CYCLE 4 DAY 1
It’s welcome to cycle four day one and I awake to coffee and a bacon sandwich, which my partner has brought me as she rose early to log on at work. I get my self started for the day by picking my chemo clothes for the day and downing my block steroids and other drugs I am using. Its another night mare journey to the hospital or more precisely to get into their parking facility. It is bizarre, the entry gate shows FULL and when we arrive on the third floor of a five story car park there are huge numbers of empty parking spaces. Too late to go and have a rant to the car park office although my PMT (pre Medication Tension) urges me to. We get to the poison ward via the sweet vending machine and I hand in my card and get the usual “wait next door” response. So we settle into some comfy seats and of course I get in first with my pre-emptive visit to the loo.
On returning I have a look at my surroundings and note the lift has been turned in to a giant sepsis advisory to clients. In effect it suggests asking the medical staff “is this Sepsis”. I am bemused is this not a question all medical staff should be asking themselves when presented with a set of symptoms? Are we now to self diagnose what we have and then suggest it to staff? Will my GP be expecting to open up with “well Roland what is your diagnosis today, did you google it? You did, excellent I will just google it too. It seems you are right, what drugs do you want?”
Feeling comfortable I grab a paper and read inconsequential stuff till the call of the Kindle takes over and I cosy up to Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, which will prove revelationary on a cross trainer later. Then I get called to be poisoned. My nurse shows me to a chair not a recliner and I note there are recliners free. Has the oncologist, “he who has made a pact with the devil” started to read my blog. I have regret writing that I thought he was a twat in the last blog if I am not going to get a recliner. Oncologists revenge could be nasty. First time cannula in, this nurse is new to me but is good. She jiggles my veins about and notes they move about quite a bit (very different from the wriggle vein events on earlier visits), she takes stock and then selects one, then straight in first time. She can do me again next time, very professional and thoughtful. So I’m hooked up to my bag for an hour with my bags of M&Ms and flask of Lucozade, free to read my Kindle as my partner goes to meet a friend downstairs who is also in chemo and seeing her oncologist. So time passes and I am enthralled by my book as it is about one of my core structures in my personal universe, existentialism, so I am familiar with the people and the philosophy involved. All good things come to an end including as bag poison and a its smaller flush through saline bag.
I’ve packed my box of self stabbing sticks and my next block dose of steroids for the next cycle and I am set free to indulge in a Cosy Club lunch in town on the way home. But before I leave the poison suite I am asked to fill in a feedback form about my experience of the day, which I gladly do. On the reverse side of the form I am asked details about myself. Usual stuff, ethnicity, colour, and so on until I get to gender: male or female? I have no testosterone, am getting fat, I have hot sweats, and I suffer from PMT. I draw in a Gender Fluid box and tick it with a question mark. I wonder if I will get to see a change on their feedback form? My partner and I take our time over the meal and time passes by until mid afternoon at which point work and other things begin to need attention. We drive home and I stow my drugs and get my gym kit ready while my partner logs on to work and checks the world has not gone pear shaped in her absence.
We head for the gym where I get up onto the gym floor and climb up on my trusty cross trainer while my partner meets up with her personal trainer. My Fitbit tells me its only got 20% and needs charging and refuses to show me anything else, possibly no 10,000 step celebration for me today so I concentrate on the calories count. So iPod blaring in my ears I set off for my hour, focussed on getting as much post poisoning fluid down me as possible, two and half litres a day to be precis . Of course I drift off into fantasy and run through one or two familiar ones but I am drawn back to the Existential Café that I was reading earlier, again and gain the theme of choice came back to me, we are always changing and constantly dealing with the anxiety of a making the decisions that shape who we are. It is what makes us human and that taking responsibility not only for us but for all humanity in our decision making is Sartre’s standpoint. It is the philosophy that we live not an abstract philosophical debate, it is who we are and how we choose to live. Crudely put by me, I recommend it is read. But as I cross train I wonder why I have chosen to characterise my battle with cancer as a hinterland of desert, why did I choose this?
I think because their is something about cancer that isolates the self and makes one self centred and narcissistic. I am aware that I can talk to friends, write to friend, WhatsApp friends and spend an inordinate amount of time selfishly talking about me and my experience of cancer, chemo and my inner workings. I hate this about my self and the fact that I am letting cancer do this to me. Yet I have chosen this. What I have chosen I can discard and choose again, but for what. The sand beneath me and the heat feel right but it is all sand, dead and barren with only sky above it in which I chose a direction to move on my own. In an instant I see a desert island surrounded by sea, a heaving teeming sea full of life, a real world full of possibilities, of unbelievable miracles of nature and the myths of magic.
A world in which Freud dissected 400 eels looking for their sex organs and gave up in failure not knowing that eels did not develop them until they returned to the Sargasso sea to spawn. Freud just looked in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is also a world where mermaids swim and Moby Dick entices Captain Ahab to his obsessional death. All this is what I now choose as the image for my war. Yes I am alone, and I may not escape but I have the ocean of life around me to dip into, to swim in, to feed from, to watch and draw upon, to study and to be part of. I choose my hinterland of timelessness to be a desert island amidst the element from which I evolved. Yes that fits my personal universe and I can still choose my direction North, guided by the stars above my island.
Before I realise my Fitbit celebrates 10,000 steps and soon I am climbing down from the cross trainer a happier man. A shower and take a rest in the lounge downing more liquid until my partner arrives to drive me home and feed me cheese on toast as I watch football.
I blog and think about my day. The island surrounded by the ocean feels right and I think about all those fish that swim north to spawn and I wonder if my unconscious is trying to send me north to grow working testicles since mine have been rendered inoperative through hormone depletion therapy. I always knew my unconscious and my brain were on my side, but trying to to grow me new balls is a bit beyond the regular themes. I suspect that those parts of me are trying to alleviate the pain of feeling less of a man than I did, physically at least, I suppose at some level I feel emasculated both physically and mentally. That’s quite a tough one to take, so I appreciate my unconscious efforts to try and do what it can to help. Now it is time to rest and prepare to enter the ocean tomorrow and swim a bit whilst resisting the urge to swim north in search of balls.
