirth. But I was treated for several months in the community before I was admitted to hospital, and it wasn’t until I was literally at death’s door that I received the help I needed. And don’t get me started on the anxiety I feel every time I see a letter on the doormat from Child Tax Credits…

Because of all this, I joined the Labour party when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader. He is the only voice in Westminster speaking out against the injustices the Conservative government are inflicting on me, my children, the sick, the elderly, the poor and the voiceless in our society. The leadership challenge within the Labour party has angered me and motivated me to do more at a local level to engage in politics.

Portsmouth City Council have cut over £74 million from their budget since austerity started, and are looking to cut a further £34 million from April 2016. Their own budget report warns that a large part of their money is spent looking after vulnerable adults and children, so it’s clear where these cuts are going to hit hardest. The vulnerable. The sick. The people who can’t fight back.

I’ve started going to Labour meetings, I went to one this week. There was obviously a lot of focus on the leadership challenge and the poison that is Westminster politics at the moment. I find it repulsive that the Parliamentary Labour Party would call for the resignation of a leader who was elected with the largest landslide in political history, especially when the Labour party has gained 60,000 new members since the EU referendum vote last week.

I’m also getting involved in a new project with a friend to take local issues to the council and the Constituency Labour Party for action. I will attend meetings, go on marches, do whatever it takes to shout loud enough to be heard because I am sick of the way this country is being run, sick of the inherent racism that has emerged since the leave vote last week, and sick of my local council’s treatment of the weak and vulnerable in our community.

I don’t think I’m alone.

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I was on Tinder before Christmas but that was brutal. So now that I’m better I’ve joined OK Cupid to see what it’s like. Dip my toe in the water if you like. I went on in a naive dating bubble thinking I’d have a look and see if I liked anyone. Maybe go on a date or two, you know, if I liked the look of someone enough. What I didn’t do was set any boundaries in my head, know what I was looking for, or expect the kind of messages one gets from men who aren’t hindered by face to face contact.

People started messaging me straight away. I didn’t know that’s how it works so I replied politely to them all to start with but as the day has worn on I’ve ignored them more and more. And I’m already over the guilt of doing that. I very much doubt it’s only me they’re messaging. I’ve set a parameter on overtly sexual or misogynistic content and don’t reply at all. If it’s someone I’ve liked and then they message me I reply providing they aren’t too familiar straight away. There’s chatting and then there’s being presumptuous.

As far as boundaries on what I’m looking for, I’m eliminating health freaks – no point setting myself up for that – anyone I don’t like the look of, anyone with a shot of their underwear as their profile picture, and anyone exactly the same age as my ex husband. The last one is pointless and I’ve scrolled past a few lovely looking faces because of their age, but I have to draw a line somewhere.

Practically speaking, I’m being sensible and only agreeing to meet people in public. I say people but I’ve only agreed to meet one man so far. He seems nice so I gave him my number. I suspect this may be something I learn not to do again, although it seems standard and practical once you’ve arranged a date to have their number. At least he hasn’t asked for a picture of my bum.

I wonder when I should tell him about the cancer. The  miscarriage. The breakdown. And the break up. Probably save that til the second date…

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I’ve waited this long to write about it because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t just having a couple of good days. I did go to Barcelona and that may have helped too. Time away from the normal every day routine can be the best medicine. But it’s been three weeks now, and every day has been a good day.

I’d like to say I feel like my old self again, and in a way I do, but I feel changed too. I care about life again, I don’t want to die of cancer, but I feel less charged, less hectic, more in control of my own mind than I was before all this started. I’m less inclined to make rash decisions and spend longer deliberating whether I need to do something or not. And why. I’ve learnt about my values and how they play a part in my mental well being. I’ve learnt to be mindful of the present and try and live in it. And I’ve learnt how important my loved ones and friends are in supporting and guiding me.

It’s hard to unpick how much of my illness was down to cancer and how much was the hormonal imbalance of childbirth mixed with hormone suppressing medication. Then there’s my marriage break up to take into account. I’ve often wondered if I’d have been better sooner if I hadn’t had the devastation of that to deal with on top of everything else. I’ve come to terms with never knowing that answer and not needing to. It doesn’t matter, that was part of the journey. Obviously I would prefer that not to have happened, but you can’t make someone love you when they don’t. You can’t make them change their mind when they don’t want to. And you can’t make them take back the pain they’ve caused you when they didn’t want to hurt you in the first place.

As far as cancer is concerned, I still have a long way to go to accept it into my life and learn to live with it. I still worry about a recurrence, I still research what new advances in medicine are being made just in case I need to know again one day. A good friend said to me a few weeks ago that I need to find a new me that isn’t defined by cancer and my marriage break up, and I feel like I’m doing that now. Or at least in a position to start. I’ve walked through the storm and come out the other side a changed person, but I do finally feel like the sun is shining again.

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http://otvmagazine.com/2016/04/04/as-a-victim-i-survived-by-charlotte-farhan/

Today I read this excellent blog on recovering from trauma and abuse. It’s not about cancer but it rings so many bells it might as well be St Paul’s Cathedral. The one thing I’ve not been able to succinctly put my finger on about life after cancer is exactly this problem with the language used around the disease and its aftermath, and the expectations of other people on how you should be feeling.

Fighter. Winner. Survivor. Battle. Fight. Lost.

These are all terms that correlate with cancer. They are stereotypically found in the newspaper reports of celebrities who have just died from cancer, although they are often also applied to heart wrenching stories of everyday people too. The reason I don’t like them is because they make cancer seem like a valiant war when it’s merely an unfortunate and unpredictable thing that happens to 1 in 2 of us throughout our lifetime (according to Cancer Research UK).

The connotations of these words is tied up in imagary of a violent struggle, and cancer isn’t. It’s the terrifying malfunction of cells in your body, a fault which can happen again – or carry on happening even when your doctors and you attempt to kill the errant cells with surgery, cytotoxic medication and radiation. It’s facing your own mortality and trying to find peace with that. It’s changes to your body and mind that you often can’t reverse. It’s the secret prayer that your body will overcome the failure of that one cell to reproduce properly even if your mind can’t tame the fear that it won’t.

The one I’d like to sanction the most is ‘survivor’. You don’t survive cancer, you get better and hope that you stay better.  Survivor, in its literal definition according the Oxford English dictionary is ‘A person who survives, especially a person remaining alive after an event in which others have died’ and in that sense someone who’s had cancer is a survivor. But the connotations of the word imply an epic struggle to overcome adversity, and cancer isn’t. It’s a slow and lonely illness, the complications of which last many years. The connotations suggest that the survivor is healed or cured – a warrior of modern medicine – and in fact you’re only ever in remission, or my favoured term, you have No Evidence of Disease (NED). It can and often does come back. Imagine how the term survivor must feel to someone with stage 4 cancer, who knows their metastasis will eventually kill them?

Once you’re declared NED you’re expected to get on with life, a warrior who has shown cancer who’s boss and won. People expect you to be positive. People often don’t want to hear that you’re convinced you’ll die one day anyway. They expect you to get over it, but you don’t. Some patients manage to come to terms with it, others never do, but ultimately it’s a traumatic experience  to face your own mortality, and that damage often lingers for a long time after your oncologist discharges you. You know that if you make it to 10 years you stand a pretty good chance of seeing another few, but with 10 year survival rates at 50%, you live with the fear that the odds could be better. Different cancers have different survival rates, depending on how easy they are to detect and treat, but the average is 50%. Half of all people diagnosed with cancer will be dead within 10 years. That’s pretty scary. Some days are better than others and you can convince yourself you’ll be in the 50% who live. But some days are a furore of fear and isolation that only other cancer patients can fully understand.

So, like Charlotte said, recovery is my trajectory for life. Staying healthy and NED is the path I follow, but if the cancer comes back and I die, I won’t have lost a battle or a war. I will have lived and died like every other single living organism on this planet.

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I’ve been feeling low for the last few weeks and my therapist and my doctors have decided to switch me from my current antidepressant to a new one. This means cutting down every three days for a week and then starting on the new one and increasing that every three days. And that means withdrawal and side effects at the same time for a few weeks.

Then after that settles down I have to come off my antipsychotic to see whether I’m OK without it. (Read: ‘still mental without it’.) This is on top of the joy that is the menopause. In fact it’s so joyous I thought I’d tell you about it.

Hot Flushes – (Or flashes as they call them in the states) OK so these are the stereotypical menopause symptom that everyone knows about. A hot flush doesn’t happen in your face, that’s feeling flushed and it’s different. That’s being too hot. A hot flush is the sudden and often unpredictable spontaneous human combustion of your trunk. With tendrils of fire down your arms and legs. Sometimes there are triggers (like having a drink, being in bed) and sometimes they just happen when you’re walking down the street. Or sitting there doing absolutely sweet FA. Let’s just say I always wear layers so I can strip off and I now sleep naked because even cotton is too much.

Memory – or lack thereof. Literally don’t have a clue what I’m doing half the time.

Concentration – I’ve lost the ability to multitask. If I am texting someone I can no longer speak to someone else.

Mood Changes – It’s hard to tell where the menopausal depression starts and the post-natal depression ends. Somewhere before Christmas I’d say. I picked up a bit during Christmas because I had such a wonderful time for several weeks on the trot. But then I noticed my mood dip again and no amount of proactive action and healthy eating – or binge drinking and partying – seem able to affect it. I hope the change in meds does the trick because I’m bored of myself already.

Spare Tyre – happening right now, around my waist.

Libido – My new surgically enhanced vagina (or ‘the road to nowhere’ as I like to call it now) seems to be fine. Phew. Because I’m a Scorpio and I need that part working.

Headaches – I don’t get these per se but I get an intense pain in my head every now and again. Which I think counts as a headache but it’s only momentary and often related to something evil my sons have done/other increases in blood pressure.

Joint stiffness – My old cancer medication (Tamoxifen) causes this. As does my new cancer medication (Letrozole). The menopause causes joint stiffness. Having four children causes joint stiffness. It’s fair to say I can’t necessarily blame my poor aching ankles on the menopause alone.

Osteopenia – This is early days osteoporosis. My old cancer medication causes this. As does the menopause. I am now on Vitamin D and Calcium as well as an antidepressant and an antipsychotic. I have to have one of those tablet boxes with the days of the week on like my Nan used to have (see above ‘Memory’).

Blindness – OK so not total blindness or anything but my vision is going. My optician, who is a very, very nice man, said it could be the antidepressant causing my ability to focus to diminish. But then he tilted his head slightly and said it could be my age…

Wank. So there you have it. The menopause as it stands now. I can’t take HRT because the whole point of doing this is to get rid of as much of my body’s ability to produce hormones as possible, and so starve any errant cancer cells of their reproductive food. So here I sit, a depressed sexaholic with a flabby belly and poor eyesight who can’t remember why that is meant to be a problem and GODDAMNIT I’M HOT.

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When I say sectioned, what I mean is ‘voluntarily’ sectioned of course, because they gave me a choice: either come in on a voluntary section, or be sectioned. The psychiatrist told me what would happen if I was sectioned and told me I didn’t want that. She was right, I didn’t want that, but I still take umbrage with ‘voluntarily’ sectioned.

So anyway, Lesley Bushell had to leave me at the Adult Mental Health Unit, and she says it’s one of the hardest things she’s ever had to do. She may have said it was the hardest, I can’t actually remember, but I don’t want to claim it as the hardest if it wasn’t. So I’ll go with one of the hardest.

It was terrifying.

I was taken to a room while Lesley went home and grabbed me some things. I sat on the bed and felt more scared than I’ve ever felt in my life. Even more scared than the thought of dying of cancer. Nobody was listening to what I was saying, they thought I was mad. I thought I was fine and they were all mad. I’d had an epiphany after all, so I was clearly right.

I don’t remember much about the first night, just snapshots. I was in a highly emotional state and existing on pure adrenaline. I remember eating a moldy yoghurt and crying in my bed. I remember them turning the light on every 15 minutes all night to check me because I was on suicide watch. I thought they were trying to drive me insane so they could keep me there. Over the coming days I wrote extensive lists of what they were doing, how they were doing it wrong, and how I knew what they were doing. I engaged with my psychiatrist but I didn’t believe that she wanted to help me. I became obsessed with every physiological test she ordered, convinced I either had a brain tumour or a thyroid problem. And wasn’t just, you know, batshit.

One day my psychiatrist held out her hands to me, palms up, and she said while holding up her right hand, ‘Here is me, here is everyone you know, we are all saying one thing.’ Then she held up her left hand and said, ‘And over here, on your own, is you, saying something totally different. What are the chances you are right and we are all wrong?’ Then she asked me to trust her. She increased my anti-depressant, put me on an anti-psychotic, and ordered a sleeping tablet for every night. That night I slept a full night’s sleep for the first time in over a year.

Then came the difficult task of accepting she was right. And the absolute terror that if I was really psychotic that I might never regain my sanity. I lived for visits and the rare times I was allowed home and for the first time in days I stopped wanting to kill myself and stopped making lists of how to do that. I started writing short stories. I did intricate drawings. I crocheted Lesley an Ocean of Emotion cushion. I felt alive and creative, but tired. So very tired. I slept at least once a day, if not more, and learned to love my nightly sleeping tablet and the bliss it brought.

Throughout all this, even when I was crazy in that first week, I chatted on WhatsApp to Lesley, Dave and Heather in a group conversation. They were there for me tirelessly, keeping me grounded but at the same time relentlessly taking the piss. They treated me like normal but they also painstakingly explained things to me and talked things through with me. I either text, spoke to, or saw Andrea every single day, and was eventually released into her care after two weeks and two days. She spent hours talking me through the early days of recovery and explaining what I was experiencing and why. And slowly I started to feel better, to be able to understand that I was ill but that I could and would get better again. My friends were paramount in nursing me back to health, everyone who visited and brought me books and magazines and ideas to write about, everyone who sent me cards and presents, everyone who went out of their way to send me love and hope – them and my children are what got me through.

This year is different. The 23rd March will always be a day of bad memories, but that’s all they are now. Memories. Much like that time I went batshit…

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