'It's Dogged as Does It'

Day 29:

General status update

Hair: Hanging on in there. Both Hair and I now cautiously hopeful that we may be confined to thinning, and perhaps a monkish crown, rather than total hair loss.  

Nausea demon: After an inspired 72-hour campaign of single-handed guerrilla warfare, has finally been cornered by the meds. Still firing the odd shot, but he’s unlikely to be able to make another major breakthrough until the next FEC cycle.

Chemo Muse: Gave up on me in disgust for today, and went to have her nails done

Chemo Brian: The Best of all Possible Brians: we spent most of today together on the sofa, slumbering contentedly in one another's arms.

 

Sleep, lack of: n/a

 

Anxiety level (1-10): wah?

 

State of mind: This is day 6, tomorrow is day 7, and after that it will be the sunlit uplands of day 8.

I come slowly to consciousness this morning, the byways of my brain filled with the slowly swirling mists of a post-Lorazepam fog:

Mmmmm….so nice and warm…sleepy…. time?.....mmmmm…doesn’t matter…

Then the nausea wakes up, too, but rather less quickly than yesterday, and we greet the day together.

The Lorazepam had been necessary because at the end of yesterday, the accursed day 5 of the chemo cycle, and its struggle against the nausea, fatigue and wider toxic effects of the chemo, I just completely lost it. The nausea was bad enough, but for the whole day it had also felt as if my arms and legs were being inflated, that some unseen mouth was blowing me up into a facsimile of the Michelin Man, that would eventually explode into a thousand tiny pieces.

Periodically, throughout the day, I had to inspect my various extremities to assure myself that this was not, in fact, the case. My arms and legs looked perfectly normal from the outside, but from the inside it felt as if spontaneous combustion could be going to happen any time soon.

And then there was the arrival of the plague of Chemo Nano-Rats, laying toxic waste to the inside of my stomach. Quite separate from the nausea, it feels as if there is a horde of miniature rodents scrabbling about inside there, slithering and sliding down the slippery stomach walls and digging their tiny claws in sharply for some purchase as they try, with increasing urgency, to nibble their way out of me from the inside. The pain isn’t acute, but the overall feeling of internal toxicity is overwhelming.

But then I am being systematically poisoned with chemical warfare agents, so I shouldn’t really be surprised.

 

I remember the oncologist smilingly telling me that the FEC chemo regimen is ‘well-tolerated’. Would that he were to be given the chance to tolerate it, too. At 11.30 yesterday night, having more or less kept it together through a very trying day, the dam finally breaks. Lying on the bed, having just reassured R for the 27^th time that I am perfectly fine, my brain implodes, my mouth opens and I simply begin to howl.

And then I weep and weep and I weep, not over anything specific but just ALL OF IT, the overwhelming tide of horribleness that has been drowning me since that day in August when I found the lump in my breast, after going for a brisk 2 mile swim. Every day I’m fighting to stay on top of it, and look forward, and not succumb to despair, and remember that my prognosis is actually very good. And the writing and keeping busy helps enormously, as does the love and support from R, my family, and an army of friends both real and virtual. I am so loved and looked after, and in many ways so very, very lucky.

 

But sometimes it is all just too much to keep contained

 R comforts me, and calms me, and soothes me to bed and unconsciousness after I take a tablet of Lorazepam, a blessed temporary fix; truthfully, though, nothing and no-one can help you in the worst days of the cycle, when the Chemo Demons are free to torment you in any way they please, and this is by far the hardest bit to get through of everything I have so far had to endure.

 In my head is a picture of the chemo cycle as painted by Hieronymus Bosch, located in the special circle of hell reserved for chemotherapy patients: the patients writhing and helpless as the Chemo Demons play, spearing them on their pitchforks, practising old tortures and inventing new ones.

 

 

That’s where I am, and that’s where I will be for some time to come, and there is no way out, or back: the only way to bear it is simply to keep on going forward, step by painful step, one foot after the other, again and again and again.

In the final volume of Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles, a terrible calamity falls upon Mr Crawley, an impoverished, high-principled but absent-minded cleric, who stands accused of misappropriating a cheque for twenty pounds; unable to account for how the money came into his hands, he is called before the magistrates and stands to lose his freedom, his honour, his livelihood and his family. In acute mental torment at what lies before him, he goes out walking, trudging for hours through the countryside in the rain. Then he meets an acquaintance, an aged brick-maker from Hoggle End, who sees that something is amiss with ‘Master Crawley’ and offers him some sage words of advice:

'Tell 'ee what, Master Crawley;--and yer reverence mustn't think as I means to be preaching; there ain't nowt a man can't bear if he'll only be dogged. You to whome, Master Crawley, and think o' that, and maybe it'll do ye a good yet. It's dogged as does it. It ain't thinking about it.' Then Giles Hoggett withdrew his hand from the clergyman's, and walked away towards his home at Hoggle End. Mr. Crawley also turned away homewards, and as he made his way through the lanes, he repeated to himself Giles Hoggett's words. 'It's dogged as does it. It's not thinking about it.'

 

It’s dogged as does it – one step at a time.