Authors: Anthony Wilson
A joyous calm day. We began at Maya and Tim’s for pancakes and coffee and chat around the table. Expertly and sensitively they helped us talk about IT as much as we wanted, Maya making sure that she got a good sesh with each of us moving round the chairs. The whole thing loving and warm. Abs drew me a get well card wearing Tim’s Panama hat, which he had had me model earlier as we talked about retail therapy on the net.
Robyn popped her head round the door later. After a couple of minutes of chat I realised we were talking to each other not as neighbours but as members of Chemotherapy Anonymous, swapping stories and impressions of the process as though it was what we always talked about in the hallway on Sunday night while she waited for Sam to come down.
‘You know that itchy bottom feeling when they first inject you? That’ll get worse,’ she said. ‘It ends up like you’re sitting on a hairbrush.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
‘And the waking up at 4.31, that’s the steroids making you hyper, that’s normal too.’
‘And the night sweats?’
‘Oh I still get those.’
‘Oh.’
‘You just have to try not to eat too much, though that’s what you feel like the whole time.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Not that you’ll have any problem getting rid of it of course, not like me.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘It took me ages to feel normal again.’
Sitting in the kitchen. A beautiful day, raw again but bright, bright, little fluffy clouds scudding in the blue.
Walked Shim to school and felt – for the first time – really whacked having done nothing at all. Feel weedy and a bit sorry for myself. ‘Which you are allowed,’ as Tatty keeps reminding me, but still feels like giving in somehow.
Yesterday another of gifts as Sarah came to visit. We sat in the kitchen while the window cleaner worked his way through the house, drinking coffee and talking. Suddenly it was lunchtime. She took me out to the café at the end of the road. When we got back she said, ‘You lie down for a bit, I’ll just sit and read.’ She timed it perfectly, knowing I think before I did that I suddenly felt knocked out and wouldn’t be up to much that afternoon. She made Bendy some toast and juice, and Shim some tea when he came in.
She looks well. She’s still moving stiffly on her knee, especially up and down stairs. I noticed as we sat going over the story in the kitchen how alive her face is, open in an alert way, but not at all childish. She is very good company and easy to talk to. No pressure to be profound or make a big statement. A huge gift.
Going over the story made me realise just how quick the whole thing has been, less than a calendar month from ultrasound to the start of treatment. Looking back, today, in my weariness, I can see how I have taken it all so well, calmly, cheerily, easing people into conversation about it for fear of their reactions. Today I feel very different. Not just knocked out, but in pain a little too, from the tumour-pressure, plus the general weirdness that goes on all the time inside the
insides, that feeling of ‘am I about to throw up, or is it just ravenous hunger again?’ Today, with that, for the first time, fear. The nagging question of what if it doesn’t work despite the prognosis? The fear of death, or, more specifically, of being conquered by something. Chris Richards says I have to be determined, to fight it off, but I’ve read things which say this makes no difference. He is onto something, possibly, but for the first time, just in these quiet sunny kitchen minutes, I feel like a lot of fight has gone out of me.
Walking back from dropping off Shim today I saw Laura stuck in traffic in her Volvo. I pulled off my hat to show her, knowing she hadn’t seen me bald. The gasp and falling forward onto her steering wheel in surprise were worth it.
A sudden feeling, just before this, of being public property. A young mum who I always pass going in the opposite direction, and who I have spoken to properly once, half-paused to wish me ‘good luck with your treatment’. You don’t have control over who knows, I know that, and I don’t really care. I just wasn’t prepared to feel so unexpectedly touched, mixed in with an ounce of cross-ness at being ‘discussed’, which in turn became guilt.
Incredible rinsed light today, very transparent. A dull breeze after yesterday’s snow showers, with promise of more, but so far none. Intense blue and pressure climbing as it says in that Ted Hughes poem …
Not pleased with my performance yesterday, too liberal a use of the word ‘feel’. You are going to feel shit. Get used to it. 4/10. See me.
The most likely thing is that it’s not having those lovely steroids to take. Hence being able to sleep. Hence zero energy? While I was sleeping, did Daffy Duck get his cricket bat and whack me in the face with it? Pace yourself.
Spent the day avoiding picking up the phone, except to Chris to turn his visit down. Sim and Is have been promising a visit. I had the proverbial ‘on a train’ call from Is at tea time. At least I was up by then.
Today I kicked off (as usual) with
Will and Grace
then
Frasier
, both of which seem faultless, in their way. Complete worlds, little clockwork universes sealed off from reality.
Amazing what cancer makes you crave. US sitcoms. Broccoli. Marmite. And, from nowhere, three slices of peanut buttered bread. But broccoli especially. Tatty said, watching Merenna hiding hers, ‘She’s not your daughter is she?’ I buy them Danish pastries for after school, like I always have, determined to Keep Things Normal.
Bumped into Maya walking back from School this morning and she nearly attacked me when I whipped my hat off. ‘Anthony, it’s
gorgeous
. Really
gorgeous
. You look great! You should keep it like that!’ Buying bread after my sleep I showed it off to Dawn. ‘Really suits you, you know. What a lovely shaped head!’
Another great spin-off of cancer: non-threatening conversations with women in which they tell you how attractive you are.
Before I conk out again … we watched the Poliakoff play on Sunday night (
Gideon’s Daughter
). I’ve always had a soft spot for him.
Perfect Strangers
I thought
was
perfect, the slow unfolding more like a symphony than a play. And when I read at Ways With Words with Peter two years ago, it was the queue to see him snaking round the lawn which we competed with. No contest.
Bill Nighy ‘played himself’ according to the
Guardian
review, which is right, I think. Not as self–consciously as in
Love Actually
or
Hitchiker’s Guide
, but the ticks were all present: unnecessary pauses between words, as if to draw
attention to significance which wasn’t there; the lurching forward a whole inch towards someone and then stopping dead, hesitating, pausing, going ‘Er …’
I loved it, though. I think P is more of a poet than a dramatist, in that not actually very much happens but that it looks gorgeous and continually sends shivers down your spine while finding its way towards saying something. He makes
great
images. The choir in the church. The party in the Indian restaurant.
The key scene led to explain why Nighy’s daughter had drifted away from him. His wife (to whom he has been unfaithful) is dying of cancer in hospital. A complete stranger walks into their room, sits down next to them and starts talking. After seeing him out he goes to make a phone call. By the time he comes back, half an hour later, she has died and the talking man is back: ‘the nurses thought he was touchy.’ The daughter cannot forgive that he wasn’t there at the end. I love the mixture in this of the everyday, the tragic and the odd; randomness ramming itself up against our own small griefs. It works because it works because it works.
On the way back from school with Shim, he told me his day in detail for the first time ever. ‘We took a vote on games, double English or double Maths. Double English won ‘cos Mr Willey said it was too icy.’
‘Which did you vote?’
‘Double English.’
‘Was that good?’
‘Yeh it was ‘cos we’re doing adverts – we have to look at an advert then say what it makes us feel.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘There was that one for Cancer Research, you know, where she says my mother shouldn’t be here, so at the end I said it made me reassured. To fill up the page.’
He looked at me, smiling, wanting me to smile my approval.
‘I feel reassured anyway,’ he stated. ‘But it was a good thing to say because it made the writing a bit longer.’
Three days of zonked-outness, today a weird shivering ache, on a pulse, every twenty seconds, down my right side. I’ve just had a cheese sandwich and tried watching
ER
but it was too much. The
ER
I mean. It began, cheerily, with a pregnant woman waking in a freezing flat, her waters broken, to find that both her children and her husband were all unconscious with carbon monoxide poisoning. It sent me over the edge. I stumbled back in here, under my rug.
I finished a book today. Donald Miller’s
Blue Like Jazz
, a book of short essays, apercus, really, on the theme of finding God. It has a lot going for it over other Christian books (not that I’m an expert) in that it is a) well written and b) relentlessly honest. I like his narrative voice a lot, with references to Andrew the Protestor and Tony the Beat Poet (who isn’t one at all). He reminds me of my favourite voices, Billy Collins, Anne Lamott, Carol Shields or Frank O’Hara at Fire Island. They’re scatty, a little frayed at the edges, a little bit basically screwy, like me. I like that. Miller has it in spades.
There’s a really good passage near the end of the book about cancer. In a preamble which goes on to explain how most Christian language about love (
valuing
people,
investing
in them) is in the metaphor of economics, he exposes the truth behind most discourse about cancer. It is written, or spoken, in the metaphor of war. He calls for a different way of looking at the disease, which does not put the responsibility for recovery onto the patient, who in most cases is already frightened and exhausted enough without this extra burden.
As Billy Collins puts it in ‘Marginalia’ this had me standing and cheering in the bleachers.
I finally feel like I have cancer.
I have just called the hospital re my aching back and waves of stiffening pain. ‘What are you being treated for?’ they said. ‘Large B-cell diffuse non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’
I felt a bit smug, it came off so pat.
‘Are you on Lengorastin for your white blood count?’
‘Yes, since Saturday.’
‘It’s probably that, then. It is a common side effect, I’m afraid.’
I asked if I could take Paracetamol for it and she said yes I could. ‘Let us know how you get on,’ she said.
I think what you want is a list which takes you through what you’ll feel. Something along the lines of:
The first day of treatment you are going to throw up in the evening because let’s face it you are full of poison and you will lie down too quickly, not having been told that to do so brings on the nausea very forcefully and that staying upright is your best bet.
The next morning you are going to feel sick again, but won’t be. Instead you will notice how something like a nuclear reaction seems to be going off below your diaphragm. You will carry your sick bucket around the house with you, sit near the loo for long periods, and walk close to hedges when you leave the house. You will pee almost constantly. If you remember to drink fluids as we encouraged you it will run clear. If you forget, your pee will look like
Pinot Noir
and stink like a sewer. This is normal.
You will lie awake at night and ‘wake up’ fully at hours previously known to you through baby-care. You will notice the dark and the cold, your thoughts clanking in your head as they pace through your skull. You will get up ‘for one more pee’ only to throw the towel in at 5.02 sitting in
the kitchen leafing through old copies of
The Express and Echo
, convinced that you recognise the photograph of the child on page 3.
You will take twenty minutes to down all your drugs. It is not the swallowing you find hard, just the sheer quantity. You like them best with chocolate milk. Then a banana. Then some dried apricots. Then some toast. Then some marmite, on the knife. You notice you have not been making any bowel movements. You eat more dried apricots, more toast. You ‘leave it a day’. And find you go twice, either side of lunch, which is baked beans on toast plus extra toast with bread and butter while you wait for them to cook. You find you have ‘limitless’ energy, the kind which sends you into town to the library and considering buying coffee. You smile a lot, especially at the school gate. The nuclear reaction seems to be dying down a bit. You go out for pizza. It is really not so bad, were it not for the headaches. You try a tiny sip of wine over supper. You wake with an axe through your head. This goes on all week. Except you skip the wine. You call the hospital. They tell you this is normal.
Just when you are ‘used to things’ it hits you like a wave or sudden gust from behind a street corner. Fatigue is in everything you do. You lift your head from the pillow and it hurts. You notice your slippers make little scraping noises as you shuffle from room to room. You stay in one room, near the telly; you give thanks for the remote control. The phone rings but you do not answer it, even though it is six inches across the bed from you. You start to sleep for hours, waking from dreams about playing team sports as a teenager. But you crave sleep. You think you look good curled up.
And then the shivers start. Somewhere in your back above your kidneys a tense pulse that begins warmly and ends in a shudder near your spine throws long electrical currents. You think of an octopus, a giant squid. You think of
Dr Who
. You think of
Fawlty Towers
, what you would
give to be watching it for the first time, with your father, scarcely able to believe your luck, your luminous happiness. And then it goes. It comes back when you cook the children pasta. It is one of your best sauces ever and you are bent double. You notice you have run out of pepper. You think about ringing the hospital. While the children eat, they joke and eye you, warily. You tell them it is nothing. You go back to feeling merely exhausted. It has snowed outside. The government have won a vote. England are back in the Test. You know you will survive.