What surviving a drought taught me about living with brain cancer

More and more, I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns to another. A blind intelligence, true. But of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth. (Hirshfield)[1]

[1] Hirshfield, J (2002) Optimism. In Given Sugar, Given Salt. Harper Collins, New York, USA.

I was one year old when my parents purchased a large sheep and cattle station in southwest Queensland, Australia. The…