As someone who generally likes attention, I fully admit I get a thrill out of the sympathy and spotlight that comes with illness. However, after two and a half weeks of being handled with kid gloves, enough is enough.

The appeal of using Facebook (as a consumer) to me, and I am sure to many other people, is the sheer volume of my friends (and potential friends) that use the site. For example, just the other day, my roommate decided to throw a party for our entire apartment block, and she went around told everyone “I’ll make a Facebook group so we can sort out the details”. There were absolutely no dissenters, we all had Facebook, and within a few days there were a few dozen members in this group all chatting away. This is a brilliant example of Facebook’s reach, but can we be assured it will last?

I picked up the famous book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” a few months before going to Germany on exchange. I was planning on studying mostly history while in Germany and I figured I needed a refresher course before I arrived. Unfortunately, the book is so long, so convoluted and so boring that I didn’t finish it until well into my exchange. Even taking into account the 1280 pages, the book took me an abnormally long time to read. I found myself making any and all excuses to put it down, and I even finished two other books while I was reading it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my particular brain tumour is located in what is called the “right temporal lobe” of the brain. According to doctors at the hospital in Germany, my tumour is perfectly operable, and in fact should be operated on as quickly as possible. However, they were not exactly clear on what was at stake in this little endeavour.

WARNING: CONTAINS A STUPID QUOTE THAT MAY UPSET SOME PEOPLE. Especially patients with brain tumours/those with friends and relatives with brain tumours. READ WITH CAUTION.

In the hopes of learning more about my situation, I have begun reading the book “100 Questions and Answers about Brain Tumours” by Dr. Virginia Stark-Vance, and Mary Louise Dubay. Having only gotten around 11% into it (thanks Kindle!), I have so far found it incredibly informative. However, some of the things contained within have also made me feel extreme unease.