Radiotherapy tomorrow. Rhodri at the eleventh hour says do I want him to come with me and I say yes as I don’t know what it will be like. I am sure it will be fine, but it would be good to have someone there. I hope to God they don’t nuke the wrong bit of me.
March 8, Thursday
I thought radiotherapy might be like that scene in one of the James Bond movies when Sean Connery, I think, is lying on a bed; there’s a laser beam slicing through the metal plate he is lying on and it’s about to cut him in half – starting with his lovely Scottish manhood. Luckily, he escapes somehow or other. So I thought I would lie there and an enormous laser beam would come out of a machine and be very noisy and zap the relevant tattooed place on my breast . It wasn’t anything like that.
Before you go in, the nurse goes through the list of possible side-effects like being tired and having sore skin. You have to use Simple soap or Dove, nothing perfumed and no deodorant. I only use Crystal deodorant now as I know there is aluminium in ordinary deodorants. Aluminium is not good for you and there is talk that there could be a link with it and breast cancer, so I stopped using it, ironically about a month before I got my diagnosis. Apparently, as regards being tired, like chemo it is cumulative, but I said I hadn’t made any provisions for anyone to look after me or my children. The nurse told me that if I am going to be tired it will be in a few weeks, the soreness the same, but some people don’t feel tired at all, and anyway it is nothing like the chemotherapy tiredness. I will be able to carry on with what I normally do, I’ll just be a bit tired.
So that was all very reassuring. I was a bit worried it might be like an enclosed MRI machine, which I had a scan in once, and it’s bloody awful if you are claustrophobic like me. She said, no, it was not like that.
The machine is very high-tech, a Star-Trek-type thing which is a bit daunting but also reassuring as it looks like it can do the business. So you lie there and they line up your tattoos with something and there are two, sometimes three people, all checking and double checking your alignment with the machine. They leave the room (so they don’t get zapped) then it makes this humming noise, then it stops and they come back in, realign the machine and approach the tumour from a different angle, then that’s it. All very painless and straightforward really, so I am very glad about it all. When I came out after about five minutes, Rhodri said, ‘Oh that’s it, is it?’ So I don’t have to worry about driving back and forth in future.
The waiting room is in a different part of the hospital and the people look less sick and have more hair, so it’s not as depressing as the chemo side. All in all, I feel as if I am progressing now to better health.
March 9, Friday
I have decided that I am going to drop Welsh for the rest of the year. After struggling with those bloody treiglads and finally having some understanding as to why they mutate, I don’t think realistically I can carry on for the next four weeks. A lot of my appointments are near to twelve o’clock, they have already juggled them about to fit in with a school day and I know how difficult it is to get on the radiotherapy machines, so I could not possibly ask them to fit the appointments around my Welsh class as well, especially seeing that I will also miss another week in May, when we go on holiday.
I will do my exam for the first half of the Welsh course and pick it up again in September, so at least I would have achieved something; I am determined to carry on with it as I really feel that I am getting somewhere.
In a way it is a bit of a relief. It’s odd having gone through chemotherapy, which is by far the worst bit, and managing to keep up with the classes. For some reason it seems all a bit too much to do at the moment. When Rhodri isn’t here I have to get the children up and off to school, then come back, have a tidy up, then off to radiotherapy, where you can wait for over an hour just to get seen sometimes. It’s just very time-consuming, and then to have to think about going to Welsh and doing two hours’ work and then having to come back and get the children and do the tea and put them to bed by myself, it’s bloody hard work.
I think I might be trying to convince myself here a bit too. I’ve come this far and I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, because I’ve kept going through some very difficult times and it’s not lost and I can still do some studying over the summer. I will make a determined effort to speak it with Rhodri and Elis and Osh so that I’m using it.
March 10, Saturday
Rhodri took Elis and Jay to the footie and I utilised the opportunity to take Osh on a shopping trip for more stuff for ‘project vantastic’. The attic will be groaning under the weight of it all before long. I am crossing items off my ‘things to buy’ list; all I need is a caravan to put them all in. We are going to Tenby tomorrow to have a look at three sites and I hope that we will be able to find something that’s right for us. Now that the nights are lighter and the weather isn’t as depressing as it has been all winter, I want to be down there living my ‘holiday home’ dream. I did once say that I would never go on holiday in a caravan and laughed at the whole scene; that was before I had children and realised that you cannot afford to go abroad more than once a year, and that is usually on a credit card in our case, that children don’t give a toss about the weather or the number of stars your hotel has, they want a bucket and spade, a football, a beach, an ice cream and a pool and they are like little pigs in muck.
I realised this the first time we went to Tenby on holiday. We spent three years taking Elis to beautiful unspoilt islands and they were lovely, but we could go out of season when there were few people around. Suddenly school starts and you are on this hamster treadmill with everyone else; you have to go at the hottest time of the year (and I am not good in the sun) and pay astronomical prices, and when you get there it’s full of people.
The truth is, no matter what the weather, Elis is on the beach and as happy there in our little West Wales cottage as if we had just spent two thousand pounds on a five-star chalet. So we started holidaying there and haven’t stopped, really. Every time I go there I remember the first holiday we ever had as a family in a cottage near the beach. Elis was three months old and I looked in the visitor book last year, when we went just before I had my diagnosis, and I had written that he had us up at five o’clock every morning. I remember taking him along the sea-front in his pushchair without a living soul around, and Rhodri and I taking shifts to be with him because he was so exhausting. We didn’t have a bloody clue about getting him off to sleep or into a routine. It’s as if that place has grown up with us as parents and with our children. When I come over the hill and see the town and the sea I always make a little ‘ah’ sound. It’s like seeing an old friend whom you really love and that’s why I want my caravan in Tenby. I feel at peace there.
March 11, Sunday
We have found a site and a caravan – hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! I can’t believe it. We went around the three sites we had arranged to see. The first one would be a bit like Magaluf in the summer, it was so big; the second one was nice but basically a collection of static caravans in a field and not much else, and the third one was tiny and a bit run down, and I just couldn’t see us there, really.
So we passed a caravan site we stayed on two years ago which is by a church that had a banner on it saying, Miracles Can Happen and I thought, Well, not today they haven’t. The site is a five-star one, with swimming pool and a club (Elis still talks about the bingo games we had there, and that was two years ago), and a gym and sauna and two play parks, and also a lovely garden centre next door with a really nice café, and the station is right behind the camp.
Rhodri said, ‘Have you tried there?’ I said, ‘Yes, I have, and they emailed back and said they didn’t have any, plus we couldn’t afford it.’ So he said, ‘Well, just go in and ask.’ I went in and said we’d stayed there a few years ago and asked if they had any caravans for sale, and they did. I couldn’t believe it.
They showed us one which was not really suitable and the man said, ‘If you come back in a few hours, there�
�s another one which will be empty and I’ll show you that.’ So we had lunch and went to the beach and came back; he showed it to us and it was perfect. It’s a few years old and has the obligatory clashing carpets and upholstery, and it’s not squeaky clean new, but it is good inside and in a nice spot with a bit of green behind it. The site is clean and tidy, and the site owners are quite strict. They want to know who is in the caravans so that families feel they can let their children go to the park on their own without worrying. There is a barrier entry to the site, so you can’t just drive onto it like the other three we went to see. So we sat down with them and they went through all the costs; we said we’d take all the details home with us and look at our finances. So we drove back and worked it all out, and if the truth be told it is a lot of money to pay in fees. We can’t really afford it, but, bugger it, we’re having it anyway. The children would have grown up and left home by the time we can actually afford anything, so if we don’t do it now, we never will. I want to be there in Tenby with my children who drive me mad sometimes, but they might as well be driving me mad in Tenby as at home in Cardiff.
March 12, Monday
‘Project vantastic’ has come to fruition, and we are now the proud owners of a Willerby Westmorland caravan. The deal is done, I’ve paid the deposit and as soon as the money comes through – hopefully this week – it is ours. My treatment finishes on 4th April, which is the first week of the Easter holidays, so it means that we can be down there for the rest of the holidays. I say ‘we’, but Rhodri will be working for some of the time. However, I can take the children as long as the radiotherapy hasn’t zapped me, and maybe my mother or Joanne will come to help me get it all set up. It is so exciting. I will stop buying clothes, I will shop more cheaply, and I will limit my eBay purchases to absolute essentials only. I will be a new, less materialistic, beach-combing, caravan-owning, serene, in-touch-with-nature-and-my-children, mother. Ah!
March 19, Monday
God knows what I have been doing this week but I never seem to have a minute to myself. Having radiotherapy is a bit like having a job suddenly. I know it’s not an eight-hour day, but I’ve gone from doing nothing for long periods of time to suddenly having to be somewhere every day on time. How the hell I am going to do my real job, and all the hundred other things I also do, is beyond me. I keep thinking. How did I manage to fit all this in before? I know there is a tendency to fill the time with the amount of work you have to do, but I forget that I basically ran around like a blue-arsed fly, completely stressed out all the time, never sitting down until about ten o’clock at night, not going to bed until about twelve. God, no wonder I drank alcohol.
It is so easy to see, when you can sit back and think, that this is a stressful life, yet thousands of women do it every day, all of the time. I know that men, well, some of them, do their bit and I know Rhodri genuinely believes he does half of what needs doing in this house, but he doesn’t and if I say that to him he goes mad. He doesn’t see all the hundreds of little jobs that he has NEVER had to do. He has never cleaned either the toilet or the bathroom – he wouldn’t know where to start. He has never washed a floor, he has never sewed any of Elis’s clothes, he doesn’t iron, he has never done any of the painting in this house. I know he would do them IF I ASKED. That is what infuriates me about men. They say, ‘All you have to do is ask,’ and you think, If I had to be asked for every single thing I did in this house, nothing would get done.
I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO ASK. I want him to see that something needs doing, and do it, like I do, not complain about it, not whine to me that he has had to fill the dishwasher three times. All I do for most of the week is fill and empty the insatiable gaping hole that is the dishwasher. Men never fail to amaze me. Rhodri has a very responsible job – he is a director who works on productions where sometimes there are hundreds of people to orchestrate and position, and he works with set designers and lighting directors and cameramen and orchestras and singers and a whole team of support people, to produce hours, sometimes, of television – and I cannot for one minute imagine him sitting there and staring into space until someone asks him to do something.
Oh no, because that is the world of work which is his domain and he is the one who is doing the asking there, he is the one who takes control and gets people motivated and works it all out because work is what is really important, and anything that isn’t work is unimportant and he really doesn’t want to do it. It’s not just Rhodri, it is most men who are like that.
The older I have become, the more I realise that men and women are never going to get it right. Along with many of my female friends, and we are all educated women with good jobs, we feel that our families, our children, are central to our existence.
I’m not saying that Elis and Osh are not central to Rhodri’s existence, because they are; it is just that for us, children are the number one thing and everything else orbits around them. We would give up our careers tomorrow if we thought that it affected our children adversely, but men are defined by their work in a way that we don’t feel we have to be.
I just think I am forty, a mother of two children, I don’t feel that I have anything to prove to anyone. It’s not having had cancer, although that just serves to strengthen it, it is because for me being a mother is the most fundamental part of my existence. I grew two human beings inside my womb and I have to look after them, and although I consider myself to be a feminist, in many ways having those children has re-shaped my existence. It’s not as if I’m one of these middle-class, breastfeeding-up-to-the-age-of-four earth mothers. I’m not like that, that’s just the way it is for me.
God, I’m not sure where this rant is coming from, other than this weekend I was sick and tired of tidying up because tidying up with children in the house is like trying to hit a moving target, it’s virtually impossible. I asked Rhodri if he would tidy Elis’s bedroom and he said, ‘You could ask me in a proper voice,’ and I said, ‘That was my proper voice.’ OK, it was a little on the terse side, but if I had a pound for every time I have cleaned that room, I would be living in the Bahamas by now.
I said, ‘I’m just sick of tidying this bloody house,’ and Rhodri said, ‘I have filled the dishwasher three times today.’
‘That’s what I have to do every day of the bloody week,’ I said crossly, ‘but it is so dull and monotonous that I cannot bring myself to tell you about it, unlike you, who thinks that you are a martyr doing the things I do every bloody, boring day of my life.’
God, I desperately need a job but, if I have a job, will it all descend into chaos and be too stressful? Will I be able to cope with it all? What I need is a wife, just like me, well actually without the nagging bit, to look after me.
My menopausal symptoms continue. I haven’t seen Rosie for a few weeks, with one thing and another, but saw her today and she said radiotherapy can give you flushes like that because it’s heating up your body. I also have the night sweats where you go to bed perfectly normal and wake up in a ball of perspiration. Fortunately my sleep doesn’t seem to be affected by it. I just have a drink of water and kick the blankets off and go back to sleep. I do think that I am very irritable and moody, especially with Rhodri and Elis. Elis has been driving me mad. I went to Lord of the Dance on Saturday, which was absolutely fab and I really did want to rip the male dancers’ shirts off and have sex with them – thus proving that the sex drive can always come back when you want it to. My Auntie Janet came with me, as did my mother and my sister.
Janet has three boys who have grown up now, and she said that with her eldest she always felt that she had to have the last word because he would never let it drop, and I said I was the same with Elis. She said you have to ignore it and turn your back on them and walk away, otherwise you will be at loggerheads for years and she is right.
Had a cheque through for the caravan, but it is in both our names. We have never had a joint account – a very shrewd move on Rhodri’s part, who no doubt picked up very early on that I am a
spendaholic – and so we now have to wait for a cheque in just my name, so this has delayed us. I’m hoping though, that the caravan-selling man, Bob, will let us go there on Friday without the money in the account. I’ll call tomorrow and ask in my loveliest voice.
Kate came over on Friday with MARK, yes, her man. He is very nice and she seems very relaxed in his company. Kate called in for a drink and ended up staying for dinner – I am trying to perfect Coq au Vin. I cooked it once for my mother, Sarah and Aidan and they have made jokes about it ever since (heathens). So Kate and Mark had some food and I kept topping up my and Kate’s wine glass and was quite drunk by the end. Mark kept saying to Kate, ‘We should go, we have to get up early in the morning,’ and Kate kept saying, ‘I’ll have a drop more, Shelley,’ and Rhodri said that Mark could see his leg-over slipping away with every glass of wine Kate had!
Radiotherapy is fine, no problems at all, although the waiting is a bit of a pain. They kept me waiting for two hours one day because someone had forgotten to tell me that I needed to report to reception, which I had been told not to do the day before, by someone else. So I was there for an hour watching everyone go in before I mentioned it, and then I was annoyed that they had seen me there for an hour and not said anything. There was another woman there and the same thing happened to her as well. We were saying to each other that they could see us there, etcetera and I said to her, ‘I don’t know why I’m complaining, I’ve got nothing else to do,’ and she said, ‘No, I haven’t either.’
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 25
