I swam, and I swam, right over the dam...

Day 5

 

General status update 

Nausea: continuous, all pervading, vile, but controlled. Just about.

Hair: nice and shiny and, more to the point, still attached.

Anxiety level (1-10): will the nausea ever abate, and when will the other side effects start to kick in? WHEN??

State of mind: quite chipper, considering. I got TWO parcels this morning. And I’m losing weight. Obvs.

 

 It came as a huge surprise to me recently to discover that the famous Charing Cross Hospital is not located in Charing Cross, as one might reasonably expect, but here in Hammersmith, on the Fulham Palace Road.
 

Who knew?

 This solved a mystery that had puzzled me many years ago when, shortly after graduating from Oxford, I was working in my first, quite dementedly inappropriate, career as a corporate banker at Citibank, in an office near to Charing Cross. I knew that the hospital must be somewhere in the vicinity, but however many streets I wandered down in my all-too-short lunch hours, I never seemed to come across it. Now I know why.

 

My first introduction to the hospital earlier this year was not as a patient, however, but as a swimmer. I am useless at sport and have tried, and failed, at various ways of keeping fit, including running, which served only to ruin my left knee, and gyms, which always made me feel deeply oppressed by their sweaty, airless claustrophobia, the endless hamster-wheel futility of the stationary bikes, and all the hyper-fit, effortlessly skinny young persons in skin tight lycra constantly checking out themselves, and occasionally, others, in the wall to wall Mirrors of Shame. Been there, done that, wasted countless hundreds of pounds on very expensive and highly under-utilised gym subscriptions.

 So, in the end, I just walked. And very enjoyable it was, too.

Before my return to London last year, I had been living for some time in a converted camel barn, in a small town called Ayvalik, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey. There, I would rise early to avoid the summer heat and, just as dawn was breaking, walk with my dog Freddie (a street dog who turned up one day and simply refused to go away) up into the pine covered hills that surround the town.

 

 

In the spring, when it was cooler, we would trek for miles over the hills to secret places where no one else ever seemed to go (the Turks aren’t great walkers, as a nation), and find acres of wild flower meadows -

 

 

 

 

and spectacular hilltop views over the Aegean towards Lesbos, (which lies just off-shore, despite being Greek).

 

 

In winter we would collect kindling, and pine cones, for sweet-scented fires in the Camel Barn. It was wonderful. And great exercise.

You can’t really do any of that in Hammersmith, unfortunately, although I did my best with daily treks along the Thames towpath from Hammersmith Bridge to Barnes Bridge and back, which is about 4 miles; being by the river also gives you access to a feeling of open space and fresh air otherwise difficult to find in west London, although it’s a pity you first have to negotiate crossing several major west London arterial traffic flows just to get to the river from where we live.

Anyway, that problem became moot earlier this year when I started to experience pain in one of my feet whilst walking. I went to the doctor, expecting a magic and instant cure, as you do, and was more than a little miffed when he suggested it was just a touch of arthritis, the kind of normal wear and tear to be expected at my age (WHAT?!?!?) He suggested taking some paracetamol. It didn’t help much, so an alternative form of exercise needed to be found, fast, before I expanded to a size where I would require my own postcode. I was casting round desperately to find some other form of exercise that would not either injure me or bore me to death, when I suddenly thought of swimming. Easy on the joints, pleasant, and extremely good for you in general. I hadn’t swum for years, but was reasonably proficient as a child. Sorted.

I asked my partner R, a long time resident of the area, if there was anywhere convenient nearby to swim. The reason R lives in Hammersmith is because he used to be Reader in Medical Ethics at Imperial College Medical School, which is based at the Charing Cross Hospital - although he has long since moved on to full professorial glory elsewhere. But because of this he knew about the staff sports club at Charing Cross, also open to the public, which includes a tidily sized 25 metre swimming pool.

The very next day I walked down the Fulham Palace Road to the hospital – a pleasant, although traffic-haunted walk of about 15 minutes - and joined the sports club.

And then I swam, dear readers, I swam and I swam and I SWAM.

Quite unexpectedly, I found myself to be a natural long-distance swimmer.

What I have always thought of as my freakishly wide shoulders, and concomitant good upper body strength, enable me to get in the pool and just keep on swimming for considerable distances, without any difficulty at all. I’m not particularly speedy, and I’m never going to win any races, but I can keep going on, and on, and not feel too tired at the end of it.

This was both a revelation, and an absolute joy. The first time I got in the pool I swam forty lengths – a kilometre – and the second time 64 lengths – a mile. Swimming induces me in a feeling of meditative calm, as I move smoothly though the water, feeling it wash over and around me in a liquid blue trance.

I enjoy swimming so much I suspect that in a previous life I may well have been a trout.

As I spent more and more time in the pool, I started recording my total distance swum, so that I could imagine I was swimming the English Channel, which at its narrowest is about 18 miles wide. Over the course of this summer I got, notionally at least, to Calais, and started on the way back. By the end of August I was up to about 24 miles, and still going strong. By this time I was feeling a little confined by the pool and wondering about venturing into the wild, by way of the Serpentine, or perhaps the Hampstead ponds. I was also beginning to develop a possibly over-ambitious plan to swim the Hellespont, famed in myth and legend,where Leander and later Lord Byron swam.

The Hellespont can be found on the narrow watery divide between Europe and Asia, on the Bosphorus, a fast-flowing channel of water that runs from the Black Sea down to the Mediterranean, splitting the city of Istanbul in two along the way. One of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the Bosphorus is shut down for a few hours once every year on August 31st, to allow a group of lunatic swimmers to take part in the Hellespont race, swimming the couple of miles from Europe to Asia through vicious currents and swarms of stinging jellyfish.

That might have been a swim too far, but the idea was enticing, and I continued to dream my aqueous dreams of swimming in open waters. At the end of the summer, however, just as August was shading into September, something happened, down at the pool. I was in the shower, soaping off the chlorine after a particularly energetic 2 mile swim, and feeling pretty much as healthy and glowing and virtuously exercised as it was possible for me to feel, when I noticed something odd.

There was a lump, on the upper, inner part of my right breast, quite high up, and close to the skin. Not huge, but Very Definitely There. There was a lump in my breast.

And what was my first thought on discovering that lump in my breast, what was the very first thing that came into my mind?

‘How weird is that? Doing all this swimming is causing me to develop muscles in my breast..’

Ah, dream on, pre-cancer and pre-chemo Caroline, dream on.

Delude yourself - while you still can.