30/6/10
“Another state has been reached - but in your case think on it as recovery - this is the effect of the chemo which is zapping anything that may be remaining after having been cleared out first. So things may look bad and make you feel down and afraid, but at the end of the chemo treatment, you will be clear and your hair will grow back again - the reverse of what you fear.”
This e mail from my friend Melissa this morning puts things back into proportion. Living alone it is possible to get things skewed and for a time I felt that incipient baldness meant imminent death.
She is right, it doesn’t. It’s just part of taking the cure.
On Skype to a friend in Poland I could see a tiny image of myself in the corner of the screen. Realised that my hairline is receding, a white shadow across my brow and two patches appearing above my temples. Laughed about it with her and it didn’t seem so bad. Thank God for friends.
Three days after the chemo I picked up and I am still well – sitting in my garden like a lady of leisure. She is a lady I don’t really know well at all, a mystery woman sitting in a bower garlanded by stephanotis and euphorbia.
I have landscaped the garden, stocked it with plants, cut the grass, put in vegetables, lobbed snails over the fence, acquired a new shed and painted it, but I have never actually sat in my garden and really looked at it before.
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Hair Today
9am
My hair is starting its promised journey. Tufts of it clog the plug hole.
Why not, I knew it would go, despite the painful experiment with cooling.
But still I thought it wouldn't go - that I would be different. Just as I would never be the sort of person to get cancer, I would never go bald and look like a victim.The two other people I knew who had chemo and went bald both died.
Putting the wet loops of hair into the waste bin my heart pounds. Feel tearful, sit and cry. Then feel elated; part of me wants it to go, to get it over, and also to have the full experience.
Text my mother far away in her village to tell her about my hair. She texts back to say, "think of all those lovely wigs."
It misses the mark - I want her to phone me, to help me feel strong about this, but she sends a text saying she is going to "a strawberry tea at the Hospice."
Think of wigs, look on the bright side, stiff upper lip. No need to make a fuss, or pick up a phone.
Go for a walk in the park, wearing my sun-glasses so no one sees my red eyes.
My hair is starting its promised journey. Tufts of it clog the plug hole.
Why not, I knew it would go, despite the painful experiment with cooling.
But still I thought it wouldn't go - that I would be different. Just as I would never be the sort of person to get cancer, I would never go bald and look like a victim.The two other people I knew who had chemo and went bald both died.
Putting the wet loops of hair into the waste bin my heart pounds. Feel tearful, sit and cry. Then feel elated; part of me wants it to go, to get it over, and also to have the full experience.
Text my mother far away in her village to tell her about my hair. She texts back to say, "think of all those lovely wigs."
It misses the mark - I want her to phone me, to help me feel strong about this, but she sends a text saying she is going to "a strawberry tea at the Hospice."
Think of wigs, look on the bright side, stiff upper lip. No need to make a fuss, or pick up a phone.
Go for a walk in the park, wearing my sun-glasses so no one sees my red eyes.
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Maggie's For Company
I am sick of myself. What am I doing with my life? Nothing. After my failure to get a single painting into a single public competition, apart from the Bedford Park Arts Festival, where I didn’t sell anything, I have stopped painting.
I didn’t even manage to get a third prize in the festival marmalade contest. That has put me off marmalade. As this long summer of chemotherapy gets under way I am as creative and resourceful as a rice pudding.
When you are left to your own devices, through unemployment, illness or perhaps locked up for the safety of the public, time itself is the task that has to be met.
That was probably why when I got an unexpected call from softly spoken “Lorraine” offering me a free massage, I agreed to have it.
When you enter the new career and lifestyle that is cancer, you get offered all kind of unexpected things.
She also suggested I should try Maggie’s, the cancer support centre in the grounds of Charing Cross Hospital. I said I’d do that as well. I also accepted a free “counselling” session while I was at it.
In the oncology waiting room at Charing Cross, the girl on the desk gestured to some seats; the same high backed ones in pastel shades they’ve got at Garry. The same type of people in them too; fat men in shorts and women in bad wigs attached to baseball caps.
That whole floor though is light and spacious. Apparently their chemo clinic is similarly comfortable. I wonder if I can put in for a transfer.
The therapy room was like a large air-conditioned office. The counsellor very young and kindly. We chatted for an hour; I gave out details of my tortuous past but didn’t feel I had anything to say about the present.
“I am not worried about losing my hair,” I told him, but perhaps I am. I won’t know how I really feel until my locks make a sudden dash from my pate to the pillow or shower tray.
I did admit that I am afraid about the future – the long walk through the Valley of the Shadow which may go on for years, with the possibility that “it” might come back. I am afraid of having to live with that.
He said roughly what everyone says to this – that no one knows the hour of his death, or as a cancer support nurse put it a few weeks back, “I haven’t got a crystal ball Miss Kelly.”
He cheered me up when he told me he was a former social worker in an hospice. The work he does now is easier because some of his clients survive. “Survive,” is the word I need to hear more than any other.
I liked him, offering gentleness and humility against the doctors' hard brilliance and often tub-thumping, eye-watering honesty.
I went slowly and tentatively to Maggie’s, a large orange coloured structure by Richard Rogers, to the side of the hospital, with smooth Zen looking stone seats outside.
In side it reminded me of a children’s library I joined in the early 60s, all bright spot colours and Swedish style shelving. There was a kitchen island with a glass top in the middle of the main room where people could make tea and prepare food. Beyond that rooms full of greenery, sofas and low seats. It offers an “expressive art group,” Tai Chi, stress management classes, a “young women’s group,” Yoga, gardening, interspersed with the more ominous, such as the “Prostate Networking Group.”
Attractive middle class women in light floral skirts descended offering information and showing me round all the little alcoves and bowers among the wood shelving.
The place is chiefly about information, the walls lined with recycled paper booklets decorated with photos of mixed race couples gardening and washing dishes. This a world where everyone has cancer.
The booklets covered almost every one of the two hundred kinds of known cancer and related problems, including Urostomy, “Breathlessness and Sex,” and the “Molar Pregnancy support group.”
I settled down for a while with “A laryngectomee’s travel guide to the British Isles,” before dipping nervously into “Coping with Hair Loss.”
Like the others this was a cheery little pamphlet full of basic common sense and useful tips, suggesting one should draw attention away from one’s head by wearing brightly coloured sweaters and interesting jewellery.
But many of them slip into what I call, “modern information.” The booklet on mouth ulcers for instance suggested, “If you get ulcers do not eat hot, spicy food as this will hurt your mouth.”
The one on self-employment and cancer suggested it was a “good idea to avoid people with sore throats, flu, diarrhoea and vomiting, or other kinds of infection such as chicken pox.”
I can’t help remembering doing that when I still lived in the other world of the well.
The leaflets sometimes slipped into the equivalent of putting a label on a bag of peanuts saying that the product contains nuts and putting up notices showing people how to wash their hands. I enjoy collecting these and got a good one recently when the Royal Mail failed to deliver a package through my door. I rang their re-delivery number and a recorded message advised, “The quickest way to get your mail re-delivered is to collect it yourself.”
This official habit of stating the bleedin’ obvious is about an infantilised culture where people are assumed to have poor English. But these pamphlets were so friendly and nice to look at and hold that you had to like them. They make you feel better, like the good women at the Maggie’s Centre themselves.
I took part in a relaxation group with a young woman called Maria. She lay on one couch while I sat on a chair with my feet on another. The woman in charge put on a loop of ambient music and we drifted away in never ending circles to the sound of a whale trying to locate itself in a vast ocean.
It was a pleasant thirty minutes and afterwards I told Maria, from Puglia in Italy, that I liked her cropped hair style. She looked young and sexy, very like Sinead O' Connor, thirty at the most, with a round cheerful face. I had my hair like that when I was a student in the 1970s, trying to resemble a member of the Baader Meinhoff gang.
Strangers turning up at our door would draw back in fear when they saw me and I liked that in those days.
“I bet I will lose it all again now,” she said, “Just like I lost it all before.”
She had been free of breast cancer for five years, now it had come back with a vengeance. She had suffered a collapsed bowel involving an emergency operation, had a colostomy, and I could see she was wearing an intravenous line into her chest. She was having chemotherapy every day.
I left the relaxation room with a kind of dead, stunned feeling and a question drowning out the whale music, why do people have to suffer like that? Why a second crucifixion for this girl?
Maggie’s is a place for story telling, exchanges and mutual support. It insists that we can help each other, but it is not a cosy fire-side. You have to be prepared to listen to horror stories and tragic tales. Many of the women sitting round the table look like sad little birds. They stare dismally at any food presented and I wonder if they have always done that, even when they were well.
There was salad and taboule on the main table. A middle aged man looked at me with mild interest. He seemed to be with an elderly working class woman who talked a lot in a worldly wise voice. No one said anything about their circumstances, while a very thin, bronzed woman with hair like a cross between Sarah Jessica Parker and a Yorkshire terrier hovered about in the background with a colourful catalogue of wigs.
Marie reappeared smiling at me, her black eyes glistening with warmth. Perhaps she was glad that I had listened to her story. There was nothing else I could do for her.
I ate my salad leaves feeling the separation between what you say and what you feel – the almost metallic taste of fear in my mouth. Everyone looks cheerful but that is often the real feeling that you take away with you secretly and try to bury at home.
Later I spent an hour with Lorraine the masseur in another darkened room with more ambient music, while she massaged the back of my neck, putting her hands underneath and pulling the muscles in my neck upwards. I felt some of my hair tangled around her fingers, could hear it crackling as she moved and knew with a kind of shame that it was coming out.
I didn’t even manage to get a third prize in the festival marmalade contest. That has put me off marmalade. As this long summer of chemotherapy gets under way I am as creative and resourceful as a rice pudding.
When you are left to your own devices, through unemployment, illness or perhaps locked up for the safety of the public, time itself is the task that has to be met.
That was probably why when I got an unexpected call from softly spoken “Lorraine” offering me a free massage, I agreed to have it.
When you enter the new career and lifestyle that is cancer, you get offered all kind of unexpected things.
She also suggested I should try Maggie’s, the cancer support centre in the grounds of Charing Cross Hospital. I said I’d do that as well. I also accepted a free “counselling” session while I was at it.
In the oncology waiting room at Charing Cross, the girl on the desk gestured to some seats; the same high backed ones in pastel shades they’ve got at Garry. The same type of people in them too; fat men in shorts and women in bad wigs attached to baseball caps.
That whole floor though is light and spacious. Apparently their chemo clinic is similarly comfortable. I wonder if I can put in for a transfer.
The therapy room was like a large air-conditioned office. The counsellor very young and kindly. We chatted for an hour; I gave out details of my tortuous past but didn’t feel I had anything to say about the present.
“I am not worried about losing my hair,” I told him, but perhaps I am. I won’t know how I really feel until my locks make a sudden dash from my pate to the pillow or shower tray.
I did admit that I am afraid about the future – the long walk through the Valley of the Shadow which may go on for years, with the possibility that “it” might come back. I am afraid of having to live with that.
He said roughly what everyone says to this – that no one knows the hour of his death, or as a cancer support nurse put it a few weeks back, “I haven’t got a crystal ball Miss Kelly.”
He cheered me up when he told me he was a former social worker in an hospice. The work he does now is easier because some of his clients survive. “Survive,” is the word I need to hear more than any other.
I liked him, offering gentleness and humility against the doctors' hard brilliance and often tub-thumping, eye-watering honesty.
I went slowly and tentatively to Maggie’s, a large orange coloured structure by Richard Rogers, to the side of the hospital, with smooth Zen looking stone seats outside.
In side it reminded me of a children’s library I joined in the early 60s, all bright spot colours and Swedish style shelving. There was a kitchen island with a glass top in the middle of the main room where people could make tea and prepare food. Beyond that rooms full of greenery, sofas and low seats. It offers an “expressive art group,” Tai Chi, stress management classes, a “young women’s group,” Yoga, gardening, interspersed with the more ominous, such as the “Prostate Networking Group.”
Attractive middle class women in light floral skirts descended offering information and showing me round all the little alcoves and bowers among the wood shelving.
The place is chiefly about information, the walls lined with recycled paper booklets decorated with photos of mixed race couples gardening and washing dishes. This a world where everyone has cancer.
The booklets covered almost every one of the two hundred kinds of known cancer and related problems, including Urostomy, “Breathlessness and Sex,” and the “Molar Pregnancy support group.”
I settled down for a while with “A laryngectomee’s travel guide to the British Isles,” before dipping nervously into “Coping with Hair Loss.”
Like the others this was a cheery little pamphlet full of basic common sense and useful tips, suggesting one should draw attention away from one’s head by wearing brightly coloured sweaters and interesting jewellery.
But many of them slip into what I call, “modern information.” The booklet on mouth ulcers for instance suggested, “If you get ulcers do not eat hot, spicy food as this will hurt your mouth.”
The one on self-employment and cancer suggested it was a “good idea to avoid people with sore throats, flu, diarrhoea and vomiting, or other kinds of infection such as chicken pox.”
I can’t help remembering doing that when I still lived in the other world of the well.
The leaflets sometimes slipped into the equivalent of putting a label on a bag of peanuts saying that the product contains nuts and putting up notices showing people how to wash their hands. I enjoy collecting these and got a good one recently when the Royal Mail failed to deliver a package through my door. I rang their re-delivery number and a recorded message advised, “The quickest way to get your mail re-delivered is to collect it yourself.”
This official habit of stating the bleedin’ obvious is about an infantilised culture where people are assumed to have poor English. But these pamphlets were so friendly and nice to look at and hold that you had to like them. They make you feel better, like the good women at the Maggie’s Centre themselves.
I took part in a relaxation group with a young woman called Maria. She lay on one couch while I sat on a chair with my feet on another. The woman in charge put on a loop of ambient music and we drifted away in never ending circles to the sound of a whale trying to locate itself in a vast ocean.
It was a pleasant thirty minutes and afterwards I told Maria, from Puglia in Italy, that I liked her cropped hair style. She looked young and sexy, very like Sinead O' Connor, thirty at the most, with a round cheerful face. I had my hair like that when I was a student in the 1970s, trying to resemble a member of the Baader Meinhoff gang.
Strangers turning up at our door would draw back in fear when they saw me and I liked that in those days.
“I bet I will lose it all again now,” she said, “Just like I lost it all before.”
She had been free of breast cancer for five years, now it had come back with a vengeance. She had suffered a collapsed bowel involving an emergency operation, had a colostomy, and I could see she was wearing an intravenous line into her chest. She was having chemotherapy every day.
I left the relaxation room with a kind of dead, stunned feeling and a question drowning out the whale music, why do people have to suffer like that? Why a second crucifixion for this girl?
Maggie’s is a place for story telling, exchanges and mutual support. It insists that we can help each other, but it is not a cosy fire-side. You have to be prepared to listen to horror stories and tragic tales. Many of the women sitting round the table look like sad little birds. They stare dismally at any food presented and I wonder if they have always done that, even when they were well.
There was salad and taboule on the main table. A middle aged man looked at me with mild interest. He seemed to be with an elderly working class woman who talked a lot in a worldly wise voice. No one said anything about their circumstances, while a very thin, bronzed woman with hair like a cross between Sarah Jessica Parker and a Yorkshire terrier hovered about in the background with a colourful catalogue of wigs.
Marie reappeared smiling at me, her black eyes glistening with warmth. Perhaps she was glad that I had listened to her story. There was nothing else I could do for her.
I ate my salad leaves feeling the separation between what you say and what you feel – the almost metallic taste of fear in my mouth. Everyone looks cheerful but that is often the real feeling that you take away with you secretly and try to bury at home.
Later I spent an hour with Lorraine the masseur in another darkened room with more ambient music, while she massaged the back of my neck, putting her hands underneath and pulling the muscles in my neck upwards. I felt some of my hair tangled around her fingers, could hear it crackling as she moved and knew with a kind of shame that it was coming out.
Monday, 21 June 2010
Sod this for a game of soldiers!
Sod This
Well sod this for a game of soldiers! After only two days of the chemical treatment I have had enough.
I feel as if I am living in someone else’s body, one racked by a cross between indigestion and flu, and tortured by constant aches and pains in my joints, even joints I hardly knew I had.
At night I feel as if I am wearing a spiked, bony corset which sticks in my breasts and ribs. I am thirsty all the time, have to drink more water, so have to get up at least three times in the night to pee.
When I got back from the hospital on Wednesday, after the first chemo, I did a bit of gardening and got a few scratches on my wrist. Now I have an infection in my arm, a hard, broad red line racing up my arm. Perhaps it will kill me? I have to think about such odd things now, and do something about it quickly.
Four and a half months of this caution and curtailment, – on the bright side I suppose I could look on it as a time to think, read, rest, listen. A space where I don’t have to blame myself for anything too much, or berate myself for not achieving anything. How I long to be n a beach somewhere, with all this behind me.
Well sod this for a game of soldiers! After only two days of the chemical treatment I have had enough.
I feel as if I am living in someone else’s body, one racked by a cross between indigestion and flu, and tortured by constant aches and pains in my joints, even joints I hardly knew I had.
At night I feel as if I am wearing a spiked, bony corset which sticks in my breasts and ribs. I am thirsty all the time, have to drink more water, so have to get up at least three times in the night to pee.
When I got back from the hospital on Wednesday, after the first chemo, I did a bit of gardening and got a few scratches on my wrist. Now I have an infection in my arm, a hard, broad red line racing up my arm. Perhaps it will kill me? I have to think about such odd things now, and do something about it quickly.
Four and a half months of this caution and curtailment, – on the bright side I suppose I could look on it as a time to think, read, rest, listen. A space where I don’t have to blame myself for anything too much, or berate myself for not achieving anything. How I long to be n a beach somewhere, with all this behind me.
Friday, 18 June 2010
Chemo 1. First Sip of the Devil's Brew
The first person I saw when I got to Garry for my chemotherapy was old fat knees again, still in his shorts. I scowled at him. He was not hard to spot as the chemo clinic is just the other end of the corridor to the alcove where we had all waited the day before.
The patients sit in a row of chairs tightly packed together in a right-angle along two walls. It could be three walls but some helpful person has put a very large, dingy fish tank against one side, taking up space for about six more seats.
Little can be seen inside its Stygian gloom and its view is interrupted by a forest of intravenous stands, giving the patients their brew. There are not enough sockets along the wall, so nurses have to grapple behind the tank to find more plugs.
Above it is a large flat screen TV, showing the World Cup, also obscured by the tall stands. No one is bother about that, as all the patients are women apart from Fat Knees who keeps his head in a book.
There were tea making facilities, and every so often a friendly looking lady came round with fruit and very stale sandwiches, which reminded me of the old days of British Rail. Guests, standing and hovering or sitting on hard chairs, were not allowed to share the food.
I sat there from 10am till 4.30pm, patiently watching my two bags of chemicals empty. The Paclitaxel, which causes all the nasty side effects was in a red bag to protect it from the light and took longest, the Carboplatin took only an hour to go in, so I watched it keenly as it dripped away.
The whole thing took slightly longer as I decided to try out the scalp cooling treatment which is supposed to prevent hair loss.
This is a large plastic hat, shaped like a Mongolian helmet, which they press down on your head and fill with ice.
“It might give you a headache,” said the nurse vaguely. It felt as if I had just smashed a frozen lake with the top of my head. The pain was intense for about ten minutes and I thought I was going to vomit. The nurse stroked my hand and cooed encouragingly. My friend noticed that I’d gone totally white and that no one else was doing it.
I held on gritting my teeth until the pain abated as my head adjusted to the cold. It was then just heavy, and damp down the back of my neck. Later I had big ridges in my forehead.
I don't know why I went in for this rather hair-raising experiment as I don't care much about going bald that much, but I am curious to see if it works.
After this freezing you are not supposed to treat your hair with colour, use any products, or a hairdryer. So my hair will probably turn grey and look awful anyway. It will be interesting to see what colour it actually is. A leaflet about it also says you should also sleep on a silk pillow case, and rather sinisterly, “If you choose to visit your hairdresser whilst you are having this treatment this may lead to increased hair loss.”
That usually happens anyway when you see the bill.
When I got home, feeling perfectly well, I got an e-mail from one of my oldest friends telling me he’d just taken a school party to Canterbury Cathedral and said a prayer for me. He’d “taken it to the top.”
I also had a message from my Japanese friend in Ealing saying they had prayed for me in their church that morning, and another from a friend in Poland who seems to have set up a whole praying network for me across Poland and linking up with Polish churches in the UK.
I have stopped praying for myself as I’ve said all there is to say, so hearing that other people are doing it for me is a comfort – a kind of spiritual meals-on-wheels/ Home Help service.
Perhaps partly on account of this I decided to be nice to fat knees when I see him again in three weeks time.
The patients sit in a row of chairs tightly packed together in a right-angle along two walls. It could be three walls but some helpful person has put a very large, dingy fish tank against one side, taking up space for about six more seats.
Little can be seen inside its Stygian gloom and its view is interrupted by a forest of intravenous stands, giving the patients their brew. There are not enough sockets along the wall, so nurses have to grapple behind the tank to find more plugs.
Above it is a large flat screen TV, showing the World Cup, also obscured by the tall stands. No one is bother about that, as all the patients are women apart from Fat Knees who keeps his head in a book.
There were tea making facilities, and every so often a friendly looking lady came round with fruit and very stale sandwiches, which reminded me of the old days of British Rail. Guests, standing and hovering or sitting on hard chairs, were not allowed to share the food.
The room is partly divided by a curtain. Beyond the first bit most of the space was taken up by two large beds, with two middle aged Indian women lying on them, looking as if they half dead. They were surrounded by anguished but rather helpless looking male relatives.
I sat there from 10am till 4.30pm, patiently watching my two bags of chemicals empty. The Paclitaxel, which causes all the nasty side effects was in a red bag to protect it from the light and took longest, the Carboplatin took only an hour to go in, so I watched it keenly as it dripped away.
The whole thing took slightly longer as I decided to try out the scalp cooling treatment which is supposed to prevent hair loss.
This is a large plastic hat, shaped like a Mongolian helmet, which they press down on your head and fill with ice.
“It might give you a headache,” said the nurse vaguely. It felt as if I had just smashed a frozen lake with the top of my head. The pain was intense for about ten minutes and I thought I was going to vomit. The nurse stroked my hand and cooed encouragingly. My friend noticed that I’d gone totally white and that no one else was doing it.
I held on gritting my teeth until the pain abated as my head adjusted to the cold. It was then just heavy, and damp down the back of my neck. Later I had big ridges in my forehead.
I don't know why I went in for this rather hair-raising experiment as I don't care much about going bald that much, but I am curious to see if it works.
After this freezing you are not supposed to treat your hair with colour, use any products, or a hairdryer. So my hair will probably turn grey and look awful anyway. It will be interesting to see what colour it actually is. A leaflet about it also says you should also sleep on a silk pillow case, and rather sinisterly, “If you choose to visit your hairdresser whilst you are having this treatment this may lead to increased hair loss.”
That usually happens anyway when you see the bill.
When I got home, feeling perfectly well, I got an e-mail from one of my oldest friends telling me he’d just taken a school party to Canterbury Cathedral and said a prayer for me. He’d “taken it to the top.”
I also had a message from my Japanese friend in Ealing saying they had prayed for me in their church that morning, and another from a friend in Poland who seems to have set up a whole praying network for me across Poland and linking up with Polish churches in the UK.
I have stopped praying for myself as I’ve said all there is to say, so hearing that other people are doing it for me is a comfort – a kind of spiritual meals-on-wheels/ Home Help service.
Perhaps partly on account of this I decided to be nice to fat knees when I see him again in three weeks time.
Good Old Garry Again
Chemo is a two day process. You have to appear for tests the day before the real thing. The Garry girls on the desk told me to come later next time as I had waited so long to be seen the week before. All the people getting their chemo on the Tuesday have priority, but as everyone for either day is bunched in together your appointment time doesn’t count. Just turn up sometime in the morning is the rule.
A Malaysian looking lad taking blood told me that everything is chronically slow because the hospital computer system is so poor.
After ten minutes of standing tut tutting, a young man gave me his seat. I sat next to his mother, a round, jolly looking woman in a pink striped headscarf.
“It’s like Selfridge’s sale in here, isn’t it?” she said.
I asked her the big question, what exactly was “it” i.e. chemotherapy like? There is something redolent of torture about the very name and for some reason one wants all the bad news before it happens.
She looked as if I’d just asked her to describe the reasons we are at war in
“It’s hard work, and you never know the outcome,” said her son helpfully.
She told me she had put on a stone during her months of chemo, which was worrying. This was due to the steroids you have to take at the beginning each session, ten the night before and ten on the day.
She also said you have to be careful with hygiene and domestic chores as your immunity is so low. “I had to take a lot of care about that,” she said with disgust.
So I felt I had learned a little bit more about my immediate future, but not much.
Through an open door I could see one of the young women doctors I’d seen before, in what seemed a long time ago. I remembered her sapphire engagement ring. She was talking to another doctor about a holiday, perhaps her Honeymoon, she’d just spent sailing up the Amazon. She was so happy, blazing with a life before her.
Opposite me sat a fat elderly man in very tight short shorts. His legs and thighs, hairless through chemo, were shining white.
And we started a grumpy conversation about male dress, particularly those men in shorts on the tube who spread their legs wide.
“But you’ve got to keep in mind how lucky we are,” she said. “Fifty or even twenty years ago we wouldn’t be getting this treatment.”
According to Indian Government figures published in 2008,
Come Again?
Come Again
“A fine looking granulation,” said the doctor last week, looking down at a small scab on my abdomen when my hole finally closed.
All though in NHS hospitals you rarely see the same doctor twice, they all have a spectacular spray of unusual words – it pays to increase your word power, as the Reader’s Digest used to say, and you can do this in seconds if you have a serious condition.
I am currently toying with the word, “adjuvant.” That is the kind of chemo I am about to have, and it means, I think, following on after the removal of all cancerous parts. According to the dictionary it simply means, “A help. An ingredient to help the main ingredient.”
That sounds a bit worryingly pathetic, but it is better than having the sort needed to shrink existing tumours, or having chemo as palliative care. I am happy with that word, and say it over to myself; it sounds a bit like adulation and jubilant.
I also get letters from my consultants sent via my GP. These are often almost indecipherable.
British NHS surgeons are now under such pressure than they cannot be expected to write to the individual patient in lay person’s language.
A recent confidential poll of surgeons, released to the press on June 17th, suggested that almost one in five had been involved in an incident in which a patient was harmed, due to the need to cut up as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, to meet government targets.
The survey, carried out by Bournemouth University, shows that during a two week period 40% of respondents reported being involved in a ‘Near Miss’ (NM) in an operating theatre, where a patient was nearly harmed, while 19% recorded an ‘Adverse Event’ (AE), in which a patient was actually harmed.
This being the situation, I quite understand that they have piles of paperwork and have to dash off a letter to the local doctor as best they can. But these can make understanding what they are saying about you something equivalent to looking at hieroglyphics.
In my last letter I had, “debulked, metastic, seroma, immunohistrochemistry.”
Non of that was bad news luckily.
In previous ones; “Increased uptake,” “transient paraneoplastic manifestation,” (that meant stiff fingers) “endometrioid,” (I first had that one when I went for my results and they kept repeating it to me as if I was budgie learning to talk) and most interesting of all, “dirty necrosis.” I won’t be boasting about having that.
All these words are preferable to consultanol lung into metaphor. I am still getting over one professor telling me, when I was at my most fragile, that my cancer was “a Rottweiler not a poodle.”
I took that home and lived with it night and day.
Why do doctors nowadays feel they have to belt you over the head with the seriousness of you situation? They certainly don't go in for putting an optimistic light on anything. Most people who’ve been told they have cancer and are waiting for results are hardly in a frivolous mood sitting there with half a pint and cap and bells on. Most of them, if they are like me, think they are on the brink of death.
“A fine looking granulation,” said the doctor last week, looking down at a small scab on my abdomen when my hole finally closed.
All though in NHS hospitals you rarely see the same doctor twice, they all have a spectacular spray of unusual words – it pays to increase your word power, as the Reader’s Digest used to say, and you can do this in seconds if you have a serious condition.
I am currently toying with the word, “adjuvant.” That is the kind of chemo I am about to have, and it means, I think, following on after the removal of all cancerous parts. According to the dictionary it simply means, “A help. An ingredient to help the main ingredient.”
That sounds a bit worryingly pathetic, but it is better than having the sort needed to shrink existing tumours, or having chemo as palliative care. I am happy with that word, and say it over to myself; it sounds a bit like adulation and jubilant.
I also get letters from my consultants sent via my GP. These are often almost indecipherable.
British NHS surgeons are now under such pressure than they cannot be expected to write to the individual patient in lay person’s language.
A recent confidential poll of surgeons, released to the press on June 17th, suggested that almost one in five had been involved in an incident in which a patient was harmed, due to the need to cut up as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, to meet government targets.
The survey, carried out by Bournemouth University, shows that during a two week period 40% of respondents reported being involved in a ‘Near Miss’ (NM) in an operating theatre, where a patient was nearly harmed, while 19% recorded an ‘Adverse Event’ (AE), in which a patient was actually harmed.
This being the situation, I quite understand that they have piles of paperwork and have to dash off a letter to the local doctor as best they can. But these can make understanding what they are saying about you something equivalent to looking at hieroglyphics.
In my last letter I had, “debulked, metastic, seroma, immunohistrochemistry.”
Non of that was bad news luckily.
In previous ones; “Increased uptake,” “transient paraneoplastic manifestation,” (that meant stiff fingers) “endometrioid,” (I first had that one when I went for my results and they kept repeating it to me as if I was budgie learning to talk) and most interesting of all, “dirty necrosis.” I won’t be boasting about having that.
All these words are preferable to consultanol lung into metaphor. I am still getting over one professor telling me, when I was at my most fragile, that my cancer was “a Rottweiler not a poodle.”
I took that home and lived with it night and day.
Why do doctors nowadays feel they have to belt you over the head with the seriousness of you situation? They certainly don't go in for putting an optimistic light on anything. Most people who’ve been told they have cancer and are waiting for results are hardly in a frivolous mood sitting there with half a pint and cap and bells on. Most of them, if they are like me, think they are on the brink of death.
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