Guest Post from my Trusty Companion

Concentrate

I’ve been thinking about my childhood a lot these past few months. Sometimes my thoughts and memories are really vivid – like that time I fell on the road outside our house and cut both my knees and hands. I dragged myself up and began to cry only to be told, nicely, by a neighbouring Dad, Mr. Quigley, that it would ‘toughen me up’. I believed him immediately and decided to stop crying (must have been 5 or 6 yrs-old I guess). Other times I think more abstractly about the sheer volume of living we all do. I think about the millions of moments that make up our lives. I remember that really nice feeling of catching yourself being content. I think about the role my parents played in my childhood. But mostly, I think about the role I’m now playing in my children’s lives. “We’re very lucky”, my lovely wife and I agreed recently. Don’t worry, we both got the irony of us expressing that, but right now we have three really special reasons to be grateful. That gratitude and the love we share, combined with the reality of dealing with the aggressive treatment of Sarah’s cancer, has given our lives a very intense quality. The future is uncertain and the present feels concentrated. Every day feels a little loaded. But we both know that there will be less intense times ahead for us all and that, whatever happens, everything will be alright.

Recap

It’s been six months. 

Having spent most of that time determined not to think about time-spans or end-dates or red-letter days, I can’t help but be aware that half of a year has passed since cancer entered our lives.

In the same way that it is pretty pointless to wistfully reminisce about life before children when you could “do whatever you want”, upsetting yourself by being jealous of a sleep-in you once had in 2005, it is also not really much use to think about how the past six months might have been if I didn’t have cancer. I mean, there would have been much fewer flowers and much less cake, and instead there would have been more worrying about work and patients and money and teething and grommets and tenants. But there has been all of those things, and there would still have been some flowers and cake. 

So the differences are attitudinal. And physical. 

For pure pig-iron, as my father-in-law would think but never say (never say what you mean being a standard Irish-man-of-a-certain-age approach to life), maybe I’ll document the physical changes that have happened in those six months. Look away now if you’re not into that kind of thing.

Starting from the top.

Hair - wirier, whiter, shorter, falling-outer after radiotherapy but not too bad the rest of the time. Lots of it on the floor and carpet now. A real pain to clean up.

Face - as previously mentioned, pretty fecking fecked at the moment. Red, dry, spotty, greasy, hairy, blotchy, pustulent. Get this - overgrowing eyelashes, like an old Indian man’s sacred toenails. Forward-encroaching hairline at the temples. So hair falling out of my head but proliferating on my visage. Good symmetry.

Neck - spotty and scratchy, with my first scar, a little grey wrinkly dent, from where the line of my portocath was poked into my vena cava. Further down, another pokey-to-get-in-there scar and then the proper slice-across one, maybe 3cm long with its little hard hockey puck pushing up from underneath. I forget about it all the time now, but I am reminded of when I was terrified that it would be uncomfortable forever. I neglected to tell my beauty therapist at the spa last week that I was a leper - I mean have cancer - they do get very haughty about that kind of thing in there, oh we couldn’t possibly put some old over-priced Nivea on you with your chemotherapied skin in case you sue us - like that’s my biggest worry. So I failed to tick the Cancer box on the over-elaborate check-in form and just told her I had acne. She would have got a bit of a fright if her lovely manicured Polish fingers came across a small tin of Vaseline under my skin just above my third rib, but thankfully her fancy facial massage techniques didn’t extend that far. (Note to spas - include a Chemo package and milk the cancer market for all it’s worth. Small kickback to me for the tip please.)

Anyway, we digress from the categorical run-down of my physical flaws.

Dry-as-a-bone belly skin over a proper beer-gut. Central obesity is what steroids give you. Oh and a moon-face. Words I learned as part of a long list of potential side effects that meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. It was one of those lists with a really annoying mnemonic that I can never remember - maybe “boiling fat” or “beating heart” or something? I always hated mnemonics - I couldn’t bear someone else telling me how to remember things. But now I am frantically trying to remember the things on the list that I would have dismissed as not life-threatening and therefore not very interesting. I mean I know you can get diabetes and high blood pressure and stuff but suddenly skin striae and fat cheeks matter more. 

Three scars on my right upper thigh from three angiograms. None of them particularly well healed (granted one is only a week old). Bruising, remnants of sticky dressing stuff that refuses to come off. Spots. Follicular issues I won’t get into. Suffice to say what happens on your face and mouth tends to be mirrored in your other end. Freudian, I think. 

I passed over the puckered incision that released my three bundles of over-eager flesh, bursting to get out of the half-womb I provided for them. 

I have varicose veins in both legs. I was going to have them wiped away by some fancy new sclerotherapy or something, when I was done having my babies. Will I still? 

Chiropodists tend to be either wimps or vicious. The last lady was the latter. My healing powers aren’t what they used to be but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her to hold back. If you’re going for it, you’re going for it.

So somewhat battered and torn, but mostly just me.