For anyone facing multiple myeloma. I know how you feel.

Although I have been in treatment for eleven months and I am currently in partial remission, my disease has a ninety per cent return rate. There is a very high risk that I shall be dead soon. So I am typing this very quickly.

   I was diagnosed with plasma cell leukaemia in mid-December 2011. It is a rare and aggressive form of multiple myeloma – a blood cancer that will kill more than 10,000 people in the United States this year. After the tears and the self-pitying “why me?” questions, I got to work researching my disease. The news was grim. Life expectancy was two to eight months. Having never been lucky at cards, monopoly or lotto, I figured I would be dead before Santa got a chance to fill my stocking.

      But I managed to hang on. I was able to see my two daughters and my husband blow out birthday candles in the first half of 2012. I ate a chocolate heart on Valentine’s Day and a chocolate egg on Easter. Okay, I ate chocolate every day after I got diagnosed. But I did have cancer.

      I felt the chill when summer first turned to autumn and I saw the first flowers of spring. Every achievement was a hallmark of my existence. They were also a testament to my “brave fight”. As they stand around my casket, my family can proudly say: “Well at least she made it to her 52^nd birthday.”

Just to give credence where it never seems to be due, my horoscope for the week I was diagnosed was so right: A change in perspective might be absolutely necessary.

X-rays, needles, baldness, the inability to have an orgasm, begging an abusive sibling to donate stem cells and debating who I should leave my paltry possessions to (what have I been doing all my life?) definitely changed my perspective. But these things were tolerable. Even the anticipated loss of family and friends and the ultimate question of what to wear to my own funeral faded in the exhilaration of actually waking up each morning.

      Eight months after my diagnosis I knew I was going to surpass the grim statistics of my predicted decline. An appreciative grin turned around my permanently drooping mouth. Every breath was a new beginning. I became ecstatic over every bite of a family sized Cadburys bar.

Now I am grateful for every day that I wake up, for every time I talk to one of my children, for everything I touch, taste or feel, for the absolute cacophony of life - because today may be my last chance to experience it.

                But that is bullshit. That’s just what everyone wants to hear. When you are seriously ill colours do not become brighter, roses do not smell sweeter, and people are not nicer. People are people. Whether you are here or gone, they will carry on being noble laureates or complete shits. We cannot change the universe because we are about to join it ethereally.

                There’s a website called “It’s OK to die”. Their web page states: Those who have made their peace with life and who have made clear plans in advance for death, find that the end of life may be transformed into a powerful time unlike any other. Like one of my favourite superheroes, the Hulk, it’s not a power I asked for, nor do I want it. It’s never okay to die. If given a choice, I would live. I think anyone would.

A thirty-five year old woman who died of breast cancer was interviewed and stoically said she was ready to go because there couldn’t be a better day in the future than she’d already had. I’m glad she found peace and power, but I prefer a quote attributed to George Clooney. The beginning was a little boring so I substituted it for blah’s: “blah, blah, blah … It's a mean thing, life.”

Life is a mean thing. As I sit here in October 2012, after using half a light-brown make-up pencil to try and create some believable brows where mine used to be, I am depressed. I am happy that the macabre stem cell collection, transplant, and hospital stay are behind me and that physically I feel seventy-five per cent like my pre-diseased self. But I am afraid of what is ahead. Like a yogurt that hides in the corner of a fridge until way past its sell-by-date, one day my health will give way. The cancer will take over and I will be gone. That day may be very soon.

      So suddenly I am faced with the concept that I haven’t actually contributed anything during my life. I grabbed on to the idea that through my writing I may have made someone laugh or brought a family closer. I hoped that through my day care work I may have given a child some much needed love or confidence. I know through my children I have provided the world with two strong, intelligent, capable women. My mother’s ambition was curtailed by being a 1950s housewife but her intelligence and passion motivated me to get the university education she never had. So perhaps it has been my role to simply be a building block, a stepping stone for the next generation of women to walk on as they pursue their goals. On the evolutionary scale we are all an incremental version of the perfect human being. Instead of one hundred per cent clever or beautiful, some have to be half as clever, three-quarters as talented, one-third as ambitious. So I take my place among the slightly successful. Someone has to do it. But there is nothing like facing your mortality to make you wonder how you could have better used your time here on earth.

This story is my contribution. It is my way of making up for all the unproductive days. Here are the ups and downs, the love and the insanity that can only belong to the dying. I sincerely hope it helps. Good luck, all the best, and see you on the other side.