Aside 1

Why not collect the set!

I have a Cystic Hygroma.

Never heard of it, have you. I'm not surprised. Very few people have - and I include the medical community in that.

Apparently, I've been lucky with mine. They are a catch all phrase for a malformation in the lymph system localised around the neck area (normally) so, ok, a way to understand this is - when you get swollen glands, or the flu - what swells up? Your neck 'glands' and sometimes ones under your arm pits, right? It's the same thing here, except, uh, chronic growth patterns, basically.

Many people have them in the womb, and are the aborted. The first time I heard that, I wept for all the children who could have been me. I felt like shouting "No, you stupid people, give them a fucking chance to prove they can live with it!" But in reality, many of the cases of it are worse than mine by a long way.

The teeth grindingly sickening thing is that it was only after I started working here and did a web search that I found out about a support group in the UK. After 16 years of living being a freak, I found I wasn't alone on here. The support group is run by a great lady called Pearl Fowler, and the thing is, she hasn't even been on the Internet. Wry irony r us. I promised then to help out with a web solution, but didn't know my arse from my elbow at that stage. Instead a lovely man in Ireland, Tony Scott, set up a page, and I bought www.cystic-hygroma.org. We're working out a way to hoik over the content and develop CGI's on the Flirble server at the moment. The most important thing is to let people know they're not alone.

I'm not ready to talk about what it was like when I was young. It was like a living nightmare. I… I think the only reason I survived it was my parents loving me and helping me be, um… myself. I get attacks of the deep-seated insecurity it left me with. The words "deep seated" don't really do it justice. Eight long years of self-aversion during the only formative years you'll ever have. I'll never get over it. It's a part of my essential make-up as 'Cait'. But then, so is my cyst.

It's still there, you see. It'll never go away. Waiting. Waiting for a weak moment when it can wake from its hibernation and begin to reach its tendrils in to my throat and psyche again. And it's part of me, indelibly. How can I despise what is in essence - me. I am my Cyst, and I am not my Cyst. Dependant on my state of mind, these are my thoughts.

So you can see. It fucked me up a bit. It was also responsible for me doing a big "Fuck you" to the world and actually getting up and doing something. A delightful perversity at the heart of my relationship with it. But… I don't really know. I think I would have probably got up and gone anyway. It stopped me from achieving many things. I said I wasn't ready to talk about it, but here I am - I've talked about it.

Happy, happy, joy, joy. Yeah, rrrright.

I'll probably add to this in the future.

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