Guest post - POEM by 17 year old Emma Tobin

This is my daughter Emma's poem that she wrote for Hopkins Summer School and which no doubt contributed to her winning the overall award. 

One Giant Fuck-Up is Mankind

I.
It was midnight and I lay reeling
Painting myself red.
Wondering why the world felt, suddenly
Like a cage and not a castle.

I have practiced dying all my life
Like a dancer, the poetic pirouette.
I’ll cut so you can’t stitch me up
Horizontal – like the line I crossed

Were puppets meant to cut their own strings?

These razor-bites are questions
I’ve sewn my shaking lips shut
This is my mustered eloquence
Wet stains on toilet paper

Humankind: A Question, posed out of rhyme

II.

When did the light behind our eyes
Morph, meticulously into black and white?
Our morals like soldiers, lined
Neatly, streets stacked with
-Corpses, like hedgegrows

When did it become polite to look away?
When did warzones come back into fashion?
Diplomacy the excuse you cite, credentials
Who said it was neat to build towers on corpses?
Because those are some shaky foundations

When did happiness become a privilege?
When did constellations become stars?
When did it become all we could do
not to slit our life open – little fish?

A kiss would push your breath back in you
But today it is a crime to love
A sin to steal a kiss
Today who we love is a label.

We are the martyrs
We are the clowns
These are our screams
This is our blood
Can you feel it?
Sticky on your hands.

III.

It was midnight
It was morning
I was mourning

For the children with severed hands
For the lovers with electrodes and shaved heads
For the girls with blood on their thighs
For Jesus, who thought we might learn to love

For the ghosts of Mai Lai
For the starved with numbers on their arms
For the healers burned in fear
For the mothers tied to beds

For the victims of justice
For whiskey’s favourite punching bag
For the people who were owned
For those who fell off the buck
When it stopped here

These cuts are questions
This blood, the reply.

Copyright: Emma Tobin 2014

Excerpt from Diary of a Stem Cell Harvest - No Editing, No Filter!

This time seven year's ago I was in the middle of a two-week process of harvesting my own stem cells. I was reminded of this yesterday at a talk I was giving on Lough Derg about living with cancer.

I thought I would share two actual diary entries that I wrote as I was going through the stem cell harvest process on 23 and 24 May 2007. This is exactly as I wrote them in my journal - no editing and no filter:

Wednesday 23 May 2007 DAY 3

1.30am, the early hours of this morning the awful nausea turned into actual vomiting - gut wrenching vomiting. I was attached to the IV fluids so by the time I realised what was happening I only had time to unplug it and make it to the sink in the room and not the bathroom. Eugh
It brought back memories of the awfulness of the sickness I had last December. I was dripping with sweat and my new surgically inserted line started to ooze - so painful. What a horrible feeling.
I did manage to get back to sleep but I had a lot of pain and was generally very miserable.
When I saw the doc early this morning he said he would write me up for some strong anti-sickness meds. Liz came down and she was unhappy that I was allowed to be so sick so she got onto it too.
I threw up again at 3pm - really bad, really painful - it was my own fault. I should not have drank a can of LILT - but I was so raw and thirsty.
I decided to walk down to the shop and was asked by one of the nurses to get a paper for the man in the room across from me - JOB done, after a tentative walk......
I had a visit from a medical student who had to assess me. He asked me at the end if I was a doctor or worked in medicine - Ha ha! Doctor's coat anyone?
PS Cyclizine drug is my new best friend - no more sickness today.

Thursday 24 May 2007 DAY 4

EVERYBODY HURTS SOMETIMES
NEW SERIES OF GREY'S ANATOMY TONIGHT  (for some reason I have that written on the top of the page - no idea why)

I woke up with this morning with a great sense of relief. I slept well apart from couple of trips in the night - false alarms. I wasn't sick so the new anti sickness drug is working. Cyclizine is working - what a relief. I have to remember to get scripted for this in advance of the next set of chemo. NOTE TO SELF WRITTEN

I had jelly and ice cream for lunch. I couldn't eat anything else. I did the scene from Jurassic Park with the jelly shuddering and shivering on the spoon in the girl's hand. Screen test anyone?

The nurses and doctors are lovely. They are so caring especially when they see how miserable you are. They just can't do enough for me. I have nothing but respect and admiration for them.

Saw Dr Enright - she is happy with me and my response.

Emma came up (that's my daughter who was 9 at the time) and I know she misses me. She is full of questions about my line in my chest and the meds I am on and constant fluids. She is such a gorgeous girl. Bryan said I appear to me much better, more relaxed about my time in hospital this time round. I guess I am more relaxed as I had notice that I was going to be admitted and had read up on all that was going to happen so I was able to plan.

Friday 25 May 2007 DAY 5
ELECTION

Another good night last night. I think I was up twice for two more false sickness alarms. Very vivid dreams. Bryan was telling me that Cathal has learned how to climb up and into his cot so I guess that now means he can climb out too! Oh O!

I am in good form today. I asked the doctors about getting out for day release and he has to check with the consultant. I doubt she will say yes. I am still on the anti sickness drugs and am scared what will happen if I come off them. I am now on the other injections into my stomach for helping to mobilise my stem cells.

My Mum told me that Emma sat Cathal down and was explaining to him that I now have a line sticking out of my chest and telling him he can't touch it and needs to be careful and gentle. He said I will be careful and I won't pull it. I am aching to see him.

I had a great chat with Emma tonight. She is just adorable and I hope that I am and can always be the mother she deserves.

I am so excited - just found out I am allowed out for a few hours tomorrow.

Cathal phoned with the help of Bryan at about 9.30 tonight and said: "Where are you Mammy? I miss you." I thought my heart would break. Then he said "Love you Mammy".

Are there any nicer words to hear from your child?

Signing off for the night.

Ends

I kept a journal faithfully during my year of sickness and I am hoping to publish it soon as a book called LIFE FINDS A WAY.

Follow me on Twitter @BrendaDrumm

Being a Teenager

This is a guest post by my 17 year old daughter Emma 

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."

– J.D Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

When I stepped over the precipice of innocence into adolescence, into the supposedly terrific and terrifying teenage years, during which (if one believes ‘Little MissSunshine’) I was to acquire all the suffering that would shape whoever I turned out to be, I had certain preconceptions that have proven mostly, wildly inaccurate.

Firstly, I believed that I would become cool. If anything, I have become less cool, enmeshed in the claws of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek and Doctor Who. Secondly, I believed that I would become corrosive and irrational. Instead, I maintain fluid diplomatic relations with my family. Thirdly, I believed that by the end of it I would know precisely who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. Of all my widely inaccurate expectations, that was pretty high on the delusional scale.

At some point in the past two years, I reached the terrifying conclusion that I have one life; one chance to do everything right, and it was absolutely terrifying. My teenage years haven’t given me one iota of wisdom about myself. I could tell you about the Cold War and The Beats Generation of artists and writers in New York City, but when I’m asked to say two things about myself I am rendered uncharacteristically speechless. I think that most people my age feel more or less the same way, and while it’s comforting not to be utterly alone, it doesn’t exactly help.

I believe that there’s a myth about adolescence as being uncoordinated and illiterate when it is anything but that. It’s during these years that we must make the choices that determine the rest of our lives, and that’s a lot of pressure to put on sixteen-year old shoulders. It’s a swirly whirly vortex of different ideas. We struggle with religion, with consensus, with sexuality, with the very foundations of our moral system, and yet at the same time we’re expected to learn things about maths and geography.

I’ve catapulted between cynicism and idealism and then challenged the basis of these categorisations; I’ve changed my mind about what I believe in dozens of times. I’ve wondered about God and been more than a little horrified by the crimesof those who came before me. I’ve read a thousand books; I’ve thought a thousand different and contradictory things. Honestly, I feel like an old woman already.

I’ve also memorised Pythagoras’s Theorem, learned how to motivate imaginary employees, and sat bewildered by the difference between diverging and converging plate boundaries. I am a person constantly in flux, but while I’m at it why shouldn’t I decide what to do with the rest of my one single precious life?

Being a teenager is hard. It’s one of the most difficult thingyou’ll ever go through. It’s so hard that some people don’t make it to the other side. All the same, it’s a brilliant time. It’s like when you’re on a rollercoaster and you’re slowly edging up to this massive height and your stomach is sick, you feel like you’re going to fall out and smash into a million pieces as people look on while eating peanuts and candyfloss. But, once you get to the top there’s a relieved, exhilarated sort of excitement slamming your heart against your chest. In the end, the triumph of reaching that giddy height is worth the slow and painful ascent.

I suppose that being young is simultaneously the worst and best fate imaginable. You’ll look back with nostalgia to your legging-wearing, Adidas-sporting days, but there isn’t enough money in the Western economy to persuade you to do it over. You’ll be terrified that, no matter how badly you did it the first time around, you might mess everything up even more spectacularly if given a second chance.

Even if I don’t reckon I’ll ever settle definitively on the one thing I want to spend my life doing, by the end of my teenage years I think I’ll have an idea, a murky inkling I can somehow grope my way to. It isn’t anything as concrete as a career name, but a dim sense of something indescribable. I think that one day I’ll take a blind step down the road of my life and it’ll feel like I’m finally headed in the right direction. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

 

Copyright:  Emma Tobin 

April 2014 

A guest post by Emma Tobin

This is a poem written by my daughter Emma. Emma is 15 and she is the most talented writer, as yet undiscovered but something tells me that 2013 is her year. This is a poem she wrote following our failed attempts at sending Chinese lanterns skywards on New Year's Eve 2012:

Words from Ashley Rice

I found this today on a bookmark. It is a piece written by Ashley Rice:

You are a lover of words.....one day you will write a book

People turn to you because you give voice to dreams, notice little things, and make otherwise impossible imaginings appear real.

You are a rare bird who thinks the world is beautiful enough to try to figure it out, who has the courage to dive into your wild mind and go swimming there.

You are someone who still believes in cloud watching, people watching, daydreaming, tomorrow, favourite colours, silver clouds, dandelions, and sorrow.

Be sacred. Be cool. Be wild. Go far.

Words do more than plant miracle seeds. With you writing them, they can change the world.

Ashley Rice