My City of Ruins (reprise)

Day 110

General status update

Fatigue/weakness: I’m so tired, I’m so so tired, I’m just totally, utterly FECked

Eyes: increasingly blurry, which means the chemo must now be Right Inside My Eyeballs – nice.

Anxiety level/insane euphoria (+/- 1-10,000): very, very anxious in case FEC 6 is delayed this week because of a low neutrophil count, after the latest infection. If there’s anyone out there who does the whole praying thing, then if you could put in a good word for me with Her Upstairs with a view to a little spontaneous neutrophil upsurge by Wednesday, I would be very grateful indeed.

Nausea demon: away on his Easter retreat with the Benedictine monks at Worth Abbey in Sussex – I sincerely hope he didn’t decide to take some E.coli with him as a surprise gift.

Despair Demon: he’s still moaning to me about his treatment at the hands of the Chemo Muse, who seems to have dropped him and moved on without a backward glance, or even informing him, for that matter. Given his status as the David Beckham figure of the infernal regions – he’s even been featured in the advertising for the Calvin Klein Demonic Pants Range clad only in his tattoos and a suspiciously well-stuffed pair of tighty whities – he’s usually beating women off with sticks (I speak figuratively, obvs) and he can’t quite compute that he’s been dumped. He keeps thinking up daft reasons why she’s not responding to his texts. I give it another 2 days max before I finally snap and spray ‘She’s just not that into you’ in 2 feet high letters on the sitting-room wall.

Chemo Muse: she completely wore me out yesterday, so she was in no position to complain about me spending a large part of today on the sofa with Chemo Brian and his woolly rat familiar.

State of mind: I’ll be having my LAST dose of chemo on Thursday, neutrophils allowing – can’t quite get my head round that yet...

Hair: it’s in such a terrible state that now it’s demanding to go back into the snood, given my refusal to cut it until after the last dose of chemo, just in case. I keep thinking I should be wearing a badge saying ‘Yes, I know my hair looks awful, but I’m not allowed to touch it, and I SHOULD REALLY HAVE BEEN BALD BY NOW, OK?’ The only mercy is that MamaFo is safely 1,000 miles away and will not be in a position to launch one of her special critiques of my hair until well after the chemo is all done.

I’m afraid writing yesterday’s mammoth blog-post, one of the longest in the last 15 weeks of Chemo Nights, which took more than 6 hours, also used up more energy than I actually had to spare – today the fatigue has hit me again so hard that I’ve spent most of the day horizontal, and a considerable proportion of that with my eyes closed. Chemo Brian has taken charge of my brain, so we’re in a pleasantly fuzzy place with no mental acuity expected, which is really just as well.

Hey, at least there’ll be more steroids on Thursday- although it’s starting to worry me slightly just how much I’m looking forward to the next delivery of Dexys…

I can’t manage any more than this today, so if you’re stuck for something to read with your toast and marmalade, here’s a link to something I wrote earlier on the Camel Barn Library blog about Ayvalik, the strange, half-ruined Ottoman Greek town in the Turkish north Aegean that was my home until recently, and whither I will be returning in early May for a couple of weeks of post-chemo recuperation: My City of Ruins.

It’s a hell of a long way from the Fulham Palace Road…

and it's always good to have another Springsteen video, no?