MamaFo throws a spanner in the works

Day 76 Intermezzo: Another romantic interlude

General status update

Hair: slumbering, safely wrapped in snood

Nausea demon: hanging on in there – I find it quite astonishing that I still feel nauseous, despite being on four different anti-emetic drugs. I seem to have inherited the stomach of a feeble Victorian invalid, perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She was very fond of sofas too, come to think of it.

Chemo Muse: Fuelled by the steroids, she positively GLOWS. Keeping me at it.

Chemo Brian: tucked up on the sofa under a warm throw, with Chemo Rat Brian’s little head poking out out next to him. They are now inseparable.

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Fatigue/weakness: that won’t kick in until about day 5. They made me go back to the hospital yesterday for an injection of something called Pegfilgrastim, which will encourage my bone marrow to produce more white blood cells, in the hope of avoiding another infection, and neutropenia, this chemo cycle. Worryingly, according to the notes that accompany the drug ‘Pegfilgrastim is a protein produced by biotechnology in bacteria called E.coli’ E.coli?? I guess I just have to trust my oncologist. Oh – have just noticed that included amongst the very common side effects of this drug, apart from joint pain (which I don’t have, so far) is …nausea. No wonder the Nausea Demon has been smirking to himself, he’s got some added back-up.

Anxiety level (1-10): It’s only day 3 of this chemo cycle, and I’m still on the steroids. The truly bad times don’t start until day 5.

State of mind: A bit down-hearted after another rather extreme experience at the hospital on Thursday. Still, taking comfort in the fact that there are only 2 more FECs to go.

Previously on Chemo Nights: After ‘meeting’ in cyberspace during a discussion about procrastination  with a mutual friend on Twitter, R and I have developed a close on-line relationship during the autumn of 2010, bonding over bonding over our mutual love of the London Review of Books , amongst other things. Our brains just match each other, and we quite like each other's photos, too. There are many obstacles that stand between us in terms of our personal circumstances, not least that I live in an old camel barn, converted into a library, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey, and he lives 2,000 miles away in West London. R is very keen for us to meet in person, and his approach to the obstacles in our way is much that of an Olympic 400m hurdler on the starting blocks, impatient for the gun to be fired so he can go for gold. I am considerably more cautious, having read much about  the low success rate of converting on-line relationships into real life ones. Eventually, however, I am persuaded that we should at least give it a try, and book a plane ticket back to London during the last week of March, 2011.

Now read on…..

My mother, MamaFo, who is 81 and lives in a fortified redoubt in the foothills of the Tramuntana  Mountains in Mallorca, where over the last 30 years she has cultivated a spectacularly beautiful Mediterranean garden (including a small but fruitful wacky baccy plantation  - for her personal use only, obvs - which is planted and harvested strictly according to the waxing and waning of the moon), gave up travelling a couple of years ago, on the following grounds:

1) She objects very strongly to the neo-fascist security staff at Heathrow airport who, last time she flew, managed to give her serious grief even though she was in a wheel-chair (Old lady in wheelchair! Obviously smuggling explosives! Needs to be body–searched!);

2) She objects very strongly to not being allowed to smoke between the time of entering the terminal at Palma airport and exiting the terminal at Heathrow, a gap of at least 5 hours between cigarettes, which is liable to lead to spontaneous combustion; and

3) She has done enough travelling for one life time – now is the time for her to sit on her terrace with a cup of coffee, a glass of Soberano, and a packet of Benson and Hedges, gazing at the ever-changing play of light on the Tramuntana mountains, watching the eagles swooping and gliding on the air-currents,  and occasionally barking instructions to my stepfather (somewhat younger than her – this is the way of my people) as he labours in the gardens on the terraced hillside below.

Nowadays, then, if we wish to see MamaFo, we have to get on a plane and go to Mallorca. This being the current state of affairs, I assumed, inasmuch as I thought about it at all, that my mother, whose 80^th  birthday was coming up on April 4^th, 2011, wouldn’t be holding a party; she had celebrated her 70^th in the UK with some style, but repeating such an event was now out of the question.

Remember the aged uncle in the Forsyte Saga (I think it might have been James) whose mantra was ‘nobody ever tells me anything?’ That’s my role in the Fo family. It was sometime in February, and plans were already well underway for Mama Fo’s 80^th Birthday Weekend Extravaganza in Mallorca, before anyone bothered to inform me that my presence was going to be required in the Tramuntana Mountains in the same week that I was planning to meet R for the first time in London.

I simply couldn’t believe it.

I had booked to come to London for 3 weeks, arriving on Sunday 27^th of March, and MamaFo’s birthday weekend was beginning the following Friday. A plane ticket had been booked for me, and I was to present myself at Gatwick Airport on the Friday morning to travel with various family members to Mallorca for 4 days, returning the following Monday. There was to be a gala lunch on the Saturday at the Tramuntana Mountains Golf Club, whose greens are grazed by a small herd of goats, followed by a smaller lunch, for family only, at a restaurant down by the sea on the Sunday (MamaFo prefers to lunch rather than dine, these days). We were all to be accommodated in a historic finca, now converted to boutique agroturismo, just down the hill from Casa Fo.

It was to be a grand gathering of the clan, a celebration of the extended family, and of 80 years of MamaFo adding to the world’s rich tapestry in her own inimitable way.  Everyone was thrilled and excited about it.

Everyone except for me, that is..

I was already a complete basket case about going to meet R, and the only person who knew what I was planning was my closest friend in Ayvalik. No one in my family had any idea that my first trip to London in several years was about anything other than catching up with family and friends and stocking up on marmalade.  Now I was going to have to fly 2,000 miles to London, stay for 4 days, and then fly 1,000 miles back to Mallorca for the party.  The entire family was in a frenzy of excitement about this event, and I just couldn’t believe my bad luck, especially as I was expected to write a speech for the occasion, being the family orator.

This is a Message from God, I thought darkly, telling me that meeting R is going to be  a complete fiasco.  As the days counted down towards March 27^th, and my head became more and more frazzled trying to think about two things at once, and people started commenting on my curious lack of enthusiasm for the coming festivities chez MamaFo, my mood began to darken about my secret assignation with R … should I just call the whole thing off?

Two peas in a pod

Day 62

Intermezzo: another romantic interlude

General status update: 

Hair: it’s been forgotten, really, in this week’s general mêlée. Still mostly attached. 

All the Chemo Demons are united as never before, BEGGING me to stop making that awful noise, and to evict the Coughing Demon from the sofa, of which he took possession much in the manner of Hitler invading Poland  (exiling a bewildered Chemo Brian to R’s battered leather armchair ) and where he now lounges menacingly, occasionally picking up poor little Chemo Rat Brian and swinging him around by the tail. The Nausea Demon keeps muttering ‘NOTHING I’ve ever done to you is as anywhere near as bad as this’ and ‘Seriously, that is One Mean Dude’, and the Chemo Muse has gone all motherly, bringing me soothing mugs of honey and lemon. 

Fatigue/weakness: very tired and over-exerted bronchial region – legs not being used much, just at the minute. 

Sleep, lack of: Lorazepam indicated tonight, so that the coughing won’t keep me awake. 

Anxiety level (1-10): FEC 4 next week? Yeah, whatever – it’ll make a change from coughing, fever, IV antibiotics and grief. 

State of mind: it’d be funny if I died of a coughing-induced asthma attack instead of cancer, wouldn’t it?

It has been a week of intense wretchedness, both physical and mental; the Chemo Muse, new highlights gleaming as she tosses her snaky locks to give us all the full effect, suggests that today it might be better to write a blog post that is not concerned with cancer, chemo or death, which is perfectly fine by me. 

‘Right’ she says briskly, ‘let’s get back to this - quite frankly, bizarre - epistolary cyber-romance of yours, back in 2010. We all know you and R first ‘met’ during a discussion on procrastination on Twitter, I see from your Gmail in-box that the two of you exchanged many hundreds of emails in the autumn of 2010, and you’ve described how you spent your lunch-times together, 2000 miles apart, engaged in literary discussions arising from the London Review of Books – by text.  

She rolls her eyes in a way that indicates the courting rituals engaged in by the love-child of Medusa and Chemosh, God of the Moabites, might well be rather more abbreviated, direct and, quite possibly, painful. 

‘So’ she continues ‘at what point did it finally occur to you and R that it might perhaps be a good idea to cease communicating only by written means, and actually start speaking to one another – you know, like normal people do? 

I laugh, because the first time I heard R’s voice, it wasn’t directly: he sent me a link to the podcast of the inaugural lecture he gave on being appointed to his Professorship of Bioethics, on the subject of Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare. In it he discussed the influence of political philosophy on health policies, asking whether ideology reflects what is really happening in GPs’ surgeries and hospital wards, and then examined current political thinking with its emphasis on patient “choice and empowerment”, encouraging people to take greater responsibility for their own health and welfare. 

Or so I’m told.  

I have to confess that I’ve just copied and pasted that summary from the web, because although I listened to the lecture several times, none of the content sank in; each time I became completely distracted by hearing R’s voice, which had said so much to me over the previous few months, but which only now could I finally hear.  

 Shortly afterwards I saw R for the first time, in a YouTube video in which he was being interviewed by what appeared to be a Hobbit, about matters bioethical; truly, ours was a strange romance… 

We moved on to speaking on the telephone, we exchanged photos, we talked on Skype, although without the visuals, as neither of us had webcams, and eventually we started to discuss meeting in person, although I was still convinced that this would be the point at which our deepening relationship would fall apart. I’d read too many stories of virtual relationships collapsing on meeting in person, with the painful recognition that online chemistry had not translated into real life. R, on the other hand, was blithely unconcerned, convinced that our meeting was a mere formality, and happily talking about how we could build a future together.

I thought he was bonkers.

Still, I recognised that now we had become so close, virtually, we had to take the next step, even though it would probably turn out to be a complete disaster. I agreed to fly back to London and meet him, in the last week of March. I could stay at my parents' flat in Richmond, in south-west London, since they spend most of the year in Mallorca.

I booked the plane ticket on Easy Jet and, with only a few weeks to go before meeting for the first time the man who had become such an important part of my life, started to feel very, very anxious. My closest friend in Ayvalik, D, an intrepid Irishwoman, listened to my worries patiently over many lokanta lunches, and took the ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ approach: if it didn’t work out, if there was no chemistry, then it was no big deal - I could just come back to my life in Ayvalik and get on with cataloguing the books in the Camel Barn Library, no harm done. 

It’s all very well for her to say that, I thought, darkly: she isn’t the one who’s going to have face the excruciating embarrassment of flying 2,000 miles to meet someone, and for that meeting to be such a complete fiasco that it will cause sleepless nights of remembered humiliation for years to come. 

However many times I enumerated to D my list of reasons why this relationship could never work in the long term, anyway, given the various obstacles in our way, she would just shrug and say ’Well, you’ll never know unless you try, will you?’ Eventually, I showed her the video of R on YouTube; she immediately commented on his good looks and then, after listening to him talking for a couple of minutes, started to laugh. 

‘What?’ I said, puzzled, seeing nothing inherently comic in R explaining the basic principles of bioethics. ‘What are you laughing at?’ 

‘Listening to him… and listening to you – you’re both just so… like each other. You really don’t have to worry about how it’s going to work out, Caroline – you and R were made for each other. You’re like two peas in a pod.’