🏋‍♀️You feel so stiff and have so much muscle and joint pain, that if you reaaaaally try you can persuade yourself that you have had the best workout ever and feel good about yourself

👅Coming up with ways to describe the taste in your mouth is good training for when you will be playing a game of “what’s the flavour” (if there is such a thing) during board game night (or what I call “whining to my oncologist and therapist about the side effects of chemo”). From the boring “it’s a metallic taste” to “it feels like the anaesthetic the dentist would squirt in your mouth and make your throat numb” to my personal best of “boiled oily pasta water”, it can only get better (not!).

💅Fingernails getting a renewal: you can see how many rounds of chemo I have done just by looking at the lines on my nails. Tossing my calendar out! Just gonna check my nails for dates now!

🐣Being one of the few who didn’t go completely bald, but maintained a peach fuzz (as I lovingly call it). My family says I look like a freshly hatched chick…

🛀Having many baths with magnesium salts to soothe my joints and being able to step out of them, just with a towel. No fuss with loads of soap or shampoo or hair drying. Straight to my warm bed while my skin is still steaming!

🍁The weather is finally turning towards autumn and I can wear my hoodie!!! I look like a thug, now that I’m a peach fuzz chick baldy, but I’m short, so no one is scared of me… yet!

😏Discovering how amazing your body is: when one sense goes, the others get stronger to compensate. I have lost taste and touch, but I can hear and smell the fart you supposedly didn’t let escape 2 floors down and when I confront you, I have to take off my glasses to see you better! Be afraid! Be very afraid!

🧔‍♂️Martien has the roughest beard in the universe and whenever I kiss him, I get spiked. Now that he has been kissing my shaved head, he finally understands my torment and shaves more. Don’t judge me, but chemo was worth this perk!

💪And last but not least: the tumors shrunk overall 74% (my oncologist shared my scan report). And that is definitely the best perk so far!

On to 100% and N.E.D. ! ❤️