Day 49
General status update:
Hair: staying in the Smurf hat/snood until I feel able to deal with
it, which is not going to be today. It’s Day 5. I feel like HELL; I am IN Hell. Hell is all around.
Nausea demon: Vicious, vicious, vicious. He’s ruining the Australian Open
final. That’s the second Grand Slam final in a row ruined by this f***ing
cancer. After waiting all these years for Andy Murray to get to the top, watching
all those matches as he fought his way up through the ranks, I am forced to witness
his greatest moments in a state of either mental or physical torment. I never
say ‘why me’, but couldn’t you just have left me alone for the tennis? Or arrived
earlier, for that matter – there were a lot of agonising Tim Henman Grand Slam
matches from which I would have been only too happy to be distracted.
Chemo Muse: Working her a*** off to get me through this, keeping me going,
driving me on.
Chemo Brian: Keeping out of the way on the sofa with
Chemo Rat
Brian: who has settled in so quickly it’s as if
he’s always been here.
Fatigue/weakness: entirely incidental in the current situation.
Joints: aching
Mouth: sores appearing on gums
Taste/smell: food tastes like mud, coffee tastes of iron filings, wine smells and tastes like vinegar; everything cooking smells atrocious. And yet, I MUST EAT.
Limbs: that bizarre sensation of
being inflated again, as if I am swelling up into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
in Ghostbusters – remember him?
Sleep, lack of: pharmaceutical sedation beginning to look very attractive, but
I don’t want to wake up Chemo Brian and have my brain go all blurry.
Anxiety level (1-10): No anxiety, because what I most fear is HERE. Plenty of room for
incidental
Rampant
Paranoia, though, about all manner of things.
State of mind: This too shall pass, this too shall pass, this too shall PASS.
the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
It’s Day 5, the much-dreaded Day 5 of the third cycle
of FEC.
Physically, I am feeling beyond wretched: tormented, despite all the
anti-emetic drugs, by constant rolling waves of nausea, with aching
joints, and the entirely illusory but still unpleasant sensation of the skin on
my arms and legs puffing up and swelling. Sore patches have appeared on my
gums, it hurts to eat, and everything tastes like mud, but I have to keep eating small amounts anyway, to help combat
the nausea.
There is nothing I can do to make it go away, and it's becoming more and more unbearable.
‘This is why I
am here’ says the Chemo Muse, speaking more gently than usual to the
shivering, retching, aching thing that I have now become.
‘I know you hate
me sometimes, but I am here to help you.
You are feeling so sick, and so tired, and all you want to do is to
lie down and close your eyes, but that won't work for very long. To escape from what is happening to you now, from this unbearable reality, you
need to release your mind from your body, and let it float away. You have to recreate yourself in a different, happier
place.’
She takes my hand.
‘You’re going
through absolute misery right now, physical torment, but you’ve also
experienced some extraordinary happiness over the last two years, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, yes I have…’
‘Let’s go back
there, then. Let’s go back to the time when you started being happy again,
after being lost and alone for so long…’
It’s the autumn of 2010, and I’m in my camel barn in
Ayvalik, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey, the old camel barn I have had
restored and converted into a library to house the 5-6,000 books I have spent
my life collecting, but never previously had the space to shelve. Creating my own
library has been the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition; I moved here 2 years
previously, after spending a few years teaching in a university in Ankara,
taking time out to supervise the restoration of the Ottoman Greek house I have bought
by the sea, and the camel barn which is attached to it.
I can’t afford not to work forever, but I have enough
to keep me going for a few years, if I live carefully, and I’m giving some English
classes at a local language school to bring in a few quid. Ayvalik, on the north
Aegean coast of Turkey, is an old Ottoman Greek market town, a remnant from the
time when the western coast of Asia Minor was Greek, and is a haunting and
beautiful place, a strange mix of deserted ruins and beautifully restored
houses.
This odd, half-ruined olive-growing and fishing town
is way off the radar of most European tourists, but tends to draw to it foreigners
working in Turkey who like historic towns and old houses, and Turkish writers
and artists from Istanbul or Ankara who feel much the same, unlike most Turks, who
tend to prefer new, shiny houses, what with the whole country being so full of
thousands of years’ worth of crumbling ruins from the many different
civilisations that that have swung through Asia Minor over the last few
millennia. I’m alone in life, as I have been for a long time now, but there are
plenty of interesting people to hang out with in Ayvalik, and I have a lot to
do.
The restoration of the house and barn has been the
usual nightmare, but it’s finished now, and I’ve had all the bookcases for the
library made with reclaimed oak from an old demolished grain warehouse in Bursa,
and with a little help from my friends have unpacked the 70 or so boxes of
books and shelved them, very roughly arranged, by broad subject area. The
contents of these bookcases follow the progress of my intellectual and working life
through a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and extremely ill-thought
out career choices - Latin and Greek
literature, philosophy – ancient and modern, political theory, corporate finance,
financial analysis, molecular genetics, human physiology and evolution, evolutionary
theory, the philosophy of biology, demography, evolutionary psychology - and
the channelling of my leisure hours into a
truly world class collection of crime fiction, covering all eras and
sub-genres and geographical areas, with a particular fondness for the literary
skills of Reginald Hill and Donna Leon, and for American crime fiction set in
the freezing winters of the snowy Midwestern states of Minnesota and Michigan.
So I’m just about to get on with the proper cataloguing
and arrangement of the books, I’ve been writing a blog about Ayvalik and
Ottoman Greek history and the camel barn, and am doing some research into
Byzantine and Hellenistic Greek history (the Greeks were in in charge of this part
of Asia Minor for some 2,000 years, before the Turks rode in from the steppes
and took over), and I’m busy and happy and occupied, and then R suddenly waltzes
into my life from out of nowhere, and puts everything into a spin.
As previously related, it is an entirely random
meeting on Twitter that first brings R and me together and starts us talking, and once
we start talking, we just never stop. We have a great deal in common: R is a philosopher,
a Professor of Bioethics, and his intellectual hinterland includes mathematics,
philosophy, the history of science, and all areas of philosophy that combine
the problems of ethics and human medicine and biology; his leisure reading,
meanwhile, is rather more challenging than mine in both range and content, including
history, poetry, and literature of many kinds and from many languages, not to mention his own genre speciality, science fiction.
R introduces me to the poetry of Cavafy, the
extraordinary meditations on the philosophy of cricket and colonialism in CLR
James’s ‘Beyond a Boundary’, and Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’; as I am currently
immersed in books on libraries, and the history of the Greeks in Asia Minor, I introduce
him to Alberto Manguel, to Bruce Clark’s ‘Twice a Stranger’, the definitive account of the catastrophic Turkish-Greek population exchange in 1922, and to Giles Milton’s
harrowing ‘Paradise Lost: the Destruction of Smyrna, 1922’.
We spend a lot of time, that autumn, exploring each
other’s minds, and happily exchanging ideas; eventually, we start to exchange
emotions, too.
And for a variety of reasons I’m resisting emotional
entanglement with R, who is 2,000 miles away in London, but all’s fair in love and war, and laying siege is common
practice in both; R, as ever drawing on an eclectic range of sources, takes inspiration
from the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in his celebrated 6th century
BC treatise ‘The Art of War’, when he advises ‘Hold out baits to entice the enemy’.
Accordingly, he decides to send me, in my far-off
corner of the north Aegean, a present.
What bait should he hold out to entice the enemy?
He ponders long and hard, and cunningly thinks of the
one thing he can send me that will utterly beguile me, and engage me, draw
me into yet more conversation and render all further resistance entirely futile:
R gives me a year's Overseas Subscription to the London
Review of Books.
