If there's anything I can do, anything at all..

Day 16: A whole new concept in charity fund-raising emerges

General status update

Hair: it’s day 15 of the first chemo cycle, and by now people’s hair has usually begun to fall out. Mine hasn’t, so we can reasonably assume that the cold cap is working; so far, anyway. The key thing is whether it will last past FEC 2 and 3.

Nausea demon: Still operating, albeit at a reduced level, but also being rather off with me, and I don’t have the foggiest idea why.

Chemo Muse: Fuming at being temporarily disabled by the dose of Lorazepam last night. Now seems to be girding herself up for the Next Big Push.

Sleep, lack of: Sleep deficit reduced by last night’s sedative-induced deep slumber. Grogginess today entirely worth it.

Anxiety level (1-10) Ratcheting up again – the next dose of chemo is in just over a week’s time, and then this manic merry-go-round will start all over again.

State of mind: Languid – it’s one of those post-Lorazepam days..

News from North Yorkshire: the beetroot macaroons were a complete disaster, and there has been a Very Unfortunate Incident involving a 5 kilo ham; the MC is unconsolable.

 

Long, long ago, when the world was young and so was I, and there were 9 months to fill before going to university after taking the Oxbridge entrance exams, post-A levels, in what was then called ‘3rd Year Sixth’, I raised money to fund my proposed travels, in what was genuinely a ‘gap’ year, by working in the canteen at the local hospital.

This was a pig of a job: much of it was spent behind the scenes cleaning out industrial-sized cooking vats which had contained stew, or mashed potato, not a very pleasant task. But it taught me an awful lot: what it is like to stand on your feet all day, and come home too physically tired to do anything but lie down; what it is like to work at a job you hate, just for the money it will bring you, and the useful things that money will do; and what it is like to be regarded, just because you’re wearing a catering overall and hat and standing behind a counter making toast for busy doctors and medical students, as Not Very Bright, because who would be doing a job like that if they weren’t really, quite, you know, thick?

 

In the end, I didn’t do any gap-year travelling, but the money I earned was useful, and the experience gained was invaluable; I have never forgotten that, having gone to university at a time when the fees were paid by the tax-payers, my very privileged education at Oxford was partly funded by the taxes of people who never got the chance to go to university, and did jobs they hated, because they had no other choice.

In those days, students who wanted to go off travelling, in gap years or university vacations, always got jobs to fund themselves, whether in factories, bars, hospitals, shops or working on building sites. It was what you did. I was recently appalled to discover that the Zeitgeist has changed, and that many young people regard it as perfectly acceptable TO ASK OTHER PEOPLE TO PAY FOR THEIR FUN. I was alerted to this when a friend mentioned that she had bought some rather expensive tickets for a fund-raising concert organised by one of her daughter’s school-friends, Chloe, but that it was ‘all for a terribly good cause’.

‘How enterprising of her’ I said. ‘Which charity is she raising money for?’

‘Oh, she wants to go to Ecuador in her gap year.’

‘And do what?’

‘I think it might be counting butterflies, something like that – you know, it’s one of those voluntary work things, but you have to pay about a thousand pounds to go and do it for a month. It’s a fabulous place apparently, a national park, on the coast, amazing scenery, and she’ll be able to go snorkelling, and whale-watching.’

Well, well, lucky old Chloe, I thought. She gets together with her mates and plays her flute for a couple of hours, and then gets given enough of other people’s hard earned money to enable her to go and have a lovely holiday in Ecuador for a month, saving the butterflies and going snorkelling.

Call me old-fashioned, but there seemed to me to be something fundamentally wrong with this,  given that the ‘good cause’ that the money was being raised for wasn’t a charity – it was for Chloe, a highly privileged, expensively educated girl, who would now have some ‘voluntary work’ to put on her CV, and be able to hold her own when she finally got to university and started engaging in competitive ‘gap yah’ storytelling

in the Union bar. I rather doubt unskilled 18 year olds make much difference to the butterflies of Ecuador in a 4 week stint – by the time they learn enough to do anything useful, it’s time to return to Notting Hill, or go on to Phuket and develop their drug-taking skills further.

I’ve just looked on the internet to make sure that I heard right, and am not making this up, and it gets worse; there are several sites dedicated to telling teenagers planning gap years how to get other people to pay for their fun abroad, because ‘working… can be difficult’, as is helpfully explained in the paragraph below from a site called gapyear.com:

“Working long hours to save for your travels can be difficult, but there are other ways to club together the pennies for a gap year. Fundraising for your gap year is the art of getting loved ones and strangers alike to part with their cash to fund your travels or voluntary work”

Yes, working can be difficult, my children: that’s why it called work, but generally, it’s how you get money in life to do the things you want, so why not consider it as an option, eh? 

Funding gap years for teenagers with an extraordinary sense of entitlement is one thing, and real charity fund-raising is another, but I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people ask you to sponsor them, albeit for very good causes, for things they’d quite like to do anyway, whether it’s going for a 3k run dressed as Santa

trekking along the Inca Trail in the Andes…

 

Or racing to the South Pole on cross-country skis, dragging sleds.
 

 

All good stuff, for very worth-while causes: tasks which are challenging to do, and also fun, and give people a sense of achievement and accomplishment. 

I’ve got an even better idea, though, which occurred to me just the other day: why not get sponsorship for doing something you DON’T want to do, but have to do anyway? For something that no one in their right minds would ever do voluntarily unless - well, unless their life were at stake.

 

Like, for instance, my chemotherapy treatment.

 

 

SPONSOR MY CHEMO!

 I have, accordingly, set up a fundraising page on Virgin Money Giving, asking people to sponsor me to do something I really don't want to do: something I have always feared, something that is making me feel Very Bad Indeed, and that will more than likely not do me any good, anyway -

Chemo will help only 7 or 8 women out of a hundred who are my age, and have my particular type of tumour characteristics.  For the remaining 92/3 it will make no difference whatsoever, but unfortunately the current state of medical knowledge has no way of differentiating those who will benefit from those who won’t, so EVERYONE has to do it (you can refuse, of course, but not many do). I will never know whether the chemo has been of any benefit to me or not, unless the cancer returns (which would be a fairly clear indication that it hadn’t). If it doesn’t return, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the chemo worked: it might never have been going to return anyway, or might have been prevented from so doing by the other treatments I will be having later, i.e. 3 weeks of radiotherapy, and then 5 years of taking the drug Tamoxifen. There is no way of knowing.  

However, I have no real choice but to do it - the alternative treatments on offer, which I will talk about another time, are worse in terms of possible long term side effects.

So, I'm asking people to sponsor my 100 days (approx.) of chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer.

 Any money raised will go directly to The Haven, an extraordinary charity which provides, free of charge, a wide range of support and therapies to improve the wellbeing of women (and men) with, and beyond, breast cancer. Their specialist nurses and experts in nutrition, exercise, emotional support and complementary therapies provide individualised, in-depth programmes to help with the physical and emotional side effects of breast cancer treatment. The Haven receives no funding from the Government; it survives solely on charitable donations.
 

The London branch of the Haven is close to where I live, and since I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of September 2012 they have helped me more than I can say, for which I am hugely grateful. I will write about my experiences of the Haven later on in this blog, but if you’d like to know more about them now you can find it on their website at

http://www.thehaven.org.uk/

 

I have no choice but to endure chemotherapy, and whatever unpleasant physical and mental side effects it brings, without knowing whether it is actually doing me any good; it would be an enormous morale booster, however, to know that by raising some sponsorship money whilst doing it I could give something back to the Haven and, by so doing, help people who are diagnosed with breast cancer in the future. 

1 in 8 women in the UK will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some time in their lives, usually in the later years; one of those people will almost certainly be someone close to you or, if you're unlucky like me, might even be you.

When you tell people that you have cancer, they all say the same thing: ‘Please let me know if there is anything I can do..’.

Usually, there isn’t.  

But in this case, there is: making a donation to The Haven, via my fundraising page (and telling other people to read the blog – the more readers, and potential donors, the better). Then even if my chemo does turn out to be a waste of time, it will still have achieved something useful.

I know times are hard for a lot of people now, but if you enjoy reading the blog, and have got a few quid you can spare, please drop by my fund-raising page on Virgin Money Giving, and make a donation, however small.  

Believe me, if it hadn’t been for the psychological help the Haven has given me since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I probably wouldn’t even be doing the chemo, or writing the blog: I’d have run away to Goa long since and would be sitting under a palm tree right now eating mangoes, and continuing to pretend that this simply was not happening to me, and that if I ignored it long enough, then it would just go away of its own accord.

Like cancer does…

Not.

 

My fundraising page address:
http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/ChemoNights