About suffering they were never wrong…

Day 58   

General status update: 

Hair: seems to be falling out less than it was, leading me to wonder if I have been suffering from Imaginary Alopecia. A LOT came out after I washed it, but now it seems much as usual. Trying not to obsess. Also trying not to obsess about trying not to obsess. Very scared of washing it again.

Nausea demon: He’s effectively got a week free now, until FEC4, so he’s working on his OU Diploma in Counselling, and trying to get a little practice in with his fellow demons. Can’t see it working, myself. 

Chemo Muse: she has the best withering stare in the universe, bar none (she is the love-child of Medusa, and Chemosh, the God of the Moabites, after all), and this combined with her Dame Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell-style ‘Counselling? You think I need COUNSELLING?’ retort to the Nausea Demon has given me the best laugh I’ve had in ages. Our DVD player is malfunctioning at the moment, you see, so boxed sets are off the agenda, and I’m having to create all my entertainment inside my own head. 

Chemo Brian: He always likes to please, so is letting the Nausea Demon practice on him, but I’m not all sure that releasing Chemo Brian’s Inner Child is a very good idea. His Eternal Adolescent who, as is customary with Baby-Boomers, has been ruling the roost for the last 40 years, might not like this at all. 

Stomach, internal condition of: I’ve now stopped taking the anti-nausea drugs for this cycle, but the effects of the Chemo Nano-Rats are still lingering – the inside of my stomach, although no longer painful, just feels residually toxic, much as if it’s being rinsed out every morning with that stuff they use to unblock drains. It never goes away, and I’m wondering how long it will last after the end of FEC6. The side effects of chemo can continue for some time after the treatment has ended – you haven’t finished with chemo, as someone remarked to me recently, until chemo has finished with you…

Fatigue/weakness: Getting better. I took a walk this morning which might almost be described as brisk. Have GOT to get out there and start building up my strength again before the next dose of chemo. One of the many less attractive features of chemo for breast cancer is that people tend to put on weight, probably from a combination of the steroids, eating to combat nausea, lack of physical activity because of the weakness and fatigue, and eating to combat the existential despair caused by all the other things. I always thought cancer made you thin. It seems not, in the early stages, anyway, and the later stages we don’t really want to think about, do we? 

Anxiety level (1-10): We’re ALL DOOMED, so what is there to be anxious about? It’s only a matter of timing. 

State of mind: trapped in a hall of distorting mirrors, and bouncing off the walls, screaming. Otherwise, perfectly chipper, thanks..

  

I took a day off from blog-writing today; after yesterday, the balance of my mind was a little disturbed. 

I needed to do practical things, to remind myself that life goes on: go for a walk in Holland Park in the cold winter sunshine, and watch the dogs going on with their doggy life; go to Waitrose to buy an exceedingly obscure cut of meat so I could make Nigel Slater’s latest recipe for a warming casserole, slow-cooked in red wine, with which to greet R tonight when he comes home exhausted after what will have been a very long day.  

So I did those practical things, got moving again, as you always have to do, and I thought about W.H.Auden’s poem, and poor Icarus in the painting, his legs disappearing unnoticed into the water as those all around get on with their lives.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.