I must start going out for some walks. I don’t seem to leave the house much and have stopped shopping now for the sake of my bank balance, so I will endeavour to have a walk every day. The weather is so wet and cold here though. It’s been raining for days.
Julia came down today to take Osh up to the farm. Rhodri is working late tonight and Friday. Elis is OK, you can stick him in front of the telly, but Osh is higher maintenance and this time around after chemotherapy I feel so tired I can hardly stay awake. Have just been lying on the sofa all day watching telly and dozing, which is fine – can’t really do much else. Spent the evening with Elis on Playstation and me lying in his bunk, watching him play. I found it difficult to get up and he went to bed at eight, so did I. I am completely exhausted.
November 24, Friday
Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy, has been poisoned with radiation and has died. Elis came downstairs this morning while I was reading about it on the BBC news website and asked me why he died. I said he had been a spy and someone poisoned him, and as I was talking about it, it came on Sky News and he said, ‘My God, it’s on the news too.’
Him wanting to be a spy and all, this really caught his imagination. They were explaining on the telly in graphic detail how radiation kills you. Basically it kills the fast dividing cells and eventually will shut down your vital organs. I know chemo is a very controlled version of this but it’s a little close to home for me at the moment and got me to thinking about my vital organs and why the bloody hell no one was checking those.
Gill Donovan’s colleague, Lizzie, rang me from the hospital. They’d run a check on the supplements I am taking and have advised me not to take anything during chemo because they are antioxidants and therefore protecting cells they want to kill. Great. I’ve already been taking them during three sessions so now I’ll be obsessing for the rest of my life over it. Still, if nothing else, it’s got me off my arse, juicing again and eating satsumas like they were chocolates. I said I was worried that I’d pick up bugs and colds off the children, and was convinced the high dosages in the supplements were protecting me. She said that wouldn’t put them off, giving me the chemo, the white blood cell count was the important thing. I will do as she says.
I asked her about radiotherapy, thinking it might make me feel sick and I’d have to have needles, but she said it would be a walk in the park compared to chemo. I wouldn’t feel sick, and it would take me longer to get dressed and undressed than have it. It is only for four weeks, not six, so that’s good news too, so only three chemo sessions, which are the bits I don’t like, to get through.
I asked about my hair growing back during radiotherapy. She said it would come back after the fifth session but a bit like baby hair – although it’s growing back already. Then I said, ‘And now a rather big question. How do you know that the cancer hasn’t spread to my vital organs?’ She said they could never tell me 100 per cent I was cured but the surgeon was pleased with my tumour removal and all the steps they are taking now – the chemo, radio and Tamoxifen – are curative; they are steps to cure me of cancer.
Every time they take my blood samples my vital organs are checked, kidney and liver. If there were any abnormalities, they would let me know. I am in a system where I am checked constantly and will have yearly mammograms and come to the clinic every year. If I ever want to ring them during those times, I will have instant referral. So I did feel better after that. It’s like Lizzie said, the further away from diagnosis, the easier it is to come to terms with it, which I know will be the case.
They are amazing, Gill and Lizzie and the people at Cancer Care Cymru. They are not the NHS, they are a charity and they work alongside the NHS. If they weren’t there, I wonder who would I pick the phone up to call and ask the questions that haunt me; sometimes for days. They answer you, just like that, and don’t think you are mad asking them. I do have Helen, of course, but Gill is in the thick of it, going through it with me, I feel. I am so lucky because I have a big support network. I said this to Gill and she said she was talking to a lady on the phone who is in her seventies going through chemotherapy and doesn’t have any family, and it just makes me feel so blessed that I am supported by people I love and who love me.
I asked Gill how she does it – deals with sick people, some very sick, all the time, and she said, ‘It is a privilege to work with you all.’ I told her we were the privileged ones.
Rhodri came home at eight with a Chinese. Julia has taken Elis up to the farm for the weekend so we watched two episodes of Lost and it was really nice to be together.
November 25, Saturday
I still feel as if I should be in a retirement home, kipping my life away, I am so tired. Would I actually enjoy doing that? When the to-do lists get done by someone else, when I have stopped obsessing about my future, and will be in it, what will have happened? Where will my children be, where will my husband be, will we be kipping pensioners together? How will I feel when I don’t have to worry about rice or turkey for Christmas, about whether the goldfish can go another day and live without me cleaning them, without children’s birthday parties and school fetes to occupy my time? How will I feel when it all stops and I have nothing to do except the one thing I so want to do which has eluded me all week, which is sleep. Pretty fucking bored, I imagine – let’s hope telly improves before that all kicks in. I owe it to the world of media to return to try and get some decent programmes made.
Went to Ian J’s tonight. Ah, the upside of chemotherapy – you don’t want to drink. I know, I can’t actually believe I have written those words. You drive to someone’s house, eat their food, enjoy a short burst of their charming company and leave about 10.30 – job done, catch up, nice food, no hangover, no staying up until three in the morning. Rhodri on the other hand did stay until three in the morning and woke me up when he came in; I then spent an hour and a half awake. I am no longer getting up in the night as I used to. I was getting up for two hours in the night, but ended up all cold and uncomfortable on the sofa watching an episode of Midsomer Murders or something, when I already knew who’d done it. The children are still having a whale of a time at my parents’ farm, so no worries there. Whatever would I do without my wonderful parents?
November 26, Sunday
I woke very early again and made Beef Bourguignon for tea and an enormous veggie chilli for the freezer – just call me Delia. Have a bit of a spring in my step now that chemo is disappearing into the horizon.
Went to see the new Bond film with Rhodri and Ian J. That Daniel Craig is eminently shaggable! God, I’d so do him. Can’t imagine he’s going to be wandering up my street sometime soon, though. If he does, though, we couldn’t do it in the marital bed – that would be sacrilege, PLUS the bedroom is a dumping ground for all ‘pending’ washing and ironing so it’s never properly tidy and I’d have to tidy up anyway if he knocked on the door – so we’d have to find somewhere else to do it. That would all start getting a bit awkward then – what was I doing in such and such hotel and why wasn’t I answering my mobile . . . I can see my affair with Daniel Craig might not be as straightforward as I first thought.
Osh and Elis came back, filling the house with their babble and chatter and treading potato into the carpet. Osh seems to come on about six months every time he goes to stay with my parents. He said, very matter-of-factly, that, ‘Dinosaurs eat grass.’ Lloyd is obsessed with dinosaurs, so Osh is getting into them too and he’s just like a little boy with opinions and singing songs – they had a great time.
I had one of those nice kicks up the arse that I need when I start to feel a little bit sorry for poor old cancer victim me. I was reading the Sunday Mirror, which is my paper of choice these days, since it takes less than half an hour to read, tells me all I need to know in a nutshell and I don’t have to sift through reams and reams of rainforest on a Sunday just because I purport to be middle-class.
What I have found in life is that if you surround yourself with like-minded people,
which we all do as we all wish to see ourselves reflected in our friends, they will invariably give you the opinions, reviews and hot topics of the week from the news. This saves the price of an expensive Sunday newspaper and also allows me to read about the exploits of the latest I’m A Celebrity in the Sunday Mirror, safe in the knowledge that by the following weekend I will have assumed all their opinions, my friends’ that is, not the Sunday Mirror’s, and pass them off as my own.
Anyway, there was an article in it about a little girl with leukaemia which I would normally ignore, not because I am a heartless callous bitch, but because the thought of any child suffering is too much to bear. Even Rhodri turns the news over temporarily if there are bad news children stories now. I know it’s cowardly but I think it’s a parent’s way of trying to live with the ‘my child might die’ scenario which sometimes haunts us all.
This little girl was keeping a blog of her treatment and quite honestly I was ashamed of my whimpering about a bloody needle in my arm and going on how the veins in my arm hurt and how I think one of them has collapsed, and about the smell of the hospital and the place. And this child was a happy smiling cherub who I wanted to put in a bubble and protect against the chemo which was relentless for her, and she had to have deep injections into her beautiful fragile little body. She served to remind me that I should be grateful for the life that I am living, for my second chance and, as Maya Angelou put it, ‘Just because I am in pain it doesn’t mean I have to become one.’
I am sending a wish to Santa and Buddha and Jesus and Mohammed to look after that little angel – please.
November 27, Monday
Another sleepless night. However, my sleeplessness is exacerbated by the start of the Ashes, and there have been some ground rules laid down for the gentlemen in this house. Rhodri waits until twelve at night to see the Ashes start; he takes a duvet and pillows downstairs so he can lie on the sofa and sleep in between the boring bits (isn’t that all of it?), then when he realises that he has to get up at 7.30, and probably do a fourteen-hour day, as he has of late, he decides to come to bed. This is any time between one and four o’clock in the morning – about the time I have nicely drifted off into my cocoon.
He did this last night when I had deliberately not gone to bed until twelve so that I could get a stab at an eight-hour sleep. I immediately awoke as he was shuffling round the bedroom turning the heating off and pulling the duvet I had been sleeping under right over to his side. Anyway, I went mad saying he was bloody selfish and that it was bad enough that I could only sleep for five to six hours a night without him waltzing in the bedroom when he felt like it, and if he wanted to watch the Ashes he was to either sleep in the bunks (which he hates as they are too small) or stay on the sofa. He was under no circumstances to come back to our room and disturb me – so there. This is the point in my life when I wish we had bought a brand new house with en suite and four bedrooms for a cheaper price than our three up, two down, fur coat, no knickers Llandaff house. Then we’d have a spare room. I ended up going to sleep in the bunk, which was fine, but woke up about six which meant I only got about five and a half hours’ sleep. I think I’m getting less sleep than Alison W next door and she has a new baby. Still, I will stop obsessing about it. It’s not as if I’ve got a top job in the city to go to, is it?
I got my own back on Rhodri this morning – not, of course, that marriage is an ongoing set of one-upmanship. I woke about 6.15 in the bottom bunk ‘snug as a bug in a rug’, went into our bedroom to get a cardigan and slippers to go and have a nice cup of tea, and by accident stood on the ‘First Christmas’ book, which peeled out a verse of ‘Away in a Manger’ very loudly and woke Rhodri up with an enormous start. Sitting bolt upright in bed as if he had been electrocuted, he said in his sleep-induced haze, ‘I AM being nice to you.’ Obviously he had been dreaming about NOT being nice to me.
November 28, Tuesday
Until you cannot have children you do not realise what an utterly crass and deeply personal question it is to ask someone, ‘Are you having any more?’ It’s not that I mind not being able to have any more children – I am nearly forty, for God’s sake. I have two very healthy children and thank God for that every day. But as the same God is my witness, I will never ask anyone that question again. Rachel, my student, and one of my neighbours both asked me this week if I wanted more children. Are these people mad! I have had breast cancer, I am having chemotherapy – five months ago I thought I might actually die. Why would I even dream of bringing any more children, even if I could, into that uncertain world? Are you fucking bonkers?
Made an appointment with the brain woman Deborah for next Wednesday. Now I’ve had my kick up the arse from the angel in the paper, I’m not sure I need someone to pull me through, am not sure what she can help me with – but I bet every nutter who goes in there (like me) thinks they are the sanest, most rational person on the planet. I keep putting it off, thinking I’ll have it after chemo, or after all my treatment, but as work will pay for my sessions I might as well go now, when I am in the thick of it all. Went to Welsh class – still very confusing, definitely a longterm project.
November 29, Wednesday
I had lunch with Ian P, went to an absolutely fab pub, the Plough and Harrow. Firstly we had a little walk along the coastal path. Ian P is so sweet. He and his girlfriend are splitting up and I’ve always thought that he and Kate would make a lovely couple. I showed him a picture of her which I had on my phone and he said she looked very nice. Texted Kate and said I know she liked Mark but Ian P was lovely and available and thought she looked nice. I have not heard back from her which means she is either a) mortally offended or b) just too busy to respond. Must call her soon. My quest to find a wife for the two Ians in my life continues.
Went to the shops for a Welsh-language birthday card for Rhodri’s mother and to IKEA for two frames to put photos of Osh and Elis in for her sixtieth birthday. We have got this present called ‘In the Paper’ and it’s a spoof Flintshire evening paper with a funny bit about Rhodri’s mother being sixty on the front page and a photo of her when she was a baby. It’s all good fun, and the family have also all pooled together to buy her a digital camera.
We’re all booked in to the Cawdor Hotel in Llandeilo: Sioned and Ali, Owain and Eva, Branwen, Patrick and Cari Mair, Ela, me, Rhodri, Osh and Elis with Rhodri’s parents. I’m sure it will be lovely. The hotel is really nice. Rhodri and I went there just before my diagnosis without the children.
I said to Rhodri, ‘The last time we were in that hotel I didn’t have cancer,’ and he replied, ‘You did have cancer, you just didn’t know about it.’ Pedant. Anyway, the last time Rhodri and I were there about seven months ago, we were shagging like rabbits. I’m not sure we will have the opportunity with two children cramping our style.
I have no idea if my period is due. I was supposed to be keeping a note to see if my periods had stopped because of the chemo, but I was eating chocolate biscuits earlier which is a sure sign that my period is on its way. Damn. What’s the point of being in a hotel with your husband if you can’t shag him, and hotel sex is so much better than sex at home, where 500 other things are running around in your head – ooh, that pile of washing needs to be put out and ooh, those sheets haven’t been changed for a fortnight and ooh, it’s so late I really need to sleep. Whereas when you’re in a hotel those thoughts don’t really pop into your head (or if they do that’s very sad) and there’s something quite sleazy about having lots of sex in a hotel room (well, OK, managing to do it twice). Sex has taken a back seat in our lives at the moment.
November 30, Thursday
What do I do with my days? I don’t know, but I never seem to sit down for more than two minutes. I went to see Rosie today and told her I thought that my chemo was worse because I didn’t have acupuncture the week before; so she has rung around because she is away next week and I am going to see a friend of hers, who coincidentally is in Penarth, not far from the brain woman, so I’ll have a
Penarth sort of a day.
Rhodri has gone to his cricket dinner in the village. He came in tonight and we were chatting and he goes, ‘Is this a good time to have an awkward conversation?’ I fucking hate it when he starts any conversation like that because I automatically think he is shagging someone else, or has cancer (I beat him to that one), or something else terrible is wrong – and I get so angry when he follows this opening question with something completely banal.
More often than not, he tells me that he has to go away to work on a project, and sure enough, he’s asking my permission to do the Kirov Ballet, which is great, but will take him away, although he’ll be back on my birthday.
Will I let him do it? It’s his job, for heaven’s sake! Am I going to say, ‘No, you can’t,’ when it’s his job that keeps the roof over our heads? And even if he did have a choice, which I am sure he does, am I, the wicked witch of the west, going to say, ‘No, actually you can’t do that.’
‘I thought you and the children could come up to London,’ he said. I don’t want to go to London for my fortieth birthday. I am thanking the bloody Lord I am fucking alive to see my fortieth birthday. Why would I want to spend it in a hotel room in London when I can be around my friends and family in my own safe little house? Plus I know my chemo is supposed to finish by then but it might not; there might be a blip and I can’t make any plans, he just doesn’t fucking get it.
So then I had a go at him for not getting it, saying that his life had not changed at all except perhaps it had become easier because I was home all the time, whereas mine had changed fundamentally and he had never once said I was doing great. And he said, ‘I just told Pip you were doing great now on the phone while you were upstairs’ and, like yeah, that’s supposed to make me feel better?
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 13
