There's a (happy) place in the sun....

Day 21 

General status update

Hair: The suspense is killing both me and Hair. Am tempted just to shave it all off, so I can stop waiting for it to start falling like autumn leaves. Hair, unsurprisingly, not overly impressed by this idea and determined to fend off the ravages of FEC 2 in the spirit of the Siege of Leningrad. Have nasty feeling that particular event ended up with everyone eating rats. And worse. Still, I could get Big Sis Fo to send some down from north Yorkshire, where there are plenty going spare.

Nausea demon: Pumped. There’s no other word for it. B*ST*RD.

Chemo Muse: Off out having her hair highlighted so she can look her best for Chemo Cycle 2. Of course her hair isn’t going to be falling out, is it? B*TCH.

Sleep, lack of: Pill last night, so no pill tonight. Oh Morpheus, gentle deity, please take me in your arms  tonight - PLEASE.

Anxiety level (1-10): The rapid, high-pitched whine of anxiety in my head has broken through the sound barrier, exited the Earth’s atmosphere, and is now heading towards Mars.

State of mind: No longer incubating escape plans, as I still was 3 weeks ago before FEC 1. Now resigned to being totally FECKED, in 6 instalments.

News from North Yorkshire: Hank keeps backing up into corners whenever the MC approaches. That is now one very nervous dog.

 

The second cycle of chemo - when the next dose of powerful toxins will be pumped into my bloodstream and, perhaps, bring about the rapid loss of my hair - will begin on Wednesday, and I seem to be becoming more than a little tense. Tomorrow morning I will be off to the hospital to see my oncologist again, to discuss how the first cycle went, decide whether the various meds to deal with the side effects need to be adjusted and, most importantly, go through the pre-chemo blood test, carried out to check that your now-compromised immune system has recovered sufficiently after the last dose of chemo for you to survive the next one.  

If the platelet count in your blood is too low, then they won’t let you have any more chemo until it has recovered sufficiently – otherwise the next dose might result in you becoming very seriously ill, or even dying. In order for the chemo drugs to be strong enough to kill off the reproducing cancer cells (chemo kills cells which are reproducing, mostly), they also have to be strong enough to kill the healthily reproducing blood cells which keep the immune system working. If too many are killed, the patient is at very high risk from any infection, however small, especially during days 7-10 of each chemo cycle, when the chemo has had time to do its work, and your immune system is at weakest, and has yet to start fighting back.  

A couple of my on-line friends have been re-hospitalised with infections already, and so I am being insanely vigilant about staying away from crowded places and public transport, washing my hands constantly, and insisting that anyone who enters the flat washes theirs before doing anything else - which can come across as quite rude, unfortunately. It’s hard to get across politely to a dear friend that you don’t want to hug them until they’ve washed their hands, but we live on the fourth floor, and visitors must touch the brass door handles to open and close the (old-fashioned, manual) lift doors, handles that are touched by hundreds of people each day; at the moment some of those hands may well be infected with the highly contagious Norovirus, currently laying waste to the London population, which can live for six months on hard surfaces… and the Norovirus would, at best , put me in an isolation ward for a couple of weeks. At best.  

I seem to have got through the first cycle of FEC relatively unscathed, apart from the constant nausea, sleeplessness and hyperactivity, the dry and sore skin and greatly magnified sense of smell; unlike some of my virtual chemo buddies, I have not yet  experienced any hair loss, mouth ulcers, thrush, cystitis, constipation, diarrhoea, indigestion, sore eyes, black nails, major fatigue or life-threatening infections.

It’s early days yet, of course, and not every patient gets ALL of these side effects. I know it will get worse, but it’s not clear yet if the side effects I already have will get worse, or if additional ones will start appearing – maybe it could be both. I’m most anxious about my hair – it’s been so good this cycle, after having the cold cap, just sitting there quietly on my head, and not falling out. Over the next few weeks, however, after FEC 2, it will almost certainly begin to fall out – if I’m lucky, and the cold cap continues to work, it will just start gradually becoming thinner; if I’m unlucky, the whole lot will go, quite fast.

Fingers crossed eh?

In the mean-time, am working on reducing the anxiety in 2 ways: first, obvs, through the use of weapons-grade pharmaceuticals and second, by doing a runner to my Happy Place in my head, even if I can’t do it in reality. I don’t know why I kept threatening to run away to Goa, in the early stages of denial, anger and rebellion after my diagnosis, because the Camel Barn and its environs, not Goa, is my Happy Place, and evoking and concentrating on images of Ayvalik can always calm me down and make me forget, at least for a little while, the many unpleasant things that are happening to me.

A couple of years ago I kept an on-line photographic diary for a while, on which I put  photos from my long walks in the hills around Ayvalik. I'm not much of a photographer, as will be evident, but I spent nearly 4 years pointing and clicking with my mobile phone at every beautiful view, and it is a place that abounds in beautiful views, both natural and architectural.

 

Below are three entries from that diary, about Ayvalik sunsets; the accompanying images are some of those I use to absent myself, temporarily, to my Happy Place in the sun when the unrelenting barrage of nastiness from this cancer and chemo business is just All Too F***ing Much…

 

  

Friday 23 April 2010: Another Ayvalik sunset...

 

 

'Coming back home again after 3 weeks travelling in south-eastern Turkey has made me look at both Ayvalik, and my house, with renewed appreciation. 

I took my dog up the hill early yesterday evening for his walk in the pine woods, and was welcomed back by a truly spectacular sunset over the Aegean. It reminded me how very lucky I am to have such extraordinary natural beauty there to enjoy freely every day, only a few minutes’ walk up the hill from my house in the town.'

 

Friday 30 April 2010: Why I can't leave Ayvalik...

 

The view, the light, the sense of calm that fills me every day when I walk up into the pine woods and look out over the Aegean. Even though I've photographed it a hundred times before, and posted it on here several times already, I can never get enough of this view.

 Wednesday 26 May 2010: Reaching new heights

 

‘Over the last few weeks I have been going on longer and longer walks every evening with my dog Freddie, gradually exploring and mentally mapping all the different tracks (they're fire roads, I think) that run through the pine woods on the hills behind & beyond Ayvalik. This is a labour of love: these woods, and these walks, are quite beautiful and I want to get to know them thoroughly both for my own benefit, & so I can show them to visitors. Very few people, other than beekeepers, ever go there - as a nation, Turks are not keen on recreational walking - so usually Freddie & I have miles of woods entirely to ourselves. 

Today was the longest and most beautiful walk yet. We were out for nearly 4 hours, and climbed to the highest point in the hills, from where there is a quite breath-taking view over the Ayvalik archipelago & across the Aegean to Lesbos. Freddie & I were very tired when we got to the top of the hill, so we sat in the grass to rest, & breathed in the scent of the pines & wild lavender as we watched the sun start to set over the Aegean..’

 

When times are bad, and I’m feeling sad, Ayvalik is my (happy) place in the sun.

Take it away, Stevie!

 

Do NOT try this at home – ever

Day 20: Intermezzo - a canine interlude

General status update

Hair: Frozen in terror in anticipation of Wednesday

Nausea demon: Doing one-armed press-ups to get himself in peak condition for the renewed nausea offensive after FEC 2. There’s a trick to it, apparently: he learned it from an old con he was tormenting in Wormwood Scrubs a few years back.

Chemo Muse: Getting very excited, and hoping to be able to dictate at least 10,000 words to me while I’m hopped up on steroids from Wednesday – Saturday. My main worry here is getting repetitive strain injury from all the typing.

Sleep, lack of: I don’t give a monkey’s if Lorazepam is addictive, I’m taking one tonight – don’t forget they are for anxiety as well as sleeplessness. Double whammy.

Anxiety level (1-10): 3 days until the next dose of poison – what do you think?

State of mind: better than Hank’s, for sure (see below). 

News from North Yorkshire: read on 

No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog – not by me, anyway. The following account is a reconstruction of the events in question put together from conversations with some of the less-traumatised participants and witnesses.

 

Boxing Day chez Big Sis Fo and the MC in rural north Yorkshire is always a very quiet day: after the enormous effort that goes into producing the Christmas Feast, and enjoying to the full the extraordinary array of wines that accompany it, the MC and Big Sis Fo (who functions as his sous-chef ) retire early, and sleep long; it is a House Rule for those guests who have stayed overnight that they should not expect their hosts to surface much before mid-day on Boxing Day, and should make their own breakfast.

Thus, earlier this week on Boxing Day morning, Big Sis Fo stumbled downstairs in her dressing gown at about 11 a.m., and headed towards the kitchen in search of some strong coffee. 

As she walked into the kitchen, yawning, she saw something which made her blink, for a moment quite unable to comprehend what she was seeing. She stood stock-still on the threshold trying to make sense of the tableau before her: the room had three occupants, namely Hank, the huge and demented Hungarian Visla, the MC, and Nick, another Fo brother-in-law who, as regular readers may recall, has bravely offered to assist in the implementation of my Viking funeral (now scheduled to be held on the River Derwent, which flows past the end of his back garden and thence into the North Sea, via the River Ouse), in defiance of any adverse legal consequences that may follow.

On Hank’s large, daft face there was an expression of extreme anguish, and he rolled his eyes at Big Sis Fo in mute, desperate appeal, as well he might, because Nick was holding Hank’s head, with the jaw firmly clamped shut, while at the other end the MC, clad in a cowboy-patterned Cath Kidston oil-cloth apron accessorised with a pair of bright yellow rubber Marigolds, had his fore-finger inserted into Hank’s rectum and was wiggling it about inside, as if trying to find something. Beside him, on the kitchen table, stood a large tub of Vaseline.

Big Sis Fo, not one to mince her words, especially when she comes across her partner in life apparently sodomising the dog, with company, barked: ‘What in HOLY HELL is going on here?’

Nick looked up, panic-stricken ‘It's not what it looks like...'

The MC, unperturbed, and without ceasing his digital exploration of Hank’s inner recesses, said: ‘Darling, you know Hank has to have his anal glands stimulated from time to time to get all the fluid out.'

 ‘I know perfectly well  it needs to be done’ said my sister, through gritted teeth. ‘But it needs to done by the vet. In his surgery. Properly. Wearing surgical gloves. Not IN MY KITCHEN by an enthusiastic amateur wearing bloody MARIGOLDS.’ 

‘But it’s Boxing Day’ said the MC. ‘Last time we had to take Hank to the vet on a Bank Holiday it cost nearly a hundred quid.’ 

‘That’ said my sister, somewhat tersely ‘is BESIDE THE F***ING POINT’ (she says this a lot, as you may have noticed). 

‘But his tail was down, and he was looking really uncomfortable. His bum is so sore he can hardly sit down.’ 

My sister lost her patience: ‘If I were a dog, I would infinitely prefer to endure a little discomfort, rather than have you f***ing around in my arse. LEAVE HANK ALONE. And throw those Marigolds away, please. NOW.’  

A few minutes later Big Sis Fo, now armed with strong coffee and beginning to revive, looked into the Boot Room, where the traumatised Hank was lying on his dog-bed, being consoled by Nick, while the MC was off phoning the vet. 

 

 

Nick was talking softly to Hank, unaware that he was being overheard.

‘It’s been a funny kind of start to Boxing Day for you, Hankie Boy, hasn’t it - buggered by the MC already, and it’s not even 12 o’clock yet?’

 

 

 

The North Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse

Day 11

General Status Update

Hair: no change and, because I’m afraid to brush it, looking pretty ratty.

Nausea Demon: Increasingly cross. Claims the powerful and disabling cocktail of anti-nausea drugs he is now being administered every day is breaching his Inhuman Rights. Threatening to take me to an employment tribunal.

Heightened sense of smell: should you come within 10 yards of me on the street eating KFC or a kebab, I WILL KILL YOU.

Anxiety level (1-10): but enough about me – how anxious are YOU now feeling, after reading all this? I bet you’re checking yourself for strange lumps on a much more regular basis now, aren’t you?

State of mind: best observed through a glass, darkly.

 

The first I knew of the North Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse was a few weeks ago, on one of the coldest, darkest and stormiest nights of the year, the night 2 months’ worth of rain fell on the north of England during the space of a few hours.

 The phone rang, and on the other end was Big Sis Fo, babbling:

‘They’re outside, they’re outside’ she cried ‘they’re BANGING ON THE WALLS, and they’re TRYING TO GET INSIDE THE HOUSE!’

 After pausing for an instant to draw breath, she continued:

 ‘And the internet has gone off and it’s been raining non-stop for 24 hours and the beck is going to overflow any minute and then we’ll be flooded and then we’ll never be able to sell this house again NEVER NEVER NEVER, and we will have to live here FOREVER!’ 

‘But I thought you loved the house so much that you never want to move again, and intend to be carried out of there in a box, feet first?’

‘That, Caroline’ replied my sister, a touch tersely, ‘is BESIDE THE FUCKING POINT’.

 I made soothing noises, and suggested that she pour herself a Weapons Grade gin and tonic, for medicinal purposes, and tell me exactly what was going on.

At this point I should give you a little background info on Big Sis Fo, the oldest of the Fo Sisters - there are five of us in all, including my two lovely step-sisters (who are not genetically Fos and therefore much saner, generally nicer and incomparably better-mannered than the rest of us). We are like the Bennet sisters, only middle-aged and with iPhones. And without the lovely frocks. I like to think of myself as Elizabeth (delusional, much?) and my younger sister, aka L’il Sis Fo, to whom you have yet to be introduced, is Lydia. Very Definitely Lydia.

 

Big Sis Fo is thus, obviously, Jane.

Like Jane Bennet, Big Sis Fo found a Happy Ending with her true love (only in her case, second time round), and they live together, with a truly demented Hungarian Visla called Hank (think Scooby Doo on crystal meth), in an exquisitely restored 18^th century farmhouse (pure property porn, it’s even been featured in one of THOSE magazines), with a stream (in local parlance ‘beck’) running through the grounds, in a small hamlet on the north Yorkshire plain, on the edge of the Howardian Hills (the geological significance of this location will become apparent later). 

 

 

By the way, as always with stories of Fo family members, please be assured that I am not making anything up (a friend suggested me to me recently that the Fo family motto should be ‘Ultra parodiam’ i.e. ‘Beyond parody’, and I think he may well be right).

So, Big Sis Fo lives a truly enviable life in her rural idyll with a man who

a) is utterly devoted to her,

b) is 13 years younger than her,

c) earns a quite ridiculous amount of money as a partner in one of the big management consulting firms (so let’s call him the MC from now, for ease of reference),

d) not only insists on doing all the cooking, but does so to pretty much restaurant quality standards (his pink grapefruit granita is to die for),

e) has converted the stables into a wine cellar to house his ever-growing collection of rare and precious vintages, including a world class selection of vintage champagne, and finally – 

and this is the one which is going to make women everywhere want to HUNT DOWN AND KILL my sister 

f) insists on doing absolutely everything related to Christmas.

 

I will repeat that, the MC does Christmas. Every single bit of it.

 

Christmas is his hobby, for goodness sake; he takes two weeks leave every year in December to devote himself to the whole enterprise, from presents to decorations (I’ll leave you to imagine the Christmas tree) to the seven course Christmas lunch extravaganza, accompanied by the kinds of wines that the likes of you or me are highly unlikely to get to drink in this lifetime (unless we happen to be related to him, that is, which happily I am).

You’re beginning to hate Big Sis Fo now, aren’t you? I don’t blame you – it’s almost impossible not to. The rest of it you could just about take, but the Christmas thing is the absolute killer. I keep thinking she must have done something amazingly wonderful, in karmic terms, in a previous life, to deserve the one she has now. Maybe she was Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. She’s very fond of curry, come to think of it – but no matter, you’re going to start feeling a whole lot more sympathetic towards her when we get to the full horror of the Rat Apocalypse, which will be very, very soon.

Rats apart, the only other less than optimal feature of my sister’s fabulous existence is that the MC, who likes to go shooting and salmon-fishing when off-duty, has landed her with the daily care and maintenance of his dog Hank, a Hungarian hunting dog with major behavioural problems, despite having being sent away for training at the gun dog equivalent of Eton. Although, to be fair, his education was cut short, rather abruptly, after he urinated all over the dog trainer’s feet, in an attempt to assert his dominance, something which no other trainee gun dog had ever had the balls to do. Hank’s balls, by the way, are enormous, and the fact that they are still attached to him is a continuing bone of contention between Big Sis Fo and her partner… but I digress. We will return to Hank and his humongous balls another day.

 

 

Where was I? The night of the storm, and my sister on the phone, swigging back almost neat Bombay Sapphire on ice to calm herself as she began to tell me how she and the MC had, a few days previously, become aware that they might have a problem with vermin.

 When you live in a big house, especially a very old and very cold one in the bracing climate of north Yorkshire, you inevitably end up spending most of your time in one or two favourite rooms; such is the case with Big Sis Fo and the MC who, of an evening, are usually to be found in a tiny little room off the kitchen known, inevitably, as ‘The Snug’; this little den has barely enough room to hold a small sofa, an armchair and the 42” plasma TV the MC had installed above the fireplace, the better to watch the Cooking Channel non-stop from a horizontal position when he is not out at work, or otherwise engaged.

One evening a few weeks ago Big Sis Fo, the MC and Hank were all sitting in front of the fire, watching Yotam Ottolenghi disassemble a large squid, when they became aware of noises coming from – underneath them. Hank immediately began to run round in circles, quite difficult for a dog his size in a room that small, barking his head off. The MC muted Yotam for a moment, and they all continued to listen. Yes, something – or rather a number of somethings – was moving around under the floorboards. Stomping in fact. Quite loudly. It was evident that there was a party going on down below to which the official occupants of the house had definitely not been invited.

‘OMG’ said my sister ‘we’ve got mice. I’d better get some traps’

‘I dunno,’ said the MC ‘it sounds a bit loud for mice. Maybe it’s badgers.’

‘I don’t think they sell badger traps,’ replied Big Sis Fo ‘and aren’t they protected? If it’s badgers, they won’t let us touch them. It’s like bats. Hell’s teeth, we may end up being forced to run a badger sanctuary.’

The next day my sister put down mouse traps. The noises from below continued, however, and grew louder, as the new occupants started asking their friends to drop by; by the end of the week they decided that there nothing else for it but to call in the council Pest Control man.

When the Pest Control man walked into the snug, he just sniffed the air and said ‘’Ey up*, love, you’ve got rats. I can smell ’em’. Big Sis Fo was mortified to hear that her house stank of rats, but the Pest Control man hastened to assure her that in his line of work he had developed a heightened sensitivity to the very faintest traces of rat odour, quite undetectable by the average person.

After examining the exterior of the house, the Pest Control man found the hole where the rats had tunnelled through the base of the wall under the bay window in the snug. He laid poisoned bait in various places around the exterior of the house, assuring Big Sis Fo that, once poisoned, the rats would head out from under the house to seek water, as poison makes them very thirsty. As my sister stood at the open door waving him off, she heard a noise and looked down. A large black rat was sitting just in front of the doorstep, looking up at her, as if waiting for admittance.

 

 

(picture posed by model - that is not the actual rat). .

The wall through which the rats had tunnelled inside was repointed; within a few days they had eaten their way through the new mortar, and were back inside, continuing to party. The new breed of Giant Mutant Ninja Rats - and these ones are particularly hard, coming from Yorkshire - just love mortar with a side of rat poison. And the reason they were continuing to invade the house, as on the night of the storm, when my sister could hear them scrabbling around just outside, banging on the wall, trying to get in, was - the weather.

The massive rainfall experienced this year has meant that the Yorkshire plain is SODDEN; black rats have a particular aversion to getting their feet wet, so have been coming out of the fields and hedges looking for warm, dry places of refuge. North Yorkshire and, for all I know, the rest of the country, is genuinely facing a plague of black rats, a lot of whom found their way chez Big Sis Fo.

In the end, the ONE THING that prevented any more rats getting in was, strangely, Brillo Pads. Rats will eat anything, up to and including actual walls, but they won’t eat Brillo Pads. The texture and taste of wire wool covered in caustic detergent doesn’t agree with them, apparently. Please note this useful tip for future reference in case the Rat Apocalypse moves into your neighbourhood next.

So, things were looking up: the rats had either been poisoned, or couldn’t get inside any more, and gradually the noises underfoot stopped. Problem solved.

A few days later, the smell started.

My sister, when asked to describe what the corpse of a dead rat decomposing under your floorboards smells like, was both clear and concise:

‘It smells like liquid death – SWEET liquid death. It is unspeakably vile and even just thinking about it makes me want to vomit.’

So the carpenter came, to take up the floorboards in the snug, now rendered uninhabitable by the awful, terrible-beyond-imagining smell that was wafting up from below; the Brillo pads, of course, had not only prevented more rats from getting in - they also stopped the poisoned rats from getting out. Underneath the floorboards they found the decomposing corpse of one recently deceased rat, and one mummified rat; problem solved.

But a few days later the smell reappeared, first in the dining room and then, bafflingly, in the snug. And so it went on. By the end of last week all the floorboards in the entire ground floor of the house had been taken up, and a total of 4 fresh rat corpses, and 3 mummified ones, removed. The carpenter insists that there are no longer any decomposing corpses in situ, but my sister swears he is wrong – she thinks there is at least one left, somewhere inside the old, thick stone walls, which cannot be got at. 

‘I know the smell of dead rat by now’ she said, darkly ‘I’ve lived with it long enough, and there’s still at least one there. I KNOW THERE IS.’ 

Christmas is coming, the highlight of the MC’s year, and there will be a number of guests around the dining room table for his command performance. All Big Sis Fo can do is hope that the smell will finally have dissipated by next week – but she isn’t holding her breath. Although she will be on Christmas Day, quite possibly.

She’s asked me to give her a flame thrower for Christmas.

So that, my friends, is the true story of the North Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse.

On the whole, I’d prefer to have the chemo.

 

*People do actually still use this expression in Yorkshire dialect, it is not a comic myth - it comes from Old Norse. I have heard it myself.