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‘Thrive: the Bah! guide to wellness after cancer’ will be published by Hay House in September 2012 -and ‘How I Said Bah! To cancer’ will son be available in the US! (Thrive will be global from the start.)

Take a Break magazine loves the Bah! book! “Of all the books written about breast cancer, Stephanie Butland’s unflinching yet humorous look at her “dance” with the disease is one of the best… It is a must read for any woman with the disease who wants to be proactive in her approach to treatment.”

Amazon reviews for the Bah! book are making me blush/cry… here.

Cancer Free Friday: Bah! Brownies

(Cancer-free, but not calorie-free, this one. If you’re on a diet, diabetic, sugar-free, wheat-free or dairy-free, look away now.)

I thought, it being Friday and all, you might fancy a chocolate brownie. As the internet is not yet sophisticated enough to let you help yourself, here’s the next best thing: the recipe. I promise you, they are the easiest thing in the world to make.

Bah! Brownies

You need:

200g dark chocolate (the better, the better. I like Green & Blacks, but doesn’t everyone?)
175g butter
325g golden caster sugar
125g plain flour
3 eggs
- Cake tin, approx 24cm x 24cm
- Baking parchment

Preheat the oven to 170C/325F/Gas 3.

In a pan, melt the chopped butter and broken-up chocolate over the lowest possible heat. It will take ages, and that’s fine, because you don’t want any burning. (I usually put this on to melt then measure everything else out and get the tin ready while it does its thing.)

When the butter and chocolate have melted, take the pan off the heat. Stir in the sugar, then the flour, then the eggs: you should end up with a thick, shiny mixture.

Pour the mixture into the tin. (You’ll notice I have a fancy tin that goes into sections – a leftover from my cake business days – but you really don’t need one. Anything roughly the right size will do. Lazy cook’s tip: to line the tin, tear off a piece of greaseproof paper bigger than the tin, and scrumple it into a tight ball in your hands. Unscrumple, and spread it into the tin – it should be nice and flexible and go into all the corners and up the sides without fighting back. If you have a bit of overhang, all the better for getting the brownies out later.)

Now pop it in to the oven, have a coffee, and 25 minutes later, go take a look. You want a flaky top, and if you have that, take the brownies out of the oven. If not, give them another 5 minutes, but don’t overdo it. (Oh, and don’t try sticking a skewer in and seeing if it comes out clean – it should never come clean out of a brownie.)

When the brownies are cool, cut them into squares, and enjoy.

Oh, and if any break coming out of the tin, like a couple of my last batch did, you could try this:  put them aside until dinner time, then warm them up – 30 seconds in the microwave will do it – and serve with ice cream and toffee sauce. (For toffee sauce, melt 100g butter and 100g dark brown sugar together in a pan. When they have both melted, add 200ml double cream, stir, and let the sauce bubble away for 5 minutes or so.)

You can also experiment: sprinkle over white chocolate chunks, add dried cherries (not glace) to the mixture, substitute coconut for half of the flour, try milk chocolate, add nuts…. go wild.

Happy baking!

Beside myself

I’m reworking ‘Thrive: the Bah! guide to wellness after cancer’ at the moment. There are bits to tweak, bits to expand, bits to rethink before I Officially Submit The Manuscript To The Publisher in March. (That sounds proper glamorous, but actually, it’s quite like sending any other email. Except I will do a little dance afterwards, and give myself the rest of the day off.)
Before I began, I asked Carolyn, my editor, for thoughts/tips/direction. Working with her on the first Bah! book was a real pleasure – she really gets what my approach is all about, and is very good at seeing what will make things better – and all of her thoughts on Thrive were really helpful too.
One of the things she suggested was a section about anger. Which I’ve been trying to write, and failing. Yesterday, after typing and deleting, typing and deleting, I came to the conclusion that I’m just not that angry, really. I did a search on the blog to check, and got very few posts when I searched for ‘anger’ and ‘angry’. A few posts contain ‘cross’, none at all ‘livid’ or ‘furious’.
Well, OK, I thought, I’m not someone who is angry about cancer. There was a corner of me feeling a little bit smug. Too well-adjusted to get mad, it whispered, don’t you worry about it. But in another corner, another voice was whispering too. I didn’t think I was going to like what it had to say, so I ignored it for as long as I could, but in the end I gave in and listened.
The voice was saying, ‘you are angry, you’ve been angry, but you can’t admit it, so you let it out in different ways’. And as soon as I listened, that smugness disappeared in a puff of… whatever imaginary voices in hypothetical corners of the psyche disappear into. (You know what they say: every analogy limps.)
Because all of those cleverly-written-so-you-don’t-realise-quite-how-ranty-they-are rants about hospital waiting times, rude oncologists, scars, PICCs, not being able to work, breathe, do what I want to do? Anger. Anger at the fact that I got a cancer, redirected at things it felt was OK to be annoyed about.
I suppose my feelings are further complicated by the fact that, nasty as cancer is, my life has been improved a great deal by my dance with it. So being angry about cancer has felt a bit like being angry with the teacher who pushed you and pushed you…. until you got full marks in your exam.
But maybe it’s time to admit that I was angry that I got a cancer. Yes, I laughed and I danced, but actually, getting a cancer really hacked me off. It ruined my plans. It upset my family. It turned me fat and bald and knackered. It hurt. And I didn’t rage and scream, because I’m not a rager and a screamer – Bah! is about as cross as I get – but I was angry all the same.
I don’t think I’m angry any more. But if cancer ever comes back to me…. I’ll be mad as all hell. And I won’t be afraid to say so.

Bah! revisited: PHT

You know I posted last week about the Mysteriously Tender Breasts? Well, not so mysterious, as it happens…. PMT. (I know. D’oh. In fairness to me, this is my second period since March 2009, and I’m not supposed to be having periods anyway, because I am simultaneously having a medical sodding menopause. I know. You couldn’t make it up.)

Anyway, I was searching PMT on the blog, and I found this post from September 2009, which reminded me that It Could Be Worse. (I’d completely forgotten about being cold all the time. And the sinus thing.)

*

Herceptin isn’t cheap, as you probably know – in fact, as I’ve mentioned before, it comes in at around £3000 per dose. It’s made up for specific patients (calibrated to body weight) and has a short, short shelf life.

So, when you are being treated with herceptin, you are asked to ring the unit the day before your treatment is due, to confirm that you are well (a term taken under advisement by oncology patients, obviously) and that you will be coming in. Which seems fair enough.
My next treatment is tomorrow, Monday, so I had to ring the day unit on Friday to confirm that I would be coming in, because, as we all know, no-one has cancer at the weekend.
So I called the unit at 9am and said I would be coming in on Monday.
And then it started to happen. As the day went on, my mood darkened. I felt cross and a little bit teary. I struggled to settle to anything, although eventually I found that – yes, you’ve guessed it – knitting seemed to take the edge off. (Just to be sure, I combined it with catching up on The Tudors. Gloriously, unhistorically watchable.)
Yesterday, I spent much of the day batting away questions about whether I was OK from the family, and then an hour in the bath with a Philippa Gregory novel that still failed to cheer me up. (I seem to be finding a theme to my being-less-miserable strategies: no matter how bad life is, at least I’m not married to Henry VIII.)
Alan came in to see how I was doing and I burst into tears. I realised that as soon as I book for herceptin, it plunges me into misery. (I had a big cry the night before the last one as well. I was like a child at the end of summer: “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to goooo…”)
Yes, my friends, I am suffering from PHT. Pre-Herceptin Tension.
I can’t work out why I resent it so much – because it is resentment, more than anxiety, that I am awash with. I’ve come up with a whole host of possibilities.
1. Needles.
2. Half a day in hospital.
3. Bringing back old memories of chemotherapy.
4. A three weekly reminder that I am not as well as I think I am.
5. Sore sinuses, sore nose, cold all the time, aches and pains.
6. Because herceptin is meant to keep cancer from recurring, rather than destroying the previous one, it suggests to me on some level that cancer is not done with me, nor I with cancer.
7. I have to do this every three weeks for a year.
I’m trying to counter these thoughts.
1. It’s better than a PICC line.
2. It’s largely uninterrupted knitting/reading time.
3. I can measure, in my physical health and mental state, how far I have come since the dark days of chemo. And, by being there and being well, I can show others that their chemo journey will end too.
4. I am well. I’m just taking preventative measures.
5. The side effects are manageable.
6. I’m just humouring the medical profession.
7. Some people dancing with cancer would give their eyes to be in the position that I am in.
But somehow, this reframing isn’t working. I am grumpy and resentful and low when I want to be gracious and grateful.
Alan has suggested I go back to see Gosia at The Haven, and I think that’s a good idea. (You can read about how she helped me before, here and here.)
Until then, I will try to play nice. And remember that it could be worse – I could be Anne Boleyn.