January 1, Monday
Another New Year. I have no resolutions as the biggest vice I have is coffee and I am not giving that up, PLUS I have spent the last six months resolving to change just about everything there could possibly be, so figure this is one year I will give up giving up.
Rhodri made us go for a New Year’s walk by the sea; to say it was bracing is a mild understatement. We went in those beautiful walled gardens by the sea in Southern Down, which lead up to the top of the cliff, and the sea was just in turmoil, crashing against the cliffs. It was howling a gale by the time we reached the top of the cliff, which meant we came back down with the full force of the wind and the rain, and Osh was so cold and so wet, he kept crying so much, that Elis and I had to try hard not to laugh as he felt so sorry for himself.
Needless to say I was horribly hungover and did not mind too much having the rain lashing against my face; it was almost comforting. My wig was hilarious. When I got back in the car, I looked like one of those people in a sketch show where it is so obvious they are wearing a wig. Unlike real hair, when they are blown about by the wind, wings tend to stay in that position, rather than flopping back down when the wind has subsided. All I needed was a chin strap and the sketch-show look would have been complete. Needed to have curry and chips though, when we got back as a hangover cure.
January 2, Tuesday
It’s seven years to the day my little beautiful boy Elis was born. A millennium baby. He was actually due on Christmas Eve but decided to pop out on 2 January. Well, not exactly pop out – it was a rather long protracted affair and despite myself, every time I drive past the hospital where he was born I get a little reminder of the horror that is childbirth.
But you do forget; I went on to have Osh, and his birth was even more horrendous. I ended up giving birth to him on my own as the nurse went to get me a paracetamol. I had said to her, ‘I think I’m in labour, I know what being in labour is like,’ and she said, ‘No, you couldn’t possibly be. I’ll get you a paracetamol.’
I said, ‘I think I’m going to need something stronger than a paracetamol.’ But she ignored me and left, and I gave birth to Osh in bed on my own. The only thing that stopped him falling on the floor was that he got caught in my knickers – something to thank Tesco for, the durability of their knickers. Elis’s birth was about twelve hours, not so bad but I lost so much blood after it that I couldn’t get out of bed for about ten days.
That’s a bit what having the chemo is like, only a milder version; it sort of wipes you out, like after you’ve had a baby and you feel the sleep deprivation that you can only get in that situation.
I went to the hospital for a blood test and shamelessly cheated the queue, telling Gill it was my little boy’s birthday and I had promised to take him to Toys R Us. Who could possibly refuse a cancer patient that?
When I told Gill about my periods, she said it was normal. I said my red bloods might be affected because it was pretty bad, I had lost a lot of blood and felt a bit washed-out. She told me about another of her patients who actually couldn’t go out, it was so bad. Bloody hell, there is always someone who is worse than you, isn’t there?
She said the periods might get even heavier or they might stop. I thought that if you had them throughout your chemo they would carry on. If they continue being as bad as they have been, I will seriously have to do something about them, like my sister who had the ovarian ablation, as I just could not live with them. I couldn’t sit in a meeting or go on a car journey like that, it would be impossible. I have four months now essentially without the chemo and before I go back to work, so I will see how they go.
I also need to fully discuss my options with the Tamoxifen and having my ovaries removed. Although I have to say the thought of having more surgery, especially surgery which knocks you out for a few weeks, as opposed to a few days with my breast surgery, is not appealing as I am coming to the end of my treatment.
It may be that when I’ve finished Tamoxifen – the drug that stops oestrogen from getting to the breast and feeding the cancer – I will want to have them removed. BUT if my periods continue like this, then I cannot live with it; I might as well have my ovaries removed as have an ovarian ablation. I can’t believe I have to think about these things.
Although my mother told me that she had her ovaries removed when she was forty-two – she had an eptopic pregnancy, so she also had an early menopause – she was on those bloody HRT plasters for years. I couldn’t go on them, I probably cannot take anything to address my menopause if I have one, but I know that diet and exercise and running into the garden in the snow naked – as my mother once did – can help a lot with these hot flushes.
I figure I have to go through it sometime so it doesn’t matter if I am forty or fifty – does it? I’ve no bloody idea what I am talking about. I need to discuss this in detail with a medical professional, methinks.
Gill rang me as I got home to say my white blood count was borderline but it was fine to have the chemo, and that my red cells were down but not enough to do anything about them yet; however, they had dipped.
I could feel they were not right though, so it was not a huge surprise.
I dropped Osh off at nursery before I went to the hospital, so we could take Elis to Toys R Us with Lloyd. Last time we took Osh he wouldn’t sit in a trolley – can you blame him when faced with thousands of toys? – and he ended up knocking about two hundred Playstation games off a shelf by putting his hand on the shelf and running to the end of the row, whereupon they all just fell on the floor. I decided I could actually live without that degree of stress on Elis’s birthday this year.
Going to Toys R Us has been Elis’s wish for two years in a row, after he found out there was a shop as big as a supermarket which only sold toys. He couldn’t believe such a place existed until he went there – it was like taking him to Lapland. So he likes to go there and know that he can choose anything he wants from the entire store; in practice that is not true, but I know the things he wants will be within a certain price range so he lives with the illusion that he can actually have anything.
It is also his great wish that I win the lottery, then he can buy all of the toys in Toys R Us. It is also my great wish to win the lottery and have a great big house in the Vale of Glamorgan with a great big swimming pool and to shut my door and never leave the house again. But realistically I don’t think it will happen, so I will be grateful for my little Llandaff semi-detached, as semi was something that I aspired to and now here I am all suburbiaed up and I didn’t even have to win the lottery, just pay an enormous mortgage for the next seventeen years and never go out because I can’t afford to.
I hadn’t realised that Lloyd had never been to Toys R Us before, probably for the same reason we kept Osh away from the place. He kept running around looking at things and saying at the top of his voice, ‘Bloody hell.’ Martin, his father, says that after a day with me, Lloyd’s language is terrible. True, I do say, ‘Bloody hell’ a lot BUT I had not uttered a single swearword up until that point, but Martin still thinks I am a bad influence, no doubt. We went to Charlie Chalks for lunch – we will not hear a bad word said against Charlie Chalks, and even though Rhodri considers himself to be something of a connoisseur of fine food, he embraces the place just as I do.
Charlie Chalks means we are able to sit down and eat a meal together while the children, after having had a mouthful of sausage, peas and chips, bugger off and play in the ball pool, leaving us in peace and not having to worry about them annoying other diners, or making too much noise as ALL of the children are like that and NO ONE gives you those looks you get in restaurants, especially from people who don’t have children. They just don’t understand what it is like to have to keep the kids quiet for an hour.
After a leisurely lunch, we picked Osh up from nursery, then took Elis up to the farm with Lloyd as Elis will be staying there until Sunday, when he will come back for his party in the leisure centre. Rhodri is able to take Osh to
the crèche and pick him up so I don’t have to worry about the children if I am not feeling well after my chemo tomorrow.
January 6, Saturday
I have lost four days of my life. Well, not exactly lost them, they were still there but they passed in a sort of drug-induced haze. I have never taken Class A drugs, but can only imagine that this is what it feels like. I have not been able to get out of bed, except yesterday I was able to come down and lie on the sofa, but even then I couldn’t keep my eyes open for very long. Lack of sleep is the least of my worries this time round. Being able to stay awake for more than an hour was the problem.
It was almost instant. After the session, I came home and all I wanted to do was sleep; I was physically incapable of looking after the children or in fact doing anything. I managed to come downstairs and make myself porridge or soup and go back to bed again.
My sisters would have come down but I really wanted to be left alone to lie in my pit. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was unable to have acupuncture the week before, because Rosie and her friend were not around, and the only other time I have felt remotely like this was when I didn’t have acupuncture the week before my treatment. I know that the chemotherapy has a cumulative effect. I saw Sandra in the hospital on Tuesday – she was in when I had my op – and she said that after her fifth chemotherapy session she threw up in a supermarket.
I didn’t feel particularly sick, in fact less so than previously. I have discovered that if you take Gaviscon or Milk of Magnesia, which I was knocking back, that it really offsets the nausea feeling. I stopped taking all medication after three days as opposed to five with no ill effects – I also thought maybe it was the medication that knocked me out and I did feel a lot better after stopping taking it, but that could have just been a coincidence.
I also had VERY negative feelings when I went for treatment this time. I hate the smell of the place, and as lovely as the nurses are there, I cannot stand seeing them. It’s horrible, I know, because they are so chatty and are so kind, but I have no wish to see them and exchange pleasantries with them. I just want to say, ‘Get me out of here.’ The needle in my hand was so painful, I was crying, and then I felt ashamed because I was acting like a big baby.
Thank God Rhodri came. I was going to go on my own. Julia rang and said she would come, but I think if anyone comes with me other than Rhodri, I will be stressed. I would feel that I had to put on a brave face for them. Rhodri said late last night, almost as a throwaway comment, ‘Do you want me to come?’ and I said, ‘Yes, please. I don’t want to go on my own.’ He thought that Rachel was coming but she is still away. Rachel is also good, she makes me put on a brave face too. So no Rachel, no brave face, a needle that was bloody excruciating and the smell which makes me feel like throwing up, all contributed to a very negative feeling about going to the cancer hospital – surprise surprise.
I feel sick just writing about the place – and as time has gone on it has got worse, not better. You would think it would be the reverse as I am getting to the end, but the truth is, with each visit and each session I have come to dread going to the place more and more, and no matter how much I try to pretend basically I do not want to be a cancer patient in a cancer hospital getting treatment for cancer. I want my life back, thank you very much.
I want to go to work and have people bother me with their problems to sort out, I want nothing more than to worry whether I have enough time in the lunch-hour to nip to the supermarket and then nip home to put the food in the fridge. I want to have nothing more to worry about than do I have soup for lunch or go for fish and chips in the canteen? Should I do the ironing tonight or leave it until tomorrow? Should I go out on a Wednesday for a meal with Babs or a Friday? I want my life to be filled with trivia once more. I am fed up of living my life around hospital appointments and test results and internet searches on things you never really wanted to have to think about at my age, like osteoporosis, and having your ovaries whipped out, or secondary cancer.
I have been crying on the phone to my mother as I have been very down. Alison K rang and I was really down for once with her, as I always try to be so upbeat about it all and it’s just too hard to keep doing that because this time I do feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry that I have cancer at thirty-nine and that I have had to go through this and, yes, I do feel grateful that I will in all probability be cured of this cancer and I thank God every day for that and for letting me look at life with fresh eyes, but there IS a sadness also in losing a bit of my life and this happening, and the truth is, the real truth, is I’d rather it wasn’t happening to me.
January 7, Sunday
It was Elis’s party today. We had it in the leisure centre with football on one court, a Bouncy Castle and a face painter and about thirty children. A great time was had by all. The boys were manic, they could hardly sit down to eat their food and ate their jellies before eating any other food. The girls were calm, sat down for about half an hour, ate all their food and then went on to their jellies. There is a moral or something in that somewhere.
Because I have been so unwell, wonderful, marvellous Joanne and Russell did all the party food at their house and brought it down with them. I didn’t have to do a thing except turn up. I said I would make sure that next time I invited thirty children for a party, I would be ill again.
Elis and Rhodri went off after the party to see Cardiff play Spurs with Alison K, Jay and Alison’s dad. As Elis got in the car and I was saying goodbye, he turned to Jay and said, ‘My mummy wears a wig – does yours?’ Jay did not know what a wig was, apparently.
Rhodri had arranged for Elis’s photo to be put up on the big screen at the game for his birthday, and for them to say Happy Birthday over the Tannoy and they put it up about three times. It was the perfect end to his perfect day.
Osh came back with Elis for the party. I haven’t seen him for a few days. He woke at eleven in the night and I went to him and he was crying, so I brought him downstairs and gave him some Calpol because he has a bad cold. Then I said I was going to bed myself. I thought he would want to go back in his own bed because he has never slept with me. Unlike Elis who was a leech on my back for years, Osh has never been the slightest bit interested in coming into bed with me, not even for a lie-in in the mornings, whereas Elis would happily stay there all day.
It was really strange because Osh got into bed and he lay down and he held my hand and looked into my eyes for ages and it was as if he was saying, ‘It’s OK to be ill, Mummy, we’re all ill sometimes,and I’m here to look after you,’ and my heart ached, it was so lovely.
January 8, Monday
Back to school today. Hurrah for a bit of normality and, to be honest, a bit of a rest. We are having new shelves and an outer front door fitted. Nigel is coming to do them, and to say the house is a bit chaotic today is an understatement. We have hundreds of books which have been in the attic for two and a half years waiting for shelves to be put up, but with all the other work we’ve had done on the house the shelves have rather taken a back seat.
It sort of begs the question that if we haven’t seen the books for two and a half years and have had no reason to find them for reference (apart from the odd cookery book or French phrase book), do we really need them cluttering up our middle room? The answer has to be yes, ONLY because I think it is vitally important for children to grow up around books and think it is normal and natural to pluck a book off a shelf and read it.
I grew up in a house that didn’t have any books. I cannot really believe it now, but we never had a bookcase. My grandmother had a bookcase at the top of her stairs and I probably read every single book in it as they were the only books I had any easy access to, apart from the Secret Seven and Famous Five series by Enid Blyton.
My grandmother also liked reading Mills & Boons; this meant I ended up reading hundreds of the bloody things and in retrospect probably explains why I have such an unrealistic view of how relationships should be, having spent most of my formative years
reading about passionate love affairs ending up in happily-ever-after land.
Anyway, I left Nigel to the shelves and went off to see Deborah. For once I really felt like I needed to have my brain ironed out by her. I find I cry less in her sessions but I still get very emotional. I told her I had been ill and had been feeling sorry for myself, and was at a point where I just really wanted my life back and to get back to work and some normality.
She said (in so many words) that I am hard on myself. I say I feel bad because there are people in that hospital who are so ill they have to be brought to the chemo in wheelchairs, and here’s me complaining that I can’t get out of bed for a few days.
But she is right, I do trivialise my illness; maybe that is one of the ways of coping with it. If I diminish its power over me as an illness, then it won’t get the better of me. If I deny the seriousness of it and the intensity of it, then it will disappear, but like all demons in our life, the only way of dealing with them is facing them.
I have decided that I will make a New Year’s resolution and that is to be kinder to myself. I am always so hard on myself and with what has happened to me it is time to stop that. I need to realise that I am vulnerable and I need people, and that I am not perfect. If I feel upset and sad it is not a matter of shame to communicate it, and I’ve found that when you tell people you’ve been ill or that you are fed up, the whole world doesn’t suddenly fall apart and some people actually say things that make you feel better or that you are not alone. All my life I have tried to take on the whole world by myself and it is a bloody big world to be able to keep that up for ever. So this year I will resolve to be kinder to myself.
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 18