It’s my birthday today, and it was a lovely morning of
cards and presents and flowers with R, who didn’t go in to work until later on
(R and I managed to buy each other the same book for our birthdays, which are
on consecutive days, just as we did at Christmas – we’ve really got to stop
doing this). I was feeling much better in general – nausea and internal toxicity
back down to bearable levels - and intending
to walk down to Holland Park after lunch, to get some much-needed fresh air and
exercise, before returning to write my blog post.
Then, completely out of the blue, it was as if my
batteries had been removed; I was barely able to stand, and just had to lie
down immediately. It’s the strangest sensation, when your body is simply unable
to respond to the commands of your brain, although given that it happened in
exactly the same way during FEC2, I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting it.
It’s day 8 of the chemo cycle, which means we’re into
the ‘no immune system’ period: the last dose of chemo has now had time to knock
out all the platelets in my blood and I’m very, very weak, and completely
overwhelmed by fatigue. The blog post I was planning for today remains
unwritten, and I spent the afternoon on the sofa in the arms of Chemo Brian,
whilst Chemo Rat Brian reclined alongside in oriental splendour on his new
golden velvet cushion (a present from the lovely Andrea Gillies) like a small
woolly satrap:
It’s getting quite crowded on that sofa now, but in a
good way.
There’ll be a proper blog post again tomorrow, all
being well. I’m learning to accept now that on certain days of the cycle it’s
just not possible to do very much at all, and there’s no point in getting upset
about it.
It will pass.
By my reckoning, if my last dose of chemo is administered as planned on March 27th, then the side effects should have done their worst by the 10th of April, and that is the day I will be free from this chemical prison.
And the first thing I will do when I get my 'get out of jail free' card is to walk straight back down the Fulham Palace Road to the hospital, not to be injected with toxic chemicals, or have a scan, or get my PICC line flushed, or talk to an oncologist, but to get back into the swimming pool (I joined the sports club there 9 months before my cancer was diagnosed) and swim and swim and swim.
Only 69 days, and three more doses of chemo, from now.
We're halfway through, just about: I've stopped counting up, and started to count down.
Hair: having a nervous breakdown after a fair bit of it came out on
the comb after washing yesterday. Reminded it that we knew thinning was
imminent, and that it is not yet coming out in actual handfuls. It is still
possible we may get through to the end of chemo with just thinning, and no
actual bald spots, or just balding on the crown of the head. And that is what
Smurf hats, snoods and hijabs are for. We are completely prepared for this. And
it WILL grow back, and be better, by all accounts.
Nausea demon: Bit of a fight-back today after I forgot to take my meds at
lunch time, but has subsequently been re-corralled.
Despair and Rage demons:
burned themselves out yesterday, and have moved on to party elsewhere –
happily, they tend to be only short term visitors during days 5 -7 of each FEC
cycle.
Chemo Muse: after her tactful retreat yesterday during the hair-related
emotional melt-down, got me up and at it this morning, and has kept me working
all day. She does have her uses.
Chemo Brian: was very comforting yesterday, when I completely lost it after
several days of extreme physical unpleasantness culminating in hair
loss-related weeping extravaganza. He gave me a Lorazepam, and let Chemo Rat Brian sit on my shoulder.
Chemo Nano-Rats:
these have been giving me hell for the
last few days – a clear pattern has now emerged whereby the nausea dominates for
the first five days, but then from days 5-7 extreme internal toxicity takes
over: the inside of my stomach feels like a toxic slurry pit, the sides of
which are constantly being abraded by the claws of those tiny Chemo Nano-Rats. It is the
most unpleasant physical sensation I have ever experienced, and I would take
nausea or toothache over it any day. I think the toxic slurry pit is going to
be the hardest thing to forget about chemo. Also, it induces such huge distress
that the Despair and Rage demons become rampant around it; this cycle has been
by far the worst, and for the last 3 days I was very close indeed to breaking
point. If it hadn’t been for R, I would probably have reached it. This problem
has now abated to a bearable level, and by Friday, probably, will effectively be
over for this cycle.
Sleep, lack of: n/a. Getting back to normal.
Anxiety level (1-10):Hah – when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have actually dropped in for tea, and are sitting on your sofa digging into the egg and cress sandwiches
and the lemon drizzle cake, what on EARTH is there left to worry about?
State of mind: much better, today, because the physical stuff is now at a
more bearable level. By tomorrow I will be positively chirpy, I shouldn’t wonder.
It’s always good to have a Plan B, especially in
highly unpleasant circumstances into which you have not entered voluntarily,
and over which you have no control. Regular readers will know that my public
Plan B, since the start of this nightmare in August, has been running away to
Goa, there to sit under a palm tree, in flagrant denial of the realities of
breast cancer, and eat mangoes and health-giving vegetable curries until the
cancer gets bored and goes away, or Jesus reaches down and takes me for an
angel, whichever occurs first.
Have passport, have credit card, really don’t want anything to do with any of this, will travel. I'm still finding this quite tempting, from time to time.
There’s another Plan B, though, hitherto a purely private Plan B, and this is the result of the following thought experiment:
‘What would you do if at some point along the
line, it all becomes too much to bear – if the cancer comes back, despite all
this hideous treatment, and makes a triumphal procession from your bones via
your brain to your liver, as breast cancer loves to do, given half a chance?
What then?Would you have more chemo,
and then yet more chemo, and then end your days trying to persuade the doctors to
give you enough pain relief so that you don’t actually die screaming?’
My answer to that is, most definitely, no. I’ve had
enough problems just getting the doctors to prescribe the right kind of drugs, and enough of them, to deal with
the nausea from chemo; if it ever gets to the stage where my death has to be
managed, then I’m going to be in charge – I will manage it myself.
Something that has been on my mind for quite a while now, since long
before I was diagnosed with cancer, is the extraordinary cruelty with which some of the dying are treated. Terminally ill people are forced to suffer unspeakable deaths that we
would not inflict on animals; to give one of the most egregious and well-known examples, people with advanced motor neurone disease have fought several highly-publicised court cases in an attempt to prevent themselves from being forced to die by
choking to death. Each of them lost, and at least one of those people ended up starving himself to death instead, because it was
an 'easier' way out.
I’m not going to debate the ethics of euthanasia here:
it’s an enormously difficult, perhaps intractable, issue, and I’m all too well
aware that the legal safeguards against helping people to die to exist for very
good reasons – the human capacity for evil is considerable, helpless, vulnerable people need to be protected, and the shadow of the
atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of ‘euthanasia’ still looms
large.
I also know that many doctors do, quietly and humanely,
ease the passing of those who are close to death, and for whom continued existence
has become a physical and mental torment.But you can’t count on it, that’s the problem: you only get the one death, and if you're dealing with the wrong doctor, then you're s*** out of luck.
Many people, every day, suffer quite unnecessarily
hideous deaths, and that's a not a risk I will be willing to take, if it comes down to it.
(There’s a whole separate
issue about futile, unnecessary, invasive medical interventions which prevent people
who are dying anyway, particularly the elderly, from having peaceful deaths, in
the name of ‘doing everything possible’, and avoiding litigation from the
bereaved; we’ll come back to that another day, as it bears thinking about by
any of us in advance of a time where we may be called upon to make decisions on
behalf of a dying relative in such a situation.)
If I do ultimately find that this cancer manages to
turn itself into a death sentence, then I hereby give notice that I will find a
way to make my exit at a time and in a manner of my own choosing.
The great problem with devising one’s own departure
from life, however, is that so many ways of doing it are extremely unpleasant, and the less
unpleasant ones won’t necessarily work. Dorothy Parker famously
summed up this dilemma as follows:
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
There’s also the problem that many methods of
self-disposal are likely to involve distress or inconvenience for other people,
and such acts have always seemed to me to be extraordinarily selfish: just how disturbed
does the balance of your mind have to be not to care that by throwing yourself
in the path of a tube train you are sentencing the poor b***er who’s driving it
to a lifetime of grisly nightmares? Similarly, although the noble Roman method
of opening one’s veins in a hot bath (accompanied, perhaps, by a distinctly
un-Roman bottle of vodka with some nice painkiller chasers), in a
well-appointed room in a big, anonymous hotel, has a definite appeal, being both
simple and definitive, I couldn’t do that because of the cleaner.
Someone has to find you, and it would be some poor
woman from Ecuador or Lithuania, working endless hours as she struggles to survive
and support her family on the minimum wage or less, who would find my corpse in
a bathful of blood as she did the morning shift. I couldn’t do that to anyone.
Then there’s the Dignitas
route, but I gather it involves going through an awful lot of tedious process
before they permit you to fly to Switzerland and end your life in a bleak, bare
little flat somewhere, supervised by people who sound distinctly creepy (the novelist Susan Hill, in whose recent
work end-of-life issues have been a central theme, offers a fascinating account
of a Dignitas-type exit, aborted at the last minute, in one of her excellent
Simon Serailler detective novels; this has completely deterred me from ever
trying it myself).
Which brings us to plan B the second or, as I like to call it, The Northern Lights Optimal Exit Strategy.
If I hadn’t inconveniently been diagnosed with cancer
this autumn, then I would have found a way to go and spend a few days up in the
Arctic circle, watching the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights: this year they
have been predicted to be particularly active, and a sight of quite historic
splendour. There have been lots of special holiday brochures offering trips to see
the Northern Lights, in Norway, Finland, and Iceland, combined with cross-country
skiing, or whale-watching or, my own preference, husky-sledding, something I
have long desired to do.
Why haven’t I done it,
then? What, exactly, was stopping me? I could have done it at any time in the
last 10 years when I was blithe and fit and solvent and healthy and cancer-free
– epic Fo fail. Please note, reader, for
your own reference – ‘carpe diem’ applies to you, now.
So, this is The
Northern Lights Optimal Exit Strategy:
1. During the winter months take a plane to somewhere
in the Arctic circle ideally suited to viewing the Aurora Borealis – perhaps northern
Finland. Before you board, remember to purchase large bottle of vodka (or other
potent alcoholic beverage of choice) in the duty free shop, and some strong
pain-killers from the pharmacy.
2. Transfer to luxury hotel somewhere within the cold,
snowy northern forests, with facilities for husky-sledding (or other activity
of choice) and Northern Lights-watching.
3. Spend a couple of days husky-sledding. Do NOT fall
in love with dogs, start worrying about what happens to them when their
sledding days are over, and immediately
metamorphose into classic demented Englishwoman of a certain age abroad, determined
to set up sanctuary for retired sled dogs – remember, you will be too ill by this point to make this a
feasible alternative life plan.
4. Once you have husky-sledded (or whale-watched – I think cross-country ski-ing would probably be out
of the question by this point for most terminally ill people) to your heart’s
content, make preparations for your imminent exit by writing notes to your
loved ones, explaining that it is a far, far better thing you do, etc., and entreating
them not to be cross about your chosen exit strategy.
5. Eat a delicious and carefully chosen last dinner.
Unfortunately, if you’re in northern Finland, this might involve eating reindeer,
which would be a bit of a minus, but bear in mind that it would not be possible
to carry out this plan in somewhere with greater culinary options, e.g. Paris,
or Notting Hill - you can’t have everything. If this is really a problem
for you, then you could always bring a small hamper with you from Fortnum and
Mason. They do an excellent chicken, apricot and pistachio raised pie, or did.
That would be nice.
6. Wrap up well, and pack a small rucksack with a sleeping
bag, alcohol of choice, painkillers, snacks and perhaps raised pie from Fortnum’s
(see above).
7. Quietly leave the building and, avoiding the places
where organised Aurora Borealis-watching takes place, trek off to somewhere
quiet, deep in the forest, where no one is likely to find you before morning
(it might be best to scope out such a place in advance).
8. On reaching
your chosen spot, spread out sleeping bag as picnic blanket, and unpack provisions:
vodka, painkillers, nuts, olives, and chicken and apricot pie (am liking the
pie idea more and more – why not go to
heaven via Fortnum and Mason? Sod the reindeer carpaccio, it’s always good to
have a picnic).
9. iPod optional
here – you may care to go out with a musical accompaniment, but my own
inclination is for the deep, deep silence of the Arctic night, and the Musick
of the Spheres.
10. Eat and drink your picnic, which will leave you
happily anaesthetised against the encroaching cold - in northern Finland in
January it will be very cold indeed, probably lower than -30 degrees Centigrade. Lethally
cold, and that is the whole point. You may drink as much as you like, because
there will be no hangover. But not too much, because the cold is going to kill
you, not the booze and the pills. They are merely there to take the edge off,
and to send you into that good night in a cheerful frame of mind, and perhaps just
very slightly rat-arsed.
11. Settle down to watch the incredibly beautiful
pyrotechnics of the Northern Lights and, while you are so doing, freeze
quietly, painlessly, and unobtrusively to death in a state of aesthetic bliss,
inconveniencing no-one.
You will not even feel cold, because the beauty of
hypothermia is that your brain tricks you into thinking that you feel warm. My
research on this subject tells me that freezing to death is definitely not
unpleasant.
12. In this manner - well-fed, comfortable, warm,
pain-free, and a little tipsy - you will gradually lapse into unconsciousness, and journey thence on a
one-way trip to Eternity, whilst looking at one of the most beautiful sights on
Planet Earth.
Excellent plan, no?
I have thought about this question a great deal, and really can’t think of a
better way to go. I do appreciate that someone
will have to find you, but they will at least be from the emergency services,
alerted to your disappearance the next day by the hotel management. They will
be accustomed to this kind of thing – drunken people freezing to death in the snow
is a very common cause of death in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe – and your
body will be a neat, well-wrapped, deep frozen package, which will not cause
anyone undue distress to encounter. Remember to leave adequate funds available
for the repatriation of your body, and if a family member feels impelled to
come and fetch it, at least they’ll get the opportunity to see the Northern
Lights.
I can see that the Finnish tourist board might not be
thrilled by a rush of suicide tourism, but I think it’s probably a fairly
specialist niche market, anyway. And you could probably do a budget version of
this in the Cairngorms, or somewhere similar, although it definitely wouldn’t be as
pretty.
This, then, is the real Fo Plan B: I sincerely hope I'm not going to have to use it, but it comforts me greatly to know that it's both practical, and eminently possible.
Hair: Finally took it out of its wrappings just now. It’s
whimpering, but then so am I.
Nausea demon: Woke me at 5.30 and we saw in the dawn together, and then it all
got a bit nasty as the Despair and Rage demons turned up and started to
party. Good thing there weren’t any oncologists within striking distance.
Chemo Muse: She kept me scribbling for a while, which kept me from
breaking things, or heading for the window…
Chemo Brian: At 9am I took a Lorazepam and lay down on the sofa with him,
holding Chemo Rat Brian in my arms,
and we all slept until lunch-time – several peaceful hours of blessed
unconsciousness. In my dreams there is no Chemo; in my dreams there is
swimming.
Sleep, lack of: After a difficult few hours around dawn, I was able to sleep
for much of the morning,for which I am
profoundly grateful.
Anxiety level (1-10):Have been unconscious, mostly; now I’m awake again, it’s resigned
despair, rather than anxiety.
State of mind: The Giant Black Hole of Despair and Hopelessness which opened
up this morning has moderated into some kind of acceptance, knowing that in a couple
of days’ time I will be feeling much better.
As is now customary at this stage of the FEC cycle I
am woken very early by nausea; by 5.30 I am sitting at the dining table eating
yoghurt and banana - which I don’t want- because it’s important to take all the
anti-emetic drugs with food.
Yesterday -Day
5 of FEC3 - was extremely bad, the worst day of the whole chemo experience so
far, and while at least I got some sleep, another day of equal
hideousness now lies ahead. I’m in a state of acute mental and physical distress, and belatedly
realising that the physical side effects of the chemo drugs are only part of it,
because feelings of extreme psychological agitation – anger, paranoia and
despair - are playing an equally
significant role in their impact on me. This happened last cycle, when I turned
into an insane, snarling harpy on Day 5, and did my best to drive R away, and
yesterday it happened again.
It is unfortunate that day 5 of each cycle is on a Sunday,
so that he is forced to witness me at my
worst: on the one hand, it’s a comfort to have him around, but on the other I
hate him being exposed to the tormented thing that I have become, lashing out at him like a wounded
animal – which, of course, is precisely what I am.
I am still sitting at the table as the dawn breaks, and
my mind takes up yesterday’s rampage where it left off: full of rage, hating
all the smug healthy people who have no idea what it’s like to be at the mercy
of a body that is trying to kill you, or of how vicious the ‘treatment’ is, and
who say such stupid, thoughtless things, and hating the oncologists who inflict
the horror of this treatment on you so lightly, saying it’s ‘well-tolerated’, when
they have NO IDEA what it feels like to experience chemical weapons poisoning their
body from the inside, and ‘well-tolerated’ only means that it doesn’t actually kill
you (except for those in whom it triggers leukaemia later on).
I’m even hating the chemo survivors on the BCC UK
forum who say chemo is ‘doable’, because at this point in my chemo experience I
am beginning to realised that 'doable' is ONE OF THE BIGGEST EUPHEMISMS OF ALL
TIME.
It's perfectly
doable when you're unconscious, I find.
Awake, not so
much...
Not at this stage
of the chemo cycle, anyway.
Right now, I hate them ALL, and I’m wondering how I
can possibly endure 3 more cycles of this – I’m now at the worst part of FEC cycle
3, and the thought of going through exactly this experience AGAIN with FEC4,
FEC5 and FEC6 just makes me want to howl out loud with anguish.
In one part of my brain, where there is still some small
trace of sanity left, I know perfectly well that in the annals of human
suffering, what I am going through is really very minor indeed, that I can and
will get through it somehow, and that in a few months’ time I will have my life
back, more or less. For the time being, at least.
I am also well aware that humans are fragile,
time-limited organisms, born to suffer, something Western culture these days mysteriously
chooses not to acknowledge, at least since the decline of organised religion.
The idea that suffering is unusual or unexpected is a
delusion created by Western consumer society, with its insane sense of universal entitlement: not only do we regard death as an
optional extra, and expect somehow to be exempt from physical suffering
(despite being very willing to inflict it on all sorts of other animals), but
we even demand to be happy. Later,
more sensible eras will look back on the mass psychosis of Western civilisation
in its last centuries of decline, and wonder at the vast stupidity of it all.
I blame the Enlightenment, myself – the Perfectibility
of Man is a concept which has led us into all sorts of dangerous delusions… but
I digress. And I’m not up to an in-depth discussion on the very strong
arguments for the Imperfectibility of
Man right now.
At least it has made me channel all this inchoate rage
into some kind of thought, for a while. I’m seeing now that it’s actually much
harder to get away from the mental effects of the chemo than the physical ones.
With the physical symptoms you can, to a certain
extent, remove yourself by taking your mind away from the lived experience of your
body, and refocusing elsewhere – it takes a huge effort, but it can be done,
and I’ve had some little success with that, with the help of the Chemo
Muse.Yesterday, I spent a lot of the
day writing: this forces me to concentrate, to move the internal
focus of my mind away from the horribly unpleasant physical sensations I am
experiencing within my body, and towards the abstract shapes and rhythms of
language and its construction into small edifices of meaning. I live within great
clouds of words, much of the time, swirling around in my head like vast flocks
of birds, and there is some relief to be found in chasing some down and finding
a way to shape them into something, and then marking that shape into physical being
in my notebook or on a computer screen.
That’s manageable, to some degree, when the distress
is physical, but the mental effects are much harder to escape; the
torrents of anger and sorrow and rage and despair flood your system, overwhelming language,
and merge into an undifferentiated, wordless howl of anguish.
There’s comes a point when words just don’t work anymore.
R, when he wakes, comes in to the room and finds me
sitting at the table, head in my hands, weeping, once again completely overcome
by the horror of it all.
‘I didn’t want to wake you’ I say ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry
I’m like this all the time.’
“Don’t hide from me in here’ he says ‘I can’t look
after you if you hide from me.’
He draws me down onto the sofa and says ‘ What you
need right now is a cuddle, that’s all. C’m here.’
Curled up with his arms around me, feeling the solid warmth
of his body against mine, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and the whisper
of his kisses on my forehead, I begin to calm down.
R steps straight into the heart of my emotional storm,
and drives it away; he soothes me, and calms
me, and gradually the great black hole of pain in my head starts to shrink down
into itself and then, slowly, dissipates.
R reinforces the physical soothing with soft words of consolation,
reminding me that we have been here before, that it will pass, that in a couple of days I will be feeling much better,
and by then we will be half-way through the chemo.
By the time he leaves for work I have edged my way back from the precipice, and the howling thing, the ball of elemental rage I briefly became has slowly metamorphosed back into a person; once again, in extremis,
love has done far more for me than any pharmaceutical ever could.
Hair: staying in the Smurf hat/snood until I feel able to deal with
it, which is not going to be today. It’s Day 5. I feel like HELL; I am IN Hell. Hell is all around.
Nausea demon: Vicious, vicious, vicious. He’s ruining the Australian Open
final. That’s the second Grand Slam final in a row ruined by this f***ing
cancer. After waiting all these years for Andy Murray to get to the top, watching
all those matches as he fought his way up through the ranks, I am forced to witness
his greatest moments in a state of either mental or physical torment. I never
say ‘why me’, but couldn’t you just have left me alone for the tennis? Or arrived
earlier, for that matter – there were a lot of agonising Tim Henman Grand Slam
matches from which I would have been only too happy to be distracted.
Chemo Muse: Working her a*** off to get me through this, keeping me going,
driving me on.
Chemo Brian: Keeping out of the way on the sofa with
Chemo Rat
Brian: who has settled in so quickly it’s as if
he’s always been here.
Fatigue/weakness: entirely incidental in the current situation.
Joints: aching
Mouth: sores appearing on gums
Taste/smell: food tastes like mud, coffee tastes of iron filings, wine smells and tastes like vinegar; everything cooking smells atrocious. And yet, I MUST EAT.
Limbs: that bizarre sensationof
being inflated again, as if I am swelling up into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
in Ghostbusters – remember him?
Sleep, lack of: pharmaceutical sedation beginning to look very attractive, but
I don’t want to wake up Chemo Brian and have my brain go all blurry.
Anxiety level (1-10):No anxiety, because what I most fear is HERE. Plenty of room for
incidental
Rampant
Paranoia, though, about all manner of things.
State of mind: This too shall pass, this too shall pass, this too shall PASS.
the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
It’s Day 5, the much-dreaded Day 5 of the third cycle
of FEC.
Physically, I am feeling beyond wretched: tormented, despite all the
anti-emetic drugs, by constant rolling waves of nausea, with aching
joints, and the entirely illusory but still unpleasant sensation of the skin on
my arms and legs puffing up and swelling. Sore patches have appeared on my
gums, it hurts to eat, and everything tastes like mud, but I have to keep eating small amounts anyway, to help combat
the nausea.
There is nothing I can do to make it go away, and it's becoming more and more unbearable.
‘This is why I
am here’ says the Chemo Muse, speaking more gently than usual to the
shivering, retching, aching thing that I have now become.
‘I know you hate
me sometimes, but I am here to help you.
You are feeling so sick, and so tired, and all you want to do is to
lie down and close your eyes, but that won't work for very long. To escape from what is happening to you now, from this unbearable reality, you
need to release your mind from your body, and let it float away. You have to recreate yourself in a different, happier
place.’
She takes my hand.
‘You’re going
through absolute misery right now, physical torment, but you’ve also
experienced some extraordinary happiness over the last two years, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, yes I have…’
‘Let’s go back
there, then. Let’s go back to the time when you started being happy again,
after being lost and alone for so long…’
It’s the autumn of 2010, and I’m in my camel barn in
Ayvalik, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey, the old camel barn I have had
restored and converted into a library to house the 5-6,000 books I have spent
my life collecting, but never previously had the space to shelve. Creating my own
library has been the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition; I moved here 2 years
previously, after spending a few years teaching in a university in Ankara,
taking time out to supervise the restoration of the Ottoman Greek house I have bought
by the sea, and the camel barn which is attached to it.
I can’t afford not to work forever, but I have enough
to keep me going for a few years, if I live carefully, and I’m giving some English
classes at a local language school to bring in a few quid. Ayvalik, on the north
Aegean coast of Turkey, is an old Ottoman Greek market town, a remnant from the
time when the western coast of Asia Minor was Greek, and is a haunting and
beautiful place, a strange mix of deserted ruins and beautifully restored
houses.
This odd, half-ruined olive-growing and fishing town
is way off the radar of most European tourists, but tends to draw to it foreigners
working in Turkey who like historic towns and old houses, and Turkish writers
and artists from Istanbul or Ankara who feel much the same, unlike most Turks, who
tend to prefer new, shiny houses, what with the whole country being so full of
thousands of years’ worth of crumbling ruins from the many different
civilisations that that have swung through Asia Minor over the last few
millennia. I’m alone in life, as I have been for a long time now, but there are
plenty of interesting people to hang out with in Ayvalik, and I have a lot to
do.
The restoration of the house and barn has been the
usual nightmare, but it’s finished now, and I’ve had all the bookcases for the
library made with reclaimed oak from an old demolished grain warehouse in Bursa,
and with a little help from my friends have unpacked the 70 or so boxes of
books and shelved them, very roughly arranged, by broad subject area. The
contents of these bookcases follow the progress of my intellectual and working life
through a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and extremely ill-thought
out career choices - Latin and Greek
literature, philosophy – ancient and modern, political theory, corporate finance,
financial analysis, molecular genetics, human physiology and evolution, evolutionary
theory, the philosophy of biology, demography, evolutionary psychology - and
the channelling of my leisure hours into atruly world class collection of crime fiction, covering all eras and
sub-genres and geographical areas, with a particular fondness for the literary
skills of Reginald Hill and Donna Leon, and for American crime fiction set in
the freezing winters of the snowy Midwestern states of Minnesota and Michigan.
So I’m just about to get on with the proper cataloguing
and arrangement of the books, I’ve been writing a blog about Ayvalik and
Ottoman Greek history and the camel barn, and am doing some research into
Byzantine and Hellenistic Greek history (the Greeks were in in charge of this part
of Asia Minor for some 2,000 years, before the Turks rode in from the steppes
and took over), and I’m busy and happy and occupied, and then R suddenly waltzes
into my life from out of nowhere, and puts everything into a spin.
As previously related, it is an entirely random
meeting on Twitter that first brings R and me together and starts us talking, and once
we start talking, we just never stop. We have a great deal in common: R is a philosopher,
a Professor of Bioethics, and his intellectual hinterland includes mathematics,
philosophy, the history of science, and all areas of philosophy that combine
the problems of ethics and human medicine and biology; his leisure reading,
meanwhile, is rather more challenging than mine in both range and content, including
history, poetry, and literature of many kinds and from many languages, not to mention his own genre speciality, science fiction.
R introduces me to the poetry of Cavafy, the
extraordinary meditations on the philosophy of cricket and colonialism in CLR
James’s ‘Beyond a Boundary’, and Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’; as I am currently
immersed in books on libraries, and the history of the Greeks in Asia Minor, I introduce
him to Alberto Manguel, to Bruce Clark’s ‘Twice a Stranger’, the definitive account of the catastrophic Turkish-Greek population exchange in 1922, and to Giles Milton’s
harrowing ‘Paradise Lost: the Destruction of Smyrna, 1922’.
We spend a lot of time, that autumn, exploring each
other’s minds, and happily exchanging ideas; eventually, we start to exchange
emotions, too.
And for a variety of reasons I’m resisting emotional
entanglement with R, who is 2,000 miles away in London, but all’s fair in love and war, and laying siege is common
practice in both; R, as ever drawing on an eclectic range of sources, takes inspiration
from the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in his celebrated 6th century
BC treatise ‘The Art of War’, when he advises ‘Hold out baits to entice the enemy’.
Accordingly, he decides to send me, in my far-off
corner of the north Aegean, a present.
What bait should he hold out to entice the enemy?
He ponders long and hard, and cunningly thinks of the
one thing he can send me that will utterly beguile me, and engage me, draw
me into yet more conversation and render all further resistance entirely futile:
R gives me a year's Overseas Subscription to the London
Review of Books.
Hair: dormant, confined in Smurf hat/snood. Out for the count. Wish
I was, too.
Nausea demon: rather testy, andmaking
a bit of a fight back today.
Chemo Muse: urging me on to write some more of the back story, even though
I’m feeling really sick. She’s so mean. They’re
so mean.
Chemo Brian: It’s so hard to resist when he holds his arms out from the sofa,
and says ‘come over here and curl up next to me’. Not today, though. I need to
work before the fatigue really sets in.
Chemo Rat
Brian: has settled in nicely on the sofa
Fatigue/weakness: Still had a bit of steroid energy left this morning, but now
it’s starting to drain away.
Sleep, lack of: asleep before 2am. Slight improvement.
Anxiety level (1-10):lessened this cycle by having adequate supply of ALL anti-emetic drugs,
which are just about holding me together. No nausea crisis seems imminent, which makes a nice change from FEC1
and FEC2
State of mind: How did I get here? HOW?
Previously
on Chemo Nights: it is the morning of Thursday 30th August, 2012, and I have
just received a diagnosis of breast cancer at the Charing Cross
Hospital.
Now read on…
We emerge from the hospital, shell-shocked and silent,
into a cold, damp August morning, and walk hand in hand up the Fulham Palace
Road towards Hammersmith Broadway. There isn’t much conversation; we are both too
stunned by what we have just heard, and I am trying not to cry. It’s getting on towards lunch time, so we
stop at Pret to get some sandwiches on the way home.
Back at the flat, neither of us has much appetite as
we sit at the table with our lunch, and discuss what to do next. The immediate
problem is disseminating the bad news to those who need to know: close family
and friends.
A few people know that I have been for a biopsy, and
am going to receive the results today: my sisters, my close female friends and,
unfortunately, my mother. I very much did not
want my 81 year old mother to know even that I was going for the biopsy, not
wishing to cause her unnecessary stress and anxiety should it turn out to be a
false alarm; one of my sisters, unable to resist the temptation, has told her anyway, and I am
quite angry about this.My mother will
be waiting to hear, very worried, and we need to let her know straight away.
As we talk about this I am crying, and know that I will
not be able to hold a conversation with anyone else today, so I ask R to call
BigSisFo, tell her, and ask her to call our mother, and other family members.
While he does this, I retreat to the bedroom, close the door, and curl up on
the bed; I do not want to listen. When R comes in a while later, he tells me
that BigSisFo, greatly distressed by the news, has agreed to tell other family
members, but couldn’t bear the thought of telling my mother so soon after hearing the news herself. So R decides to do this himself. Heroically, considering that at this point in our relationship
he has only met my mother once, R calls her home in the Tramuntana mountains
in Mallorca; after a brief conversation with my stepfather he is handed over to my mother, who is agitated and demanding the phone, and tells
her that her middle daughter has breast cancer.
MamaFo apparently takes the news stoically, saying
that as the mother of three daughters, this is a phone call she has dreaded
receiving all her life. She understands that I cannot speak to anyone now, and
tells R that she will call me tomorrow.
There still remains the problem of telling others, and
I decide to do this immediately by email, as I want to get it over with in one
go. The thought of having to have multiple conversations on the subject appals
me. At this point I realise I need to be alone for a while, and that R could
probably also do with some mental space in which to process the news, and I send
him off to the office, although we both know he won’t be getting much done.
I make some coffee, sit down at the computer and,
pretty much on auto-pilot, start to write, deciding to focus on the positive
aspects of the situation, so as not to alarm anyone. At 11 minutes past four, I
send out this email to family members and friends, copying it to R.
Subject: Some bad news...
Caroline Foster <carolinefo@gmail.com>
30/08/2012
... but it could have been worse.
In brief, and as a round robin, because I'm too done in to think/talk
about this much more for today:
This morning at the Charing Cross Hospital they told me I have invasive
ductal breast cancer, Grade 2. The lump is not huge, about 1 1/2 centimetres.
This is the most common form of breast cancer, and the 'best' sort to
have; they have got the treatment off to a fine art. And at the stage it's at,
it's not likely to kill me.
They will do a lumpectomy (in 3/4 weeks' time), whip out the lump, and a
margin around it to check if it has started spreading. Afterwards the scarring
should be fairly minimal, and the appearance of the breast normal. It helps
that my breast is largish.
The operation can be done as a day op, so although it's a general
anaesthetic, I won't even have to stay in overnight. R will take me home
to have pizza.
They will also take out a lymph node, to check if it has spread there,
but at the moment they don't think it has.
Then I will have 3-6 weeks of radiotherapy, which is 15 mins every day,
Mon-Friday. It doesn't hurt or make your hair fall out, but it does make you
quite tired, apparently. At this stage I am not going to bother researching
what other side effects there may be - we'll deal with that when we come to it.
Unless it turns out to be worse than they think (and they can't be 100%
sure until they do the op), I won't have to have chemotherapy, which is a huge
plus. Although I had already decided on going for the full hijab rather than a
wig, if necessary. So much more stylish.
If all goes well, the treatment will be over by the New Year, and I can
get on with my life. So, really, it's very annoying, and tiresome, and won't be
a bundle of laughs, but it could have been an awful lot worse. I have my own
cancer care nurse, Vanessa, who is lovely, very knowledgeable and helpful, and
there are all sorts of support services. Breast cancer is very well catered
for.
Anyway, it's much better knowing than not knowing, because once you know
you can work out how to manage it - and this sounds eminently manageable. As
the op won't be for several weeks, I will be back at the swimming pool tomorrow
to resume training for next year's planned swim across the Hellespont, which
will take place, coincidentally, exactly one year from today - inshallah!
C xxx
p.s. Not unnaturally, over the last couple of weeks I have given some
thought to provisional funeral plans, and have settled upon being cremated and
then having my ashes fired into the sky in a huge rocket, which is not quite as
a good as a Viking funeral, but not half bad (and possible to arrange, which a
Viking funeral sadly no longer is). Given the high survival rate of my
particular form of cancer, these plans will have to be put on hold for the
foreseeable future, but I'm warning you all now that my funeral, when it
eventually happens, hopefully many decades from now, is unlikely to be an
understated affair.
R emails me back immediately:
Good.
Well done tatlim. Xxxxxx
When he comes home that evening we drink a lot of red
wine to anaesthetise ourselves as we cuddle up on the sofa together, watchingthe Paralympics on the television. For this
day, that is quite enough.
We will have plenty of time to talk and think about
cancer later on.
