24 hours till Chemo..

Day One

General status update:
Side effects: none as yet, chemo doesn't start until tomorrow
Hair: still attached (see above)
Anxiety level (scale of 1-10): it knows no bounds
State of mind: richocheting off the walls like a human squash ball
 
In the midst of life I found myself in a dark wood, as people so often do. Still, as I stumbled about in a baffled haze, wondering how it had all gone so very wrong, there were two issues at least about which there were no doubts, two things I knew with crystalline certainty: the first was that I would never again live in London, or any other big city, something I took so seriously that I moved 2,000 miles away to live in a camel barn on the north Aegean coast of Turkey; the second was that I would, quite literally, rather die than have chemotherapy.

 

Everything else in life might be dim and foggy  - viewed through a glass, darkly, even - but about these two matters I was as sure as sure could be: no London, and no chemo, under any circumstances whatsoever.

NOT EVER.

Were I to get cancer I would simply refuse, point blank, the brutal treatments on offer, namely surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy; at the beginning of the twenty-first century the main treatments for cancer can still be summed up concisely in just four words: ‘Slash, Poison and Burn’.  

Twenty years earlier, the man I then thought was the love of my life had died at the age of 32, slowly and horribly, 12 months after developing leukaemia. He didn’t die from the leukaemia: he died from what would otherwise have been a minor chest infection, after the chemotherapy had temporarily destroyed his immune system. His experience, and my subsequent reading of the medical literature, left me convinced that chemotherapy is essentially a form of torture inflicted by doctors on cancer patients, with very little beneficial effect on long term survival rates.

 

Why? Because oncologists, despite many decades of intensive cancer research,  have still not found a more effective method of eliminating cancer than cutting out the tumour and then injecting you with poison, in the more often than not vain hope that it will kill off any residual cancer cells and prevent the disease from returning. The ineffectiveness of chemo is widely documented in the medical literature although, strangely, not much publicised. In many cases, chemo improves survival chances by only 2-3%, and its toxicity brings not only terrible immediate side effects, but also considerable long-term risks for the patient, not least the possibility that it may kick start the development of another, entirely different, cancer.

So, no chemo for me – I had an alternative plan: should I be unlucky enough to develop cancer, I would accept the death sentence graciously and without argument, refuse chemo, and go straight for the morphine, thereby cutting out the pointless suffering. I could then live out my remaining days in a pleasant, opioid-induced haze, preparing calmly to meet my Maker. I was on my own, childless, and fairly loosely tethered to life at the best of times: death from cancer might even offer an easyish way out of an existence that had for two decades been overshadowed by grief, survivor’s guilt and subsequent failure to thrive.  Bring it on.

Given my deeply-entrenched views on these matters of life and death, it has thus come as a considerable surprise to find that, as 2012 draws to a close, I am EXACTLY where I swore I would never, ever be. Not only am I now living in Hammersmith, an area of London that I have always regarded more as a giant mutant traffic island than a place where one might actually choose to live, but I am also, with immense reluctance, about to start a course of chemotherapy, for breast cancer. Go figure.

I’ve never been a huge fan of John Lennon – those distressing images of him and Yoko Ono naked marred my childhood and still return to haunt me from time to time – but there is one thing about which he was absolutely right, one statement he made which encapsulated in a few words the central dilemma of the human condition:

‘Life is what happens when you’re making other plans’.

Yes, quite.

My chemotherapy begins tomorrow, on Tuesday 11^th December. I will be having 6 cycles of a chemo regimen called FEC – from the Father Ted pharmaceutical company, presumably -  spaced every 21 days, or as close to that as can be managed. This means that the interval between the first and last doses of FEC will be around 15 weeks: just over 100 days. They give you steroids to ease the side effects of the chemo, but the side effects of the steroids include, apparently, difficulty in sleeping.

There are thus going to be many, many long Chemo Nights over the next few months; not nearly as many as Scheherazade had to endure, of course, in equally unpromising circumstances, but arguably rather more unpleasant. I plan to fill them, as did Scheherazade, by telling tales, here on this blog (including, obviously, the bizarre sequence of events that has led to me being about to do something I swore I would never do, in a place whither I had vowed never to return). I will write a blog post every night, all being well;  each post published will help me count down the days until the final dose of chemo in the last week in March. Right now, that seems a very, very long way off, but all great journeys begin with a single step, do they not? I'm just going to have to stumble forward, one Chemo Night at a time, towards the sunlit uplands of a chemo-free - and hopefully cancer-free - future.