I’m looking forward to next week already, though not quite
as much as I looked forward to seeing Andrew at the end of my meeting.
It’s funny how it sometimes takes misfortune before you
realise just how fortunate you are.
It’s funny, but when you’re fit and
well, most of us are pretty cynical about anything we can’t get over the
counter at
Boots
. Fall ill or
experience some sort of calamity and before you know it we’re filling our
pockets with charms and drinking the bark of Chinese trees. That’s just the
nature of life, I guess. We’ll pin our colours to any mast that’ll give us
hope, and that’s no bad thing in the long run. There are no atheists in
foxholes, as they say.
I started reading up about all this sort of thing on the
internet and after a little initial eye rolling I actually found some of it
quite interesting. Okay sure, we weren’t going to cancel the chemotherapy in
favour of having some elderly hippy dangle crystals over us every Wednesday but
there was nothing to stop us from opening our minds and broadening our approach
to Sally’s illness.
The key word to complementary therapies is “complementary”,
as opposed to alternative.
Now, I’d already sorted out Sally’s diet for her so that we
were eating the right foods to flush her toxins out and the brand spanking new
osmosis water filter was bolted in and providing us with good, clean tap water,
so next I looked at what else I could do.
Green tea; this was a revelation. Why hadn’t anyone told me
about green tea before? According to the book, it could not only help people
avoid cancer, it could also help people fight it by limiting the cancer cells’
production of urokinase. Startling (whatever they were). Why weren’t there
billboard posters up and down the country proclaiming this fact? I mean Christ,
if they can paper the land with adverts for chicken dippers and cocopops, why
can’t they do the same for green tea? Admittedly, it tastes pretty disgusting,
but then again so do chicken dippers and cocopops, so what’s the difference?
“I think it’s one of those things you get used to,” I
reassured Sally, as her eyes pleaded with me for a cup of PG and a HobNob.
“Are you drinking it as well?” she asked.
“No, I thought I’d have an Irish whiskey and a chocolate
éclair. Of course I’m drinking it,” I replied, and did just that to prove it
was safe. “Delicious,” I gasped, smacking my lips.
“Really?”
“No, not really. But then things you have to get used to
never are, are they?”
And the fun didn’t just stop with green tea. We had all
sorts of mad and mysterious teas; dandelion & burdock, cinnamon, liquorice,
prickly ash and hawthorn and other such treats. I learned about them on the net
and read up about the beneficial properties of each, then found a herbalist who
lived a short car journey away and got her to mix me up a few batches. She was
a nice old stick and served me with such a warm smile that I could’ve sworn she
recognised me from one of her previous lives. She seemed to know what she was
banging on about too and tailored the teas to Sally’s exact requirements.
“Where do you get your ingredients?” I decided to ask, just
as I was leaving.
“ICI. Most of it’s just left-over paint scrapings,” she
replied.
“What?” I gawped, but the lady just smiled:
“Nature.”
“Oh. Oh right,” I replied, then nodded. Who would’ve
thought: a herbalist with a sense of humour?
Most of the teas were also pretty disgusting but none of
them came close to my own attempt at making nettle tea. I’d read up about it on
the internet and convinced myself that I could boil anything down I found in a
field just as good as Andy McNab or my comedy herbalist friend, so I gave Tom a
call and asked him if he wanted to give me a hand.
“What, nettles? Stinging nettles? Are you serious?”
“People have been drinking it for years. It’s meant to be
very nice,” I told him.
“I’ll have a fiver on that,” he replied.
“Well, perhaps not nice, but you know, good for you.”
“Make that a tenner.”
Tom was up and out of his wheel chair these days and moving
about on sticks. He walked along like a new born giraffe and was just about as
stable, a point he proved the following afternoon down the common when he
leaned too far forward picking nettles and went face-first into a great big
dirty ditch full of them.
God that was funny. I can’t ever remember laughing so hard
in all my life and Tom just kept setting me off again every time he pointed his
tingling, speckled scowl in my direction.
“What happened?” Sally asked, when we got home.
“If I was you I wouldn’t worry about me. I’d worry more
about what you’re having as an aperitif tonight,” Tom replied.
Anyway, we boiled it all up, stunk out the house and it was
truly disgusting, so we tipped the rest of it away and decided to stick with my
humorist’s home brews. I mean, they might’ve been horrible too but at least
someone in a white coat had told us they were good for us.
“Are you stopping for dinner Tom?” Sally asked.
“What is it?”
“Mushrooms – shitake mushrooms – fried in garlic
with onions, ginger, turmeric and brown rice and with a green salad,” I told
him.
“Why?” he asked, suspiciously.
“Shitake mushrooms are officially,” I underlined,
“recognised in Japan as cancer fighting fodder.”
Tom weighed it up. “Go on then, I’m game. Besides, if it’s
horrible, I can always get myself kebab on the way home with that tenner you
owe me.”
“Huh?”
I tried many of these sorts of recipes and some of them took
a bit of getting used to and some of them were actually all right, but the main
thing was that they were helping Sally. She’d now undergone her second
instalment of chemotherapy and was listless and weak all over again, but the
difference this time around was that she was starting to believe – and
that was half the battle.
Before, when there’d only been bad news and all the agonies
were raw, it had been practically impossible to pick her up off the ground.
Sally had seen only doom and gloom and no hope or even reason, but I’d done
everything in my power to batter this out of her with a constant bombardment of
buoyancy and rosiness that would’ve seen the average person tunnelling to
escape me. Fortunately Sally was far too weak for that sort of nonsense and had
to endure all I could throw at her until her spirits finally waved the white
flag and started to lift.
Well, you can’t stay downhearted forever. Your mind simply
won’t let you. It’s just too much like hard work. Something always has to give
and I wasn’t going to chuck in the towel until it did.
She even tolerated shower time, which was hot and cold, hot
and cold, alternately, to give her lymph circulation a kick start and helped
oxygenate her tissues and drain away toxins, though first time around was
something of a punch-up.
“Oh my God! Turn it off! Turn it off!”
“Chilly is it? Blimey yeah, that’s like ice on my fingers,”
I said, testing it myself as I splashed it all over Sally.
“Turn it off, Andrew seriously stop it! STOP IT!”
I twisted the hot tap and the water flowed warm again, bring
Sally and our next-door neighbours merciful relief.
“You
fucking dickhead
,
that was far too cold Andrew. That was bloody freezing.”
“You know, you really shouldn’t call the bloke in charge of
the taps a fucking dickhead. That’s not sensible.”
“No Andrew don’t, I don’t like it…”
“Get ready for the cold stuff.”
“Andrew, nooooOOOOOHHHHH!”
“That’s it love, you scream. Screaming is supposed to be
good for you too. Hmm, now where did I read that?”
Of course, in between the fun and games of bath and meal
times, Sally was still deeply despondent about the fact that we would never
have children but, like with the green tea, the weird mushrooms dinners and the
ice cold hosings, it was something she was learning to live with. Still, every
now and again I’d catch her feeling the corners of the bedclothes or staring
blankly at her toothbrush in a particular way and when this happened, I’d rush
in and quickly head off her thoughts with a hug.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it didn’t. But this was how we filled our days.
I tried to find as many practical solutions to Sally’s
condition as I could and scoured the internet and almost melted the telephone
talking to her various support groups, phone friends and all the experts that
were generous enough to spare me a few moments of their precious time, although
this wasn’t all entirely for Sally’s benefit.
The plain simple truth of the matter was that I couldn’t
bear to sit still – figuratively and literally. I just couldn’t do it.
Not even for five minutes.
I had done so in those first few days after diagnosis but
that was only because back then I didn’t know what else I could do, but it had
nearly driven me so far out of my mind that I couldn’t think to breathe.
And there was another reason I tried to keep busy.
Back at the start, when there were only worries and
fingernails and worst fears, my thoughts would occasionally stumble upon
questions I didn’t even want to ponder. Questions such as:
What if the cancer spread further still?
What if the chemotherapy didn’t stop it?
What if Sally were to die?
What would I do then?
I hated thinking these thoughts but once Pandora’s lid was
lifted there was nothing I could do to stop them from tumbling out. It was
awful. And the more I allowed myself to think about these things, the more
specific my questions would become.
Bizarre practicalities started taking shape such as how
would I pay the mortgage? The amount we’d borrowed had been based on both of
our salaries, so did that mean I’d have to sell up and move somewhere smaller?
Or would Sally’s life insurance provide enough to meet the payments? We were
both on a policy and had been since buying our home but it had never meant
anything more to me other than an itemised £20 direct debit on my monthly bank
statement for sundry whatevers. I’d never expected to actually have to do
anything with the policy in practical terms other than renew it once a year and
remember to leave the paperwork somewhere obvious for my kids or Battersea Dogs
Home to find when I kicked the bucket. Not my problem.
But suddenly it was my problem.
And I didn’t know how it worked.
Did I have to fill out a load of forms and supply a death
certificate before they’d look at my claim? Or would I have to appoint a lawyer
to take care of it all? And what if I didn’t want the money? Couldn’t I just
have Sally back and the insurance company could keep their money along with all
the subs we’d ever paid? If I did collect, would everyone think I was a greedy
bastard for doing so when my wife had only just passed away? Wouldn’t it be
better if I gave it all to a charity and not even grubby my hands with it?
Would Sally prefer that? Probably not, but would she ever have to know?
And did it come as a cheque or would they just pay it
straight into my bank account?
What if they Welshed and didn’t pay at all? Could they do
that and what if they did? Would I get my lawyer to pursue them through the
courts and get what was morally and lawfully mine? Or would I let them keep it
and not sully Sally’s memory with a legal tug-of-war over a most unwelcome
windfall?
I was savvy enough to know that death was a time when people
were at their most vulnerable. How many rightful riches had been signed away
through tears and turmoil only to be regretted once the mourning had passed? I
didn’t know but I would’ve guessed a lot. And it wasn’t just insurance
companies I had to be wary of either; con men and charlatans circled the
obituaries just as vultures circled the savannah. Death was money and as
unappetising as it was to me, the world was full with scumbags who made a
living out of dying.
A living out of dying? I thought about that for a moment and
wondered if I’d intended it as a pun. I didn’t think so but then I started
trying to think up other death puns and only stopped when I suddenly remembered
what had started me in the first place.
And then I’d feel awash with guilt: guilt for filling my
head with such trifles; guilt for missing the bigger picture and guilt for
killing off Sally before she’d even begun her therapy.
It was a truly terrible time. What sort of a man was I?
I’d beat myself to bits in an effort to shame any such
thoughts out of my head, but they’d never slip very far beneath the surface and
before I knew it I’d be at it again, wondering how funeral directors worked and
when was the right time to ask Sally if she wanted to be buried or cremated or
shot out of a cannon into the sea and how did they sort out the ash of the
person out from the ash of the casket and so on and so forth until I was ready
to stick my head in the oven in an effort to shut out these terrible thoughts.
I know it sounds callous but really you have no idea how
much these questions tortured me. I hated thinking them but I couldn’t help it.
I guess I’ve always been a daydreamer and my mind has a habit of wandering and
this was just how my fears manifested themselves. It was too vast and too
terrifying a scenario to deal with the emotional side of my fears so these
trivialities and niggles would fill the void until I was able to distract
myself with the dinner or the washing or the shopping or such like. Then sure
enough, a few minutes would slip by and I’d feel confused and miserable over
splurging so much thought on pots and pans when Sally was sick upstairs and the
whole process would start again. A jolt of dread would jog Sally’s funeral into
my mind and the image would fester until a dozen different tentacles reached
into every little corner of my imagination and pulled out a jumble of
disjointed worries. I simply couldn’t help myself. It was like a sore I
couldn’t stop picking.