Worlds Collide

Worlds Collide

24^th January 2011

My departure date is nearly here and recently a lot has been playing on my mind. It’s 2am here in Uruguay and my head is swimming with thoughts and emotions. First, I should be signing on in 4 days and I still don’t have my flight details. Will I arrive on time? Probably not.

The main thing that is troubling me is whether I am making the right decision. Soon I’ll be leaving the chilled, laid back, almost boring lifestyle that vacation brings. The opposite will be waiting for me on Disney Magic – pure manic and scores of children.

Leaving my parents is going to be much harder than it was in April 2011. During the vacations my Mom has been in and out of hospital after a tumour was spotted on her chest. First was a possibility of leukaemia and things looked bleak – and that’s putting it mildly. 

Once leukaemia was discounted came the possibility of Hodgkin’s or Non-Hodgkin’s – milder cancers than leukaemia but Non-Hodgkin’s is still an aggressive bastard of a cancer from what I’ve researched. 

So far it's been test after x-ray after biopsy after no news after another biopsy. We’ve been going backwards and forwards to the hospital like a tennis ball getting knocked about by Federer and Nadal! Now we finally know that the tumour is a lymphoma. Lymph Node cancer – we are just waiting for the final test results to determine which type of lymphoma it is and start treatment. 

Treatment is scheduled to start on 28^th January – the day I am supposedly going to join ship or attend Disney training in Orlando, Florida.

So I am very much leaving my parents at a difficult time. My Dad will now have to look after my Mom (which is and will be a full time task), look after the house and run a business. Whereas before I’d happily take care of Mama, keep the house in check and cook the meals while Dad carried on overseeing his real estate business. It wasn’t a decision we made, we just slipped into our roles, worked with it and did the best we could.

The guilt I feel about leaving them in the lurch is an overly large, obnoxious weight on my shoulders. The fact I’m burdening them with more to look after/do is a burden to me. Don’t get me wrong, when treatment starts, I probably won’t be able to do anything to improve things, but at least I’ll be there. Not at sea worried out my nut!

More onto the professional side of things, this is my second contract. Although things will work differently on Disney Magic, many aspects will be the same as Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas. Guests know what they can get, what they should be getting and of course, they want it! As Royal Caribbean always says guests know the expectation and standards of the ship. They don’t want us to merely “meet their expectations”, the guests want us to “exceed their expectations”. This may sound very easy and obvious, but when you’ve experienced and lived life as an Image Cruise Ship Photographer, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Ship life and working as an Image Photographer is a mentally taxing job and you have to push your personal thoughts out of the way. What’s going on at home, will very much play on my mind while I’m on the ship, I’ll admit that. Selfishly, I will also have to learn to push my personal issues to one side altogether – not just for work but for ship life as a whole. As much as it pains me to admit this, I know I cannot push my personal life out of my head – family comes first as my Dad always says. 

My fear: knowing that my personal and professional worlds are going to colliding - it is not something I relish. The more my sign on date approaches or I’m felt in the lurch about a possibly sign on date change, the more knots I get in my stomach, the more anxious, worried I become. It’s like watching a horror/suspense film and you’re waiting for the big climax… only this is real life!

It’s not something I will talk to my parents about. I take the approach of “shut up, keep going, make out you’re fine and maybe soon you will actually be fine”. Plus they have enough on their plates without my complaints and worries. Maybe I am just being over emotional?

I just hope this isn’t something I’m going to live to regret. I am seriously wondering whether I’ve made the right decision. Maybe I should stay a bit longer until treatment is well under way? Maybe it is just the agitation of not knowing exactly what’s happening (ships changing, Image rules changing, sign on dates are constantly changing!) that’s making me work myself up into a two and eight. Who knows? 

One thing is for sure, as Hernan once advised, don’t bottle your feelings up as they will only sink you. Hernan is right, bottling it up and not having someone to talk to (unless Becks is online but even then, you feel a burden for unburdening your troubles on someone) is driving me absolutely insane, around the pipe, cuckoo. So I’ll unleash the beast of my problems in an open letter on my blog.

When worlds collide and you wonder if you’re making the right decision, there are two things that I am drumming into my head, focusing on: Make the most out of what I’ve got – have fun on the ship, learn, travel and experience. Personally: Look on the bright side, you’re not too far away (from home) in the Caribbean. If anything does happen, God forbid, I’ll be on the first plane back to Uruguay... Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck can kiss my ghostly white ass! As Dad says "family first, without family, nothing else matters."