Today I
have the pleasure of writing to you all LIVE from the chemo ‘cafe.’ Otherwise known as the Chemotherapy Day Centre.
Still no
decent coffee, but my productive achievements of the day whilst getting my fix
of champagne-oxaliplatin, include puzzleing with my mum… AND a huge upgrade to
the Christmasiness of my nails thanks to my wonderful friend who popped in to
Jam me up (a la Darcy Bussell on Strictly) Get your Jams on people!
As you may have rightly surmised by my silence on the blogosphere, I’ve been in relatively good spirits lately.
My writing
tends to be fuelled by the more extreme and spiky ends of the emotional scale,
by the need for catharsis and mental processing time. Any feelings in the
middle ground or towards the positive end of the scale leave me rather less communicative
and inspired to write.
It has been
ever thus, my teenage journals read like chronicles of misery and angst. You’d
think I’d been tortured by the near life-death experiences of encountering the
attractive and lesser-spotted males of the species. Thankfully absent from the
classroom they haunted the coach park, the car park or the infamous Black Gates
that divided ‘Girls School’ from ‘Boys School.’ It is amazing how your view of life-and-death
experiences changes in a mere 18 years, from ‘He definitely waved at me today, I think I might die of happiness’ to
hearing ‘I’m sorry you have bowel cancer.’
Genuinely grim. (Incidentally I’m not
sure I wrote the exact former sentence about waving, but doubtless something
similar actually occurred!)
Overall this
last week has been marked by a welcome lack of drama and high emotion. There
has been an absence of drugs, side effects and planned hospital visits. For all
of which I am profoundly grateful. No drama is good, I’ve had enough in recent
months.
Perhaps I
simply feel good in direct contrast to the prior week, during which I felt ‘bogging’
after my first chemo session? By ‘bogging’ I mean stuck-in-the-mud, laboured
and effortful. Like trekking in Scotland, where a supposed short cut across
what looked like bouncy and solid heather turns out to involve slow and exhausting
wading, knee-deep in cold, peaty, sludgy mud-water desperately trying not to
lose a boot. The lesson, people? In life there are no short cuts.
I have at
times in the last few days verged on euphoria at temporarily feeling ‘well’. I
have felt light and joyful, normal and ‘healthy.’ And I have been making the
most of it. Lunches with wonderful friends, extraordinarily early and
unfrenzied Christmas preparations (tree up, presents wrapped under the tree,
turkey ordered, etc), AND I have even been to the gym. Yes, really.
I ran the
slowest two kilometres that I’ve run in over 20 years, but as the only two kilometres
that I have run since my operation, I was just thrilled to be running. No
matter that it was on a treadmill and not outside, it was a test run for my
body. To see how the stoma and my abdominals felt in motion, under impact. To
see whether my Hickman line, the white tube hanging from my chest would
irritate me. It did. But not enough to make me hit the ‘stop’ button on the
machine. A moral and physical victory.
Maybe one
day I’ll get used to the line. For now, I’m grateful that despite that fact
that it dangles tantalisingly from my clavicle like a bathroom light pull-cord,
my 18 month old son hasn’t properly clocked it. Given his recent reactions to
fairy lights, baubles in fact anything that moves and doesn’t move. His
ignorance is definitely my bliss. His standard techniques of highly physical
exploration include yanking, pulling, chewing. All of which would be pretty
unwelcome.
Not one
usually prone to paranoia I find myself perpetually checking the strange,
transparent sandwich dressing that covers the chest wound. Is the skin redder
than yesterday? More itchy than a few hours ago? Has my ridiculous and wholly
inadequate plastic bag – sellotape contraption adequately protected it from
water during pathetic attempts to shower and keep it dry? (Disclosure: I even went to the hairdresser for a full wash-cut-blowdry
this week to avoid washing my own hair as I haven’t figured out how to do this
properly yet and dry shampoo only covers so many days of sin.)
But
seriously, both chemotherapy and the Hickman line have made me paranoid. And
paranoia interferes with my sleep. I wake up in a cold sweat wondering if I’m
getting a fever, or whether it’s actually just sleeping adjacent to my furnace-like
husband? I have to reach for the ear thermometer to check I’ve not hit the
chemo-red-alert level of 37.5 (which is a pretty low bar to be honest, I’d
barely give my kids Calpol for that!).
You could
argue that a high state of alert is good. The evidence related to high risk of
infection in indisputable as chemotherapy damages your immune system. However,
life is not easily sanitised, especially as mine includes little people.
My grubby
little urchins still fail to
consistently wash their hands despite a prolonged campaign involving coercion,
bribery and stickers (obviously). And even if they do we seem to be hit almost
weekly by some virus. Winter, nursery, soft play…but what can you do?
I have furnished
my house with vats of sanitising gel, poised in defence, like pots of burning
pitch on the battlements of an ancient castle. Ready to fight germs and snot. But
really? When faced with a vomiting child, desperate to crawl onto Mummy’s lap
for comfort and nuzzle under in the crook of my shoulder, I have neither the
inclination nor the strength of will to say ‘Of course darling. Just wait until Mummy reaches for a face mask, antibacterial
gel and rubber gloves.’
Solitary
confinement until the crocuses break through the earth’s surface and the
viruses shrink back into dormancy like little vampires in the pale spring
sunshine doesn’t appeal either. Clearly getting through chemotherapy is about
risk mitigation and conscious choices.
Can I eat
more vitamin-rich vegetables and fruit and ensure my diet is chock full of
immune boosting foods? Yes siree.
Can I (reluctantly)
avoid environments where the enclosed space, the throng of people and the
specific microclimates like the pressurised cabin of an aeroplane, the humid
misty sanctuary of the hot yoga studio, the damp warmth of the swimming pool
changing room all raise the stakes of transmitting and receiving unwelcome
infections? Yes. (Although I’m pretty gutted about the hot yoga AND the
flying).
Can I
continue carrying around hand gel and using it as much as possible? OK. If it
helps, then I will.
Beyond that,
and dosing everyone around me up on vitamins, there is not much more I can do
but hope.
So today, as I sit attached to my latest fix I am trying not to
worry about infections or side effects over the next few days and weeks. What
will be will be.
I am reassured by the fact that I have family to help with final
preparations for the Christmas festivities, plenty of distraction and
entertainment for the kids should I need to bow out and take a nap, so really
there is nothing to worry about. Hopefully, like all of you, Christmas will be
a relaxing and cheerful affair. A time to enjoy good food, good company and
possibly even some snow if the weather reports are to be believed?
In case I don't manage to blog again as the drugs do their work, let me wish a happy chemo Christmas to you all. x
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