All of these things are suddenly being put into bodies that
have grown strong off the back of a stable fifty thousand-year-old diet. This
has to be a shock to the system.
The question shouldn’t be why are we all getting fat and
unhealthy and filling cancer wards all of the time; it should be why are some
of us getting away with it? And what lies in store for those of us who do?
Talking purely as a species now, I reckon we’ve got to be
looking at extinction. Forget about World War III and Atomic Armageddon and
alien invasions because we don’t need them. We’re already doing it to
ourselves. I mean you simply can’t dilly-dally with all the basics to such an
extent without doing yourself and future generations incalculable harm. Nature
simply won’t allow you and she’s the one in charge. It’s all right though,
don’t panic, us here and now have nothing in particular to worry about. Like
with everything in nature, extinction is a painfully slow process (the
dinosaurs took about a million years to turn up their claws), but we’ve
certainly got ourselves pointed in the right direction and that’s a start.
Yeah, okay this whole argument’s been going around for
donkey’s years so I won’t lecture any further. All I wanted to say was that
Sally’s illness really got me thinking about a few things that actually
mattered and for the first time in my life my eyes were open.
Also, cancer’s a funny old thing, because it’s a disease
that comes from within. It’s not like AIDS or rabies or Hepatitis or flu where
you can point at one bloke/needle/bat and say “he’s the one that gave it to me,
he’s the one to blame” because you’ve given it to yourself. But that’s a hard
nut to swallow, so people start looking around for others to blame.
Tobacco companies, drinks companies, petrol companies,
battery farmers, dairy farmers, mobile phone companies, pit owners, factory
bosses and talcum powder.
It’s always everyone else’s fault. Never ours.
And there’s certainly something to that because it probably
is. These industrialists are generally a load of corrupt arseholes who have
been poisoning us for the past hundred years or so just to fill their pockets
and swimming pools. But that’s also wrong because it’s not completely their
fault. It’s yours and mine too because in most case we do have a choice (mobile
phone masts and brown sauce being the obvious exceptions). You can choose not
to smoke, not to drink, not to live on deep-fat fried micro-chips and not to
spend all day downloading ringtones until you’ve barbecued your fingers. It’s
as simple as that. You’ve got the power.
I’m lecturing again aren’t I? Okay, I’ll cut it out and end
the sermon before I come across as some sort of tree-hugging sissy. There’s
nothing worse than an ex-smoker/drinker/kebab eater is there?
Anyway, it was everyone’s fault and our fault too, but you
know what, I really hated being a victim and from what I could tell Sally
wasn’t too keen on it either, so we made a conscious decision to try and forget
about the blame game and concentrate on what we could do to put things right.
People are always saying that you have to stay positive when
the chips are down and I really came to believe in these words over the period
of Sally’s illness. After all, who cares if it was all ICI or Osama bin Laden’s
fault? Running around moaning and bleating about it wasn’t going to do any
good, least of all Sally. But a positive, upbeat outlook? You can’t put a price
on that.
Seriously, sometimes that’s the best medicine of all. See,
your brain might’ve got you into this mess, but it also held the power to get
you out of it? And I’m not talking about signing over your life savings to Ali
Bongo the miracle faith healer or being irritated to death by the eminently
punchable
Patch Adams
, I’m just
talking about being positive and staying upbeat and believing that you’re on
the mend, as this can give you the strength you need to get through what you’ve
got to get through.
Which in Sally’s case was chemotherapy.
One of the few positives of Sally’s chemotherapy was that
she could be treated as an out-patient, which was a major plus. Hospitals are
grim places at the best of times and just being in them is a constant reminder
that you’re either sick, pregnant or a doctor. So being able to stay at home
was a major plus for Sally.
Her first treatment was scheduled for three o’clock in the
afternoon, so we had to set the alarm for twelve hours earlier and get up in
the middle of the night so that Sally could take her pre-med. Dexamethasone is
how you spell it, but don’t ask me how you pronounce it. I still haven’t got it
right and every time I try to within earshot of a doctor, they almost always
turn around and laugh.
The tablets were to be taken twelve and six hours before the
start of treatment and sitting next to Sally on the bed as she stared at them
in her hand was the beginning for both of us.
“Do you want fresh water?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “But I’d love a big glass
of wine.”
“Alkie,” I said. “Oh, and junkie too,” I added, when I
remembered the pills. Sally smiled and sent the pills down. We went back to bed
and lay like spoons until we eventually drifted off to sleep.
It felt like I’d barely got my eyes shut before the alarm
went off again, but sure enough it was half past eight. Time to get up and time
for Sally to take another dose. Sally rolled her head over on the pillow beside
me and shone her pretty green eyes up at me in a way that made me wonder if
they’d closed at all last night.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, stupidly.
“Like a million lira,” she replied.
“Well, I’m off out with the boys later today. Game of golf,
a few pints at lunchtime and curry for dinner. Might even try that new
lap-dancing place in Camberley this evening. What are you up to today?”
“Just my chemo,” she replied.
“Oh well, don’t wait up…” I started to tell her before she
stifled my nonsense with a back-breaking embrace.
The worse thing about having an appointment in the middle of
the afternoon is that you’ve got to somehow try to make it through the morning
and lunchtime with nothing else on your mind except your three o’clock
appointment. I guess this is why they had executions in the morning. Don’t get
me wrong, I don’t think there’s ever a good time to fall down a short drop with
an even shorter piece of rope tied around your neck, but on the whole, I think
if it had to happen I’d rather get it out of the way first thing.
The papers and telly were still packed full of war, death
and famine, so I cancelled my subscription with the newsagents and unplugged
the aerial to create a sanctuary of positive energy, which sounded like just
the ticket – if a bit gay.
However, this did make it somewhat harder to fill in all the
silences and distract Sally when she needed distracting, such as this morning,
but I did my very utmost and over the past couple of weeks had dug out all our
old favourite books, DVDs, craft kits and board games. Unbelievably, that much
derided painting-by-numbers kit I got her for Christmas even got the dust blown
off its lid.
“When have you got to go back to work? You must’ve used your
entire year’s holiday up by now?” she asked. She’d asked me this several times
already over the last couple of days but could never remember my answer.
“Oh not for another week. Norman reckons he’s having too
much fun getting this month’s issue out, so he told me to take as much time as
I needed.”
“Do you think you should go back in a day or so, just so
that he doesn’t think you’re swinging the lead? Or if not, maybe you should
just do that report he wanted so that you’ve at least got something to show for
when you go back.”
“What report?” I asked, not a clue what she was talking
about.
“You know, that report he wanted you to do before
Christmas.”
I searched the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain and
eventually found something that looked and felt about the right shape but I
told Sally not to worry about it. “If I’ve forgotten about it then I’m sure
Norman has too.”
We spent the rest of the morning and lunchtime filling the
hours where we could. Sally took a long, hot bath, washed her hair and plucked
her eyebrows, then spent an inconceivable amount of time painting her nails,
applying her make-up and getting herself ready so that when she emerged she
looked more like she was going to a Royal garden party than a chemotherapy
appointment.
“Well, if I’ve got to feel dreadful, I want to at least look
good,” she explained, and I couldn’t have loved her more had she been holding a
gun to a kitten’s head and demanding my undying devotion.
‘Side effects’ is a funny phrase,
isn’t it? It makes you think that something small and rather insignificant
happens next to the main event. Like a sideshow, or a sidekick, but curiously
that’s not how side effects feel. The funny thing with my cancer was that it
didn’t actually hurt. I was tender from time to time and it gave me a little
inexplicable indigestion, but by and large we’d always got on quite well. I can’t
say the same for Taxol. It’s been a week since my first session and I’m just
about getting over (or used to) the worst of it. My muscles ache and I swing
between exhausted and nauseous like a broken barometer. The pins and needles in
my fingers sometimes get so bad that I can’t hold a pen, and I’m finding it
near impossible to hold down some of Andrew’s weird and “wonderful” recipes
– though I’m not entirely sure how much of that is down to the Taxol. And
then, there’s my hair. I’m already started to clog up the bathroom plug holes
and I know it’s only going to get worse, but I can’t decide whether to bite the
bullet and go for a Sinead O’Connor right away or wait a few more weeks and try
to Bobby Charlton it out a bit longer (whose descriptions do you think those
are?).
Andrew is currently looking into wigs. He says he read in
one of his leaflets that wigs can be important psychological crutches. That
maybe so, but they’re also pretty expensive. The good ones, that is. Spend
anything less than three or four hundred pounds and I might as well walk around
with the mop on my head. I know I can get free wigs on the NHS but I think I
might dodge the whole wig issue altogether in favour of a hat.
With this in mind, I am leafing through several catalogues
in search of a suitable bonnet. I believe they’re coming back in fashion. They
must be, they seem all the rage in the out-patients’ clinic.
I stayed in the car for Sally’s
first support group meeting. Not because I couldn’t bear the thought of having
to spend an afternoon surrounded by a load of people with cancer, but because
Sally didn’t want me to come in with her. She was apprehensive about what lay
in store but nevertheless she was determined to brave it alone. She likened it
to those sissy first year pupils who cried on the first day of school and who
wouldn’t let their mothers leave so that every autumn Sally would have to spend
a day teaching half a dozen house wives what the letter A looked like. Mind
you, she reckoned one or two of them probably needed it.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” she asked when I pulled up
into the car park.
“Of course,” I reassured her, feeling half-snubbed and
half-relieved.
“Okay, I’ll see you out here at four. What are you going to
do?”
“I don’t know. Go to the pub and get slaughtered, I
suppose,” I replied. Sally said she wished she could come with me, then gave me
a kiss and climbed out of the car. “Play nice with the other sickies,” I called
at her through the wound-down window, then instantly regretted it when one such
sicky with no eyebrows and a similar hat to Sally’s walked past a split-second
later.
They disappeared through the door and into their meeting, so
I climbed out from underneath the dashboard and wondered what I should do with
myself. I decided not to spend the entire hour staring at the door and set
about searching for ways to distract my brain, having not thought to buy a
paper and reluctant to go wandering off looking for a newsagents in case Sally
needed a quick getaway.
I spent ten minutes playing with the stereo, trying to
remember how to store stations on the preset buttons and lost Radio 2
altogether before giving up and looking for something else to occupy my
thoughts.
My dashboard was pretty dusty so I found a packet of tissues
in the glove box and gave it a wipe, then turned my attention to my
wing-mirrors and gave them a spit and polish too until I could virtually see
the car behind in them – very unusual for my mirrors. Then I took out all
the mats and gave them a bit of a shake. Then I neatly ordered everything in my
boot. Then I cleared all the old car park tickets and sweet wrappers out of the
compartments down the side of both doors and found a rubbish bin. Then I played
with my radio again.
Then I saw how far my seat could recline.
Then I looked at my watch and the door again.
I was just wondering if I should start the car and do a
couple of circuits of the car park in order to find a better – nay the
best – parking spot when my mobile rang. No number came up to indicate
who was calling but I answered it anyway, thankful for the distraction.
“Hello?”
“Andrew, it’s Godfrey,” a morose voice moaned somewhere off
in telephone land.
“Oh, hello Godfrey, where are you?” I asked, checking my
watch to see that I only had another fifteen minutes to fill before Sally was
finished.
“Well I’m at work ain’t I? Where else am I going to be on a
Tuesday afternoon?” he pointed out, though his pointing seemed to point more at
me than it did in him. See, while Norman had given me a week’s compassionate
leave to be with Sally when she’d gone in for her surgery, he’d instantly
doubled it when the doctors had found more than we’d bargained for and allowed
me to throw in my entire year’s holiday allocation so that I hadn’t actually been
anywhere near the office in over six weeks. I was still doing a few bits and
bobs on the magazine that either Norman or Godfrey posted or emailed me,
including all of my regular columns and features, but the majority of the
day-to-day running was being shouldered by Norman, which is remarkable when you
think about it. How many other bosses would’ve done the same? Not many. And
even though the workload wasn’t exactly breaking rocks for eights hours a day
it still spoke volumes about Norman.