A kind of magic

Day 92 

General status update

Anxiety level (1-10): am now operating a kind of ranking system in the general status update, whereby the day’s most troublesome aspects are featured at the top, thereby taking the reader right into the heart of the matter, whatever the matter may currently be. Obviously as this is the beginning of a week in which I will be having both root canal treatment and my 5^th dose of chemo, anxiety is at the top of the agenda, and as of this morning I was melting into an anguished pool of terrified hopelessness (see Despair Demon, below) but then SOMETHING HAPPENED (see further below).

Despair Demon: has been working overtime for the last 24 hours to bring me to a new low of fear, loathing and self-pity – I had to ask my fearsome friend Gill to phone up and give me one of her legendary ‘pull yourself together, you wimp’ bollockings. They’re terrific. Gill could instil backbone into a cheese soufflé - she should be available on the NHS. And then he got further kicked into touch by some magic (see below).

Nausea demon: Waiting his turn, impatiently, to start tormenting me again on Thursday.

Chemo Muse: She’s now in total awe of my friend Gill, from whom she learned a few things today about how to motivate me.

Chemo Brian: He’s played the new Bowie album so many times now that we’ve all memorised the lyrics. The Nausea Demon is complaining about this noise, being of the hip hop generation, with correspondingly ridiculous trouserage. The other day I pointed out to him that photo in the newspapers of Justin Bieber on his birthday outing with what passes for trousers hanging off his arse, and said ‘Is this REALLY what you want to look like? A giant toddler who can’t keep his nappy on?’

PICC line: it’s all happy and excited about going to see Becky the Chemo Matron on Wednesday for its pre-chemo check; it points out that it always had the potential to do well, just as Andy Murray always had the potential to become a Grand Slam champion – but like Andy, it just needed to find its Ivan Lendl to coax it into peak performance at the crucial moment.

State of mind: when your PICC line starts talking to you about tennis,then you know you’re starting to lose it BIG TIME.

Hair: very miffed at having fallen from the top to the bottom of the ‘things to worry about’ list – I hope it won’t start shedding more now, by way of protest.

  

When it comes to suffering, one really has to be sceptical about Nietzsche’s blithe assertion "That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. Whilst this aphorism is undoubtedly true of vaccinations against disease, most of the time suffering does not bestow nobility or strength: it just kicks the stuffing out of us and makes us very sorry for ourselves indeed. 

And when I say ‘us’ I mean, obviously, ‘me’.

This morning, with a little help from the Despair Demon, I probably reached an all-time high in the self-pity ratings: the prospect of both root canal treatment and chemo this week, starting tomorrow, was making me feel very shaky indeed. There were some tears, it seemed pointless to try to do anything today in the shadow of the oncoming torment, and by 10.30 am I was ready to abandon any further pretence of purposeful activity and fall into a prolonged horizontal sulk on the sofa, in the arms of the ever-welcoming Chemo Brian.

Then the phone rang, and a woman introduced herself as Sabrina, the complementary therapist at the Hammersmith Hospital to whom the Chemo Matron had promised to refer me, and about whom I had almost forgotten. We talked for a few minutes, I explained what was going on in my life this week and clearly sounded like a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, as Sabrina immediately suggested that I should come and see her this afternoon. I agreed, wondering if it was really a good idea, when all I really wanted to do was to be left alone, curl up and go to sleep. Maybe I should phone back and cancel….

This attempt to revert back to lassitude and immobility was averted in the nick of time by the application of a telephonic cattle prod; my friend Gill - a woman with all the empathy and gentleness of approach of a Regimental Sergeant Major on crystal meth - called and, when I whined, instructed me to get off my rear end and take myself to the hospital, pronto. Duly electrified into movement and action, I presented myself at the Hammersmith Hospital  – which is, oddly, in White City. Why are none of the west London hospitals situated where they are meant to be? It’s really most confusing  – not entirely sure what to expect, but grateful for anything that might make me feel a bit less stressed about what is to come this week.

Sabrina took my medical history, and explained that all cancer patients (in the Imperial Healthcare Trust, anyway) are entitled to six sessions of complementary therapies to help them deal with both the physical and psychological side effects of cancer treatment: the therapies on offer include acupuncture, aromatherapy massage, cupping therapy, reflexology, Indian cranial massage, and Reiki.

For my immediate needs (essentially ‘dread management’) Reiki, a healing and relaxation therapy, originating in Japan, and administered by what might best be described as the light laying on of hands, seemed most appropriate. Reiki (pronounced Ray-key) is apparently a Japanese word meaning “Universal Life Energy, an energy which is all around us”, and Reiki therapy, which claims to channel this Universal Energy ‘through the practitioner and into the receiver’ immediately seemed to me to come under the broad heading of what R, a vigorous proponent of evidence-based medicine, calls ‘woo’ (pressed to provide a more precise definition than ‘woo’, his one word answer is ‘bullshit’).

My own feeling, however, is that there may be more in heaven and earth than what is already evidenced by randomised clinical trials, and I was perfectly willing to try a little ‘woo’ and see where it got me. After all, it couldn’t make the chemo or my overwhelming dread of it any worse, could it?

I lay down on a massage bed, and Sabrina cocooned me in a blanket. The lights were dimmed, soft, ethereal music was playing, and the air was scented with lavender oil, providing a deeply relaxing environment. I thought I could quite happily just doze off and have a nap like that, without bothering with any treatment. I was instructed to close my eyes and relax my body totally, and then Sabrina laid her hands, very lightly, on my head and kept them there, cupping the top of my skull for several minutes.

Was there a flow of ‘Universal Energy’ from Sabrina into me through this laying on of hands? I have absolutely no idea, but it felt wonderful, and what struck me immediately, and very strongly, was that this therapy, through its very gentle use of touch, was the polar opposite of all the physically intrusive, often painful and always unpleasant medical procedures that are constantly being inflicted on me during my treatment for cancer: surgery, injections of radioactive dyes for scans, drawings of blood, infusions of chemotherapy drugs and, of course the Cold Cap, the Day-Glo pink helmet which you see in my photograph, which has preserved my hair at the cost of the intense physical pain involved in freezing my head for several hours at a time before, during and after each during chemotherapy session.

When Sabrina held my head so gently in her hands it was like the antidote to the Cold Cap, a healing of all the pain that has been inflicted on me during the last six months of my cancer treatment. It soothed me, and relaxed me, and allowed to me lay down some of the burden of stress, pain and anxiety I have been carrying for so long.

However it works, it worked.

As the treatment continued, and Sabrina moved her hands to other places on my head, and then other parts of my body (you are fully dressed for this, and the touch is very light – as I said above, it is a laying on of hands, not a massage) I became deeply relaxed, and a little drowsy, and the tight knot of anxiety in my mind unravelled into something more peaceful.

I left Hammersmith Hospital today feeling considerably better than when I went in, which is only the second time this has happened in the last six months of frequent hospital appointments (the first, as regular readers will remember, being The Day I Met Matron And She Magicked My PICC Line Better).

This evening over dinner I described the treatment and my reaction to it to R, prepared for him to scoff, but he didn’t. His view, based on the obvious improvement in my state of mind and affect, was that ‘We could call it transference, or meditation, or calming down, or a kind of magic, but whatever it is, it obviously worked.’

If we call it a kind of magic, that’s perfectly fine by me.