Noun: hobby; plural noun: hobbies

 

An activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure.

 

Now, one thing most of us have much more of whilst undergoing treatment for The Cancer is time.  Endless hours of the bloody stuff.  If you are usually a fairly active type, cramming in as much as you can on top of work, the news that you may be off work for an extended period does come as a kind of softener.  You know in the back of your head you might be feeling a bit shit at times, but surely you will have hours of free time to engage in a hobby??

 

People told me that I would be watching back to back box sets on the telly.  I have never been much of a telly watcher so I thought I would do something constructive with my time.  I would learn to play the piano, and I would learn Italian.  Then, perhaps, I would throw the odd box-set in as a reward.

 

I downloaded Italian for beginners and got off to a flying start.  Ear-phones on, I was soon able to order a cappuccino, tell my companion where I live and that I enjoy Roman food.  I did keep nodding off mid-conversation, and while I was by no means already fluent in the language, having grown up with it being spoken all around me, I pretty much knew all that anyway.  By the time I got to lesson 5 there was lots of new stuff and Mario and Maria would send me off to the land of nod before the end of the introduction.  Needless to say, I never made it to lesson 6.  As for playing the piano, the lid was never even lifted from the bloody thing.   I am still musically illiterate.

 

The truth is, when you are having treatment, especially chemo, your brain feels like it is full of cotton wool.  Keeping on top of even the basic chores feels like an epic task some days, and then the last thing you want to do is learning to order ruddy carbonara in the native tongue.

 

If you have a hobby that you find relaxing, and you feel like doing it, then make time to do it.  But don’t beat yourself up if you don’t feel like doing anything.  Be kind to yourself.