Post-chemo days

I am alright but not right to put it in a nutshell. I feel quite cheerful which is a good start and don't actually feel ill as such. There is no doubt though that the nasty chemicals are trying to get me down. I know that the 11 anti-nausea tablets I take each day are working away because I can feel them. It's like a skirmish going on in my stomach, the slight, sometimes more, feeling of sickness is never far away and it sort of gurgles like indigestion sending warning messages up the tubes. The tablets are winning you feel, but the chemo is there just waiting to catch you out.

It's a bit the same with the tiredness; I feel OK, I go to cut down some dead stuff in the garden, or climb up to the top floor for some reason and realise I can't do it for long. Something happens around my hips, deep inside my legs and it's no go. As this is not far from the gurgly stomach I feel there is a revolt going on below my waist (that is the bit that sticks out most between breast and hips isn't it?). It's worst if I try and bend at said waist, all hell threatens to break out then.

Finally and sadly my recorder playing is suffering and I may not make it to this year's proms after all. It's the breathing, you would think old Leio would have done his darnedest by now to get my lungs down but he is saying chuck that chemical at me and you will regret it in the pulmonary region. He is right so I am puffing and panting even more.

These are all side-effects described on the chemical warfare leaflets so I glory in being the norm. The leaflets also remind me I am toxic for seven days and that my bodily fluids are definitely a no-go area. I think I might get one of those hazardous waste signs and stick it on my new headdress it can only serve to impress.

Today the challenge is to visit my niece as it's her birthday, do the shopping and then make a proper Sunday dinner for Luke, Aleks and the girls. Luckily that just means chucking a piece of meat in the oven and peeling a few veg and even I can manage that. I will be helped by my trusty sous chef, Stewart, of course; that's him over there the one in the nice orange overalls and the protective mask.

Home again, home again, wiggety wig

Got back last night, earlier than last time due to less pump breakdowns (pesky machines that control the flow of the chemo etc going into your veins). I am feeling fine considering and am in love with the medicine beginning with O that controls your sickness. I refuse to try to learn all of the names of the drugs, life is too short and it only encourages them to come up with longer and longer and more and more ridiculous monikers.

I do prefer single rooms in hospitals as I have said before but this stay has brought new insights into the camaraderie of cancer and the amazing way that cancer patients behave. For some reason we are a ridiculously cheerful bunch; perhaps it's something to do with the cells dividing all over the place and sending us a bit scatty. If you added up the life expectancy in my six bed bay of cancer women you probably wouldn't get to the 2012 Olympics but there was nerry (Shakespearean term for "never a" but I don't know how to spell it and I am getting above myself clearly) a moan and lots of laughs and a very gung ho sort of "we may not have long but we are going to enjoy it" type attitude. My neighbour for a day was a more hopeful case and turned out to be an English teacher who had worked with Stewart; one woman had had breast cancer then got a sarcoma in her ribs, had herself all reconstructed and now has it in her bones and lungs but she looked fantastic and kept snogging her husband of 30 years, so she has got something right; another saw through at least two property deals while I was in and is rushing over to Alicante to sign them off after her biopsy on Monday - she was given 6 months, three months ago; the third was just a nice laughy woman despite asthma, diabetes and lung cancer and on the last day a German woman with five kids who wore her bald head bravely came in and brought more spice to the mix . There must be some miserable buggers amongst the cancer community but I have yet to meet one.

So the sun is out and I may do a bit of tweaking in the garden later, the only appointment in near future is with the wig maker; I get it free so I may as well have a go; but do I stay as me or go for a whole new look; I should have asked my cancer buddies it would have been another excuse for a laugh anyway.

Tattoos

Terribly sick last night but on stronger stuff now so feel better. I am not sure if I can trust myself to eat which by now you will all know is a big change for me. Maybe I will lose some of the zillion pounds that the Biobank folk reckoned I was out by. I felt a bit crap last night:sick, no hair and I lost my glasses in the xray dept. This morning glasses are found, I haven't been sick for 12 hours and so what if I am bald, some of my best friends are slapheads and I find I am still me underneath it all.

The young woman who sweeps the floors and brings round the tea, god love her, has a tattoo on her arm which reads ...forbidden to remember, terrified to forget. Well that has resonance for sure. There's a nice young man on today perhaps I will ask him if he has any appropriate tattoos to show me. I'll have to be prepared to keep my dinner down though.

Bed but no hair

Very quick post everyone; I have a bed today; goodness knows why I am so excited they are hardly Malmaison or even Travel Lodge. In readiness Stewart clipped my hair this morning down to number one. Yesterday I vacced it rather than washed it but today it had to go. I am afraid I look nothing like Sinead O Connor, more like that fat chap Lucien Freud used to paint, Lee Bowry was it or if I am really truthful it's Gollum I most resemble.

So I will slither around my bed muttering "my precious, my precious" and watch out for the fires of Mordar.

And the little one said roll over

I shouldn't be writing this, I certainly shouldn't have to. I should be in the hospital having had my bloods taken and be waiting for the chemo drip to be put up this afternoon but I am not. Ann the bed manager called this morning. She is lovely and we are now on first name terms. She is a nice person doing a very nasty job and she said they didn't have a single spare bed; there had been emergencies and people transferred from their other hospital, (Selly Oak for the locals). They will call me tomorrow to see if there is a bed and of course I will be a priority, and I think yes, along with the emergencies and the other people turned down this morning. I asked if this was safe as I was supposed to be on a course of treatment, so much every three weeks etc and she said this was normal and it would all just roll over; and I think yes when someone rolls over and then falls out of the bed, no doubt, just as the song says.

Now it may not matter if I miss a day or even two, although I would like to see the evidence! But does it matter that I will now probably not be able to go with Harry to see Alice in Wonderland on Saturday as I will still be feeling rough? Does it matter that my calculations about whether I will be able to meet up with my American friends on a rare visit to Paris in April are now thrown out? Does it matter that we have had to tell the garage that Stewart now can't pick up our car tomorrow morning? Does it matter that according to my doctor I can expect to live for about another 9 months on average and this is one wasted day of that nine months or 19 or whatever it is? Yes it ****ing well does matter; all of it.

Wake up people YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH BEDS! And don't tell me that the new hospital will sort it because I was there don't forget when the reduction in beds was announced and I asked would this affect patient care and I was fobbed off as usual by the Oh but we will manage it all better nonsense. This is happening to me and my fellow cancer sufferers now people, here, not in a third world country, not in some distant rural locality but in BIRMINGHAM, in the second city of a relatively rich country in a REGIONAL CANCER CENTRE, people!

If I had hair I would tear it out, instead this post is going off to my old gang. So Andy, David N, Cynth, Elisabeth, David C and Julie what do you say? Is this a service to be proud of? If it was your Mom etc etc...

An unbirthday

Today Luke isn't 30; just like he wasn't 10, 18 or or 29. He is in fact 6 and a half. He doesn't even get to be 7 and a half as they didn't have a leap year in 2000. Luke (third son) is our prodigal son and we have often put his lostness down to his lack of real years. We have banned him from our house; cursed his very existence and carried him around with us everywhere. Today is another fatted calf occasion, we don't need much excuse! Over the last 18 months - since he met and married Aleks and got himself a whole new family taking his responsibilities wonderfully, amusingly, seriously - he has warranted many a feast and celebration and thankfully joined in all of ours; accepted back now into the family fold. He is now the favourite uncle of Harry when two years ago he didn't see him; Harry has renamed him Uncle Pickle and Luke says it's the greatest honour he could have ever had.

Of course old Sod's law is about and no sooner do we get those demons out of the way then my very own version turns up. But for now I have fashioned a 30 shaped cake and we have balloons and bunting. He will rustle up the most wonderful Malaysian beef, Aleks will do her Japanese soup and there will be my trifle too.

Tomorrow it's back to the ward and the pink needles and I have started wearing the scarves because there is definitely less not more hair on my head now. But I know the family are one, and that my son has reached 6 and a half and that is the best medicine I could possibly have.

With friends like this...

On the way to the Biobank experience yesterday (no I am really not that fat you got your sums wrong!) we decided to go to see the Bridget Riley exhibition which is on in town at the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery and to feel like real pensioners able to do exactly what we feel like doing each and every day. The Gallery has taken over a couple of old Victorian buildings that I remember going to with my Mom to pay bills (can you imagine those days, no cheque books, debit cards or anything and banks were just places that kept your money and didn't go around paying revolting people, revolting amounts of money to be more revolting still and all in the interests of destroying the economy).

The exhibition was small but beautifully formed, I loved her sketches and stuff but immediately got a raging headache as her visual tricks played out on my eyes. We were given an even bigger headache by a particularly nasty woman who was guarding a group of grey arties (nothing like ourselves of course, I am a trendy coconut after all). They were apparently the "Friends" of the gallery but this was the sort of friendship you have to pay for as we discovered as this woman shooed us away from the picture the "Friends" were being talked to about. We went back later to see her shushing two other non-Friends who had the temerity to be whispering about another couple of pictures nearby.

We left but I was very close to putting on my manager's voice and asking her to come outside for a moment while I put her right about rate payers' money and public galleries; and no thank you I would not be joining her gang.

We scuttled over the road to the proper gallery. I used to come here almost every Saturday with either my Dad (he trained around the corner at the Municipal Art School) or more frequently with my friend Lorraine Wilson. Lorraine like me had artistic pretensions, she saw hers through later and went onto Art College but in those days what we were really after were chaps. It had to be a particular sort of chap, older of course, intellectual and maybe a tad Bohemian so the Art Gallery was the obvious place; we tried the same at Dudley Zoo, I'm not quite sure what we were after there. We were all of 13 or 14 so don't let them tell you that the young girls today etc etc. We probably giggled too much or something because despite our obvious charms we never succeeded in picking up a single hairy prospect.

We did make lots of friends however and yesterday it was like going back for a reunion. It's literally years since I have walked around the pictures and sculptures and I wanted to hug each and everyone of them. There was the early Degas of the old lady; my old favourites the Epstein Lucifer, the Modigliani and the one with Jesus in the temple. Loads of Pre-Raphaelites of course but mixed in with Braques and Bellinis I immediately recognised and warmly gazed at just like old mates.

So another metaphor my patient followers, as we have found since September, real friends are always waiting for you, they will always charm and inspire you and you don't have to pay them a penny.