The Grim Reaper pops in for a nightcap

General status update

Radiotherapy, day 39 – come back chemo, all is forgiven! 

Lungs: looking likely to get me before the cancer does, right now.

Radiation burns: slowly starting to heal after two weeks of hell.

Nausea demon: Oh god, I miss him – I miss him SO much. Nausea schmausea: at least he didn’t burn me or make me cough uncontrollably for days on end. And he was very sweet-natured, really.

Anxiety level/insane euphoria (+/- 1-10,000): someone give me some more Dexys – PLEASE. Even if it does turn me into an American football player – I DON’T CARE. Prednisone is good for my lungs but it DOESN’T MAKE ME HAPPY.

Despair Demon: he’s been trying to make our liaison permanent. Fighting him off as best as I can in my severely weakened physical and psychological condition.

Chemo Muse: telling me firmly that the only way now is UP – through reapplication to writing, since swimming is off the agenda until the burns have all healed and my lungs have recovered.

Chemo Brian: looking rather anxious, frankly.

State of mind: calm, resigned to my fate. Ready for whatever comes next. Hopefully just breakfast, but this IS the darkest hour before the dawn.

It’s 4am, and the Grim Reaper is sitting on the sofa with Chemo Brian, drinking the last of R’s Laphroaig. Sorry, R.

I’m lying here listening to the increasingly alarming noises in my lungs – always my weakest point, cancer treatments always get you at your weakest point – and contemplating the Three Last Things which, in my case, are likely to be a glass of Armagnac, a can of ice cold diet Coke, and a packet of Maltesers.

It’s been a bugger of a week, beginning with the continuing torment of the radiation burns, which has been so bad that at first I didn’t really notice the coughing.

Until I was coughing so much, that is, that I was choking and we had to go the A & E, where I was admitted and put on a nebuliser to pump steroids into my lungs. That was Friday morning, and I spent the day in hospital being treated before being released back into the wild clutching a big party bag of more steroids. The oncologists are divided as to whether this is a condition caused by the radiotherapy - radiation pneumonitis – or simply an asthma exacerbation in my generally weakened, immune-suppressed state, but it doesn’t really matter what the cause is, as the treatment is the same in either case: my lungs are severely inflamed and require massive doses of steroids to try and calm it all down before my airways close up entirely and I cough myself to death. 

Literally.

The other danger is if it wakes up some dormant bacteria and develops into pneumonia.

I spent the whole of Friday night awake and still coughing, so the treatment didn’t seem to be working, but during the course of Saturday the coughing became slightly less incessant. Now, though, at 4.30 am on Sunday morning, my lungs seem to be talking amongst themselves, and they are NOT HAPPY. I’m not coughing quite so much, but from inside my chest are coming crackling, hissing, wheezing sounds, the like of which I haven’t heard since I was in hospital in Ankara with pneumonia five years ago, an episode which nearly killed me.

Pneumonia is the patient’s friend, you know – it’s not an unpleasant way to go. And five years ago I was quite ready to go gently into that good night, having been on my own for a very, very long time after the death of my former husband (from a chemo-related lung infection – spooky, huh?). At that point I was very tired, quite loosely tethered to the world, and perfectly prepared to give up without a fight, but the Grim Reaper had an appointment in Samara with someone else that night, and passed me by. 

It’s different now, of course: there is R, who surrounds me with love, and I have so much to live for.

I suppose I’d better make a bit of an effort.

ps: remember, my current condition is NOT caused by the cancer - it's caused by the frigging treatment.