Self pity and trucks.

I was so thrilled yesterday. Two days after chemo, I went into work and I taught. I received so many compliments about my hair and managed to tell my tutor group that although I had cancer, there was no way I was going to die so any of them who hoped they would be getting a nice tutor, they were stuffed... A moment of doubt later in the day when I spoke to my doctor and asked him if I was right. I mean, it is easy to reassure other people that I am not going to hit the floor, but sometimes, like a mole tunnelling under ground, it crawls into my mind that I am going to die, that I am lying both to myself and to others. My doctor reassured me that I was right and I would be right as rain eventually....

Aye, there is the rub, eventually. I came home yesterday from work and couldn't even get up the stairs. My bones ached and I felt like I had been run over by a truck - absolutely exhausted. I carry a bowl with me everywhere as the omnipresent nausea has taken over my life and even my anti-sickness drugs make me feel sick. How odd is that?

Today, I called work and told them I couldn't come in. I feel so utterly wiped out. I look at those foam cloths that one uses to wipe tables and feel just like one, a green one with the state of my stomach. My mind clicks through all the food in my fridge and cupboards like a rolodex and so far, it isn't stopping. Crackers with cheese so far and a big breakthrough this afternoon, chicken noodle soup.

I know that I have been brave, but I don't feel brave at all at the moment. I feel like a little girl who is sucking her thumb with her teddy in the corner. I feel constantly sick, tired and wiped out and if this is just the first one, and it is cumulative, how on earth am I going to cope with round 6?

Have I underestimated this enemy or is this a temporary blip on the mood scanner?

Minerva

To my cancer,

pathetic - absolutely pathetic.

Okay, so I vomited four times last night. But, you know what? I grinned through it all. Want to know why? Because every time I threw up, I knew that whatever this poison is doing to me, it is killing you. That poison is circulating around your cells, crushing your tentacles into my flesh and making you withdraw. Time for YOU to realise what having cancer is like. Actually, time for you to realise that you picked the wrong victim because this collection of cells here is going to fight you every step of the way. And guess what, I am not a victim. Nope, this here collection of tissue is a hero, and you and your pathetic bunch of replicating cells are going to be the victims, scuttling out of my body like rats down a pipe.

Go on, do your worst - make me sick, make me feel constantly nauseous, make me tired, but you aren't going to kill me. Nope, that privilege is reserved for you, because I am going to kill you, make no mistake about it. I am going to delight in seeing you shrivel, seeing you shrink and seeing you slide into nothingness, and guess what? No one is going to remember you, no one is going to mourn for you and I am going to open the most wonderful bottle of champagne when I hear those wonderful words that trumpet to the world of your demise and my triumph. ALL CLEAR!

I feel the liquid searing through my veins, I picture in my head the hordes of attacking poisons charging your non-existent defences, and feel hard pressed to keep the grin off my face.

You have so picked the wrong person this time.

Minerva

Another first...

Chemotherapy. That word, like cancer, strikes such fear into me. This war that I am waging is not just a war against an illness, it is a war against words, against taboos, against fear.

Into the hospital at 9am and due to pharmaceutical ineptitude finally plugged into a drip at 12.30pm. Up come the drugs in a big orange solid briefcase marked CYTOTOXIC in huge letters across it, just reminding anyone that these drugs are poison, except for me, of course, where they are to be deliberately injected into my system. Two nurses then count down to the treatment. They bandy the numbers, doses, expiry dates and names between them like a game of tennis and then, it is down to business. 5 large vials are injected into my line followed by half an hour of the final drug through the drip.

Fascinating watching around me. The 35 year old who found five tumours in her breast, the couples that come in. One couple, the girl around my age with no hair and her devoted husband. The love that shone between them lit up the bubble they were in. The teasing, - well you SAID you felt sick last time... and I stared at them, too overtly I think, just jealous to my core of their happiness, of their closeness and of their obvious affection for one another.

Now it is about 5 hours afterward. Saliva is pouring into my mouth and I have put a bowl near me as I am starting to feel sick. I still don't feel like eating and anything I drink tastes horrid.

The phony war is over, bring it on!

Minerva

Today

is the day I have been dreading for ages... No, it isn't the start of chemotherapy, that is tomorrow. Today is the day when I together with my favourite hairdresser cut my hair off. Just to explain to those of you who don't know, I have long, wavy, dirty blonde hair that falls to the middle of my back. It is incredibly thick hair and the mere thought of it straggled on the floor of the salon this evening makes me want to weep. I love my hair, I love hiding behind it at difficult moments, I love the way it sweeps my lover and myself into a world of our own, I love the weight of it on my shoulders and the way it sweeps across the pillow in the morning. I never feel naked with my hair as it clothes me, it hugs me and wraps me in its warmth.

This morning is the last morning for a very long time that I will wake up with it and like a lover, a lover that I know needs to go, but that my heart will miss, I need to say goodbye.

Minerva

Amazing

what a difference 10 hours sleep makes. I felt exhausted yesterday, tired through every bone and muscle and today, I have a spring in my step and could (almost) climb Everest.

Yesterday I drove 5 hours and saw my glorious, gorgeous girls. I was giggled at, tricked, joked with and talked at for four hours and it was wonderful. I miss them terribly and it was so heartening to see them in such cacophany. Then back to school and not a tear amongst them - I was such a proud mother driving away....

Seems strange to be saying it when I have such a serious disease but I am so very happy at the moment. A lovely birthday with a rainbow of cards, three gorgeous girls who gave me the very hottest of hugs, and a beautiful day in London where the sun dances across the trees into my room where I sit typing...

Ah...contentment.

Minerva

The last few minutes

of my thirty-eighth year are slipping behind the door and a new year beckons. How strange that my most engaging year yet, should also be my most challenging and there is more to come. For the first time, like a toddler intent on nothing but the next rattle and shiny sound in its world, I have been tugged and jerked back by the reins of mortality. By rights, at the age of thirty-eight I shouldn't even be thinking about providing for my animals and my children, I should still be intent on living from one minute to the next, one flirtatious look to the next glance, one touch of skin to another and yet, and yet, my alarm clock has gone off early, thirty years too early...and I am awake.

Now I raise my head to each wave of heated sunshine, I touch in wonderment the dripping condensation on my window in the morning and I treasure the friendly nuzzle of my dog or cat. I see the tunnel of life getting narrower, and I spy the darkness at the end of the light. Every speck of light becomes more precious by the minute as I am reminded of how lucky I am to be seeing it.

Tomorrow I am thirty nine and at the back of my mind, is my big question: will I make it to forty?

Minerva

Another doctor,

another man to take my shirt off in front of... Bizarre... I now know how a 'woman of the night' feels as I strip off my bra and shirt for yet another stranger. But, what a relief - I have certainty. I have blood tests and a clinical appointment booked for next Monday and next Tuesday, I go up to the 6th floor, plant myself in an armchair and have lethal drugs pumped into my arm for an hour and a half.

I feel disappointed that it is still a full week away. Every day I feel the lump in my breast and imagine taking a razor blade to it and letting it pus away at my feet. It is strange having something like that sit, like an ugly vulture, in one's body and yet show no sign of redness, of swelling or of the poison that it exudes into the cells around it. To cope with the disappointment, I just tell myself that certainty is good, and that certainty a week away is better than uncertainty tomorrow. A couple more hundred times and I may believe it!

Now I am contemplating the time I need to take off. The nurse suggested I take the month off. There is no way that I am doing that. I need the stimulation and social life that work gives me as well as the routine but I am thinking of taking a couple of days.

Onwards and upwards....

Minerva

Tiredness snaps around my heels

like an irritating puppy and pulls my feet back like heavy chains. I am so tired. Every night I fall into bed like a newly felled tree and wake up the following morning, blinking from sleep, like a mole blinking into the daylight. I work and I love my work, but at the end of the day, I collapse in the door of my little house like a wet cake.

Strange as I know that the chemotherapy will make me tired, but I didn't expect this bone-weariness to take me over already. I am aware that the emotional toll that this disease is taking on me is constant and severe and I can only assume that it is that which I am feeling.

Tomorrow, the oncologist and a definite date for chemo. I paw like a bull in the sand of the arena and long for the red cloak to flash the beginning of the battle. Cancer, come, and let us fight!

Minerva

The huge dagger of stone

over my head has lifted for the moment and I have been able to almost forget that I have cancer. So strange - the first five seconds of a day, I wake up and I am free and then, wham! It steams in like an express train and from that moment on, all day, I am chained to the lump, to the cancer, eating away my cells.

I don't feel that same fear any more though. Last Monday, I had palpitations and I was hyperventilating with fear, hyperventilating at the thought that I wouldn't live to see my children's next birthdays, hyperventilating at the thought that the animals I have would outlive me. But now, that terrible gutwrenching fear has passed and a quiet calm has come in instead. I am resolved and resolute. My face is poised up to the sky like a heroine out of some soviet realism poster and my eyes face down the rays of the approaching monster with calm and purpose.

Today, I went out shopping for hats and found quite a few so have conquered that fear. I am researching the drugs that I will discuss with the oncologist on Tuesday; I know all the side effects that I can expect to have after the chemotherapy which should happen this week; and all my friends are alerted as to the possible help that I may need over the next month...and now?

Now, we wait, we wait and hope....

Minerva

What a relief....

No, I still have cancer, but the bone scan is clear, the lung scan is clear and so is the liver... You have no idea how relieved I am and how absurdly happy... Absurdly so because, of course, I still have a life threatening disease, it has spread still to my lymph nodes and I shall still have chemotherapy, an operation and radiotherapy, but I do feel at least 10 years younger...

I now only have a disease, and diseases are beatable. I can and will do this for the sake of my job, for the sake of my children and above all, for my sake. I have children to bring up, I have a book to write and hundreds of thousands of children to teach and I will do it...

I see the oncologist on Tuesday now, and I start chemo on Friday which is my birthday.. Talk about irony!

Thank you all for your kind wishes, emails and comments. I really do feel heartened by reading them and palpably sense all the good and kind wishes coming my way.

Thank you so very much,

Minerva

Today has been an ok day...

The tide of panic is starting to recede and the undercurrent of common sense and organisation is starting to show through. I have an appointment Thursday to guage the extent of the spread of the cancer but the facts, so far, are these.

I have a large tumour in my left breast which will require shrinking before surgery to save as much of my breast as possible. The way to do this is chemotherapy which will start next week, my birthday week...Happy birthday Minerva... *wry smile*

They came at my poor left boob with a mini-drill last week and took out several large samples which they are analysing this week for how invasive this cancer is. I have strange dreams at night where my tumour grows sharp teeth and I see it eating the flesh around it like some kind of carniverous Venus Fly Trap....

Because my lymph glands in my left armpit are swollen, they assume for the moment that the cancer has spread up to them and may even be in other parts of my body. Because of that fear, I am to have a bone scan, a liver scan, a chest x-ray and a needle stuck into my lymph nodes under ultrasound in order to check if it is in there. This is all in two days... On Friday or next Monday, I shall probably meet my Oncologist (cancer doctor) and chemo begins next week...

Of course, with change comes organisation and I am busy ringing up wig makers. I have been warned by the hospital that I will definitely lose my hair and am busy making provision for it. As you are mostly my readers, you won't know but my hair is my crowning glory. It is long, halfway down my back, thick and wild and an essential part of both my personality and my looks... I have had to discount buying a wig made of my own hair as that would cost up to 3 thousand pounds and after all, this hair will grow back....

So shall I do the scarf thing or the hat/turban thing? I quite fancy the Kylie look but would want my scarf to have large fronds so that I would still feel the weight of something on my shoulders... Strange to think of it slipping through my fingers, falling onto my pillow and my brush in less than two weeks time...

Any suggestions?

Minerva

I have cancer.

It is spreading....
I am trying to deal with it.
I will post later...

Minerva

It's Official - I am scared.

I am sitting here in front of my computer screen, tears falling down my cheeks. I am scared - not spider/ant scared, but gut-wrenching, heartrendingly scared.. I went to the hospital today and was terribly brave despite having the massive sandwich of a mammogram, (think spam...) and a needle inserted to take out fluid from the so-called cyst. But..think again. There was no fluid in that cyst and so cells were taken for observation and I get the cytology results Thursday. If that is dodgy, then I have a biopsy...

Cancer? Forget that, I am already going down the route of reading as much as I can on the net and deciding between chemo or radiation, mastectomy or lumpectomy, reconstruction or prosthesis. I am about to start diaries for my children so that they remember their mother, and I am going to write a will, all in the next 48 hours.

Why does my mind do this to me? Why can't I just be logical and think, in 48 hours, I will know for certain - just wait and see?

The other thing I do in this situation, is cut myself off. I don't want to talk to anyone at all. When I do talk to anyone I care about, I either cry or get grumpy and just don't understand why. I mean, they are only trying to help me...

Back, I hope, to regular service soon,

Minerva

Warning - very silly poem ahead!

Fast Food Love

You're the sausage in my hot dog,
the meat below my cheese,
and to make my juices flow,
just give my buns a squeeze.

You're the mustard on my burger,
the ketchup on my bread,
and when I see a spread like that,
it makes my cheeks go red.

You're the french oil on my fry
and the salt upon my chips,
the chocolate in my milkshake,
and the fat upon my hips.

You're the coating on my chicken,
the double in my decker,
the dressing on my salad,
and my diet wrecker.

You're the super in my order,
and the extra in my meal.
You're the bubbles in my soda
and the 'wow!' in my great deal.

There may be junk in fast food,
but my stomach knows the sign,
And all i know is this burger,
like you, is mine, all mine...

Minerva

First and last time for everything...

I so don't believe in memes and tagging but Evil Minx has tagged me, and for a myriad of splendiferous reasons including the best and overwhelming one of true friendship, I must obey...
So, here goes.

10 Years Ago

I had had my twin girls two months ago and still had a toddler daughter of just two years old running around. I was beginning to feel the effects of post natal depression for the second time and my ex-husband would come back from work to find me crying on the sofa from exhaustion, tiredness and lack of fulfilment. I was also running a charity in France for women with young children which then had over 1000 members and I remember giving a speech to 300 odd new English speaking mothers in Paris, and then going home and crying my eyes out at the frustration of having three children under two.

Having children was alternatively a blessing and a curse for me. It gave me the three greatest opportunities for love in my life, it also awakened a dormant tendency towards Bipolar disorder which led....

5 Years Ago

to my nervous breakdown. This time 5 years ago, I came out of hospital having been there for over two months. I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder which suddenly made huge sense as I looked back on phases when clouds gathered and then the bursts of sunshine. The breakdown was a reaction to the fact that my father, my grandfather and grandmother whom I adored, all died within three weeks of one another and I couldn't cope.

1 Year ago

I was beginning my second year as a teacher of secondary school children in Central London and was to discover that this, this was my vocation and the reason that I was put here... I adore my job, I love being able to discuss literature, authors and issues of language, books and words all day. I never not want to go to work...

Yesterday.
My greatgrandfather married three times and although there are over thirty years between first wife, long dead, and third wife, now 89, the descendants all met for a family reunion. How wonderful to meet over 200 people and know that each one was a part of the original blood of that Great-Grandfather and three wonderful women. My great grandmother was so resolute that her son would not be born in England that she went by steamer and sailboat all the way back to Australia so that he would be born there... And this was in the 1880s....
And I wonder where I get my spirit from!

Tomorrow

I am getting up at 4am in order to go to a boot sale where we open our cars having stuffed them with all the forgotten gifts we have received and try to sell them off at ridiculous prices. I have sneaked in all the toys which my children bought and promptly forgot about as well as the duplicate china which, now being an eccentric anti-social divorcee I no longer use..

5 snacks I enjoy

I know that everyone else interpreted this as food but my brain also needs snacks and I regularly dip into poetry...I have listed those here..

1. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock - TS Eliot
2. The Flea - John Donne
3. Tyger, Tyger - William Blake
4. The Ancient Mariner - Coleridge
5. Astrophil and Stella Sonnets - Philip Sidney

5 Bands That I Know the Lyrics to Most of Their Songs

1. Bob Dylan
2. Leonard Cohen
3. Cat Stevens
4. Norah Jones
5. Robbie Williams

5 Things I Would Do with $100,000,000

1. Put it in the bank and earn interest (sad but true)
2. Give away loads to people who need it.
3. Self-publish my poetry
4. Contribute to my daughters' education
5. Buy a house overlooking the sea where I could write.

5 Locations I Would Like to Run Away to

1. The arms of the person who is waiting to love me.
2. Anywhere on a horse
3. anywhere on a horse by the sea
4. Anywhere I could sail to.
5. The cuddling arms of my children.

5 Bad Habits I Have

1. No will power
2. lust
3. laziness
4. only drink Diet Coke
5. no confidence.

5 Things I Like Doing

1. Anything and everything in bed.
2. Reading
3. Writing
4. Painting
5. Sunbathing

5 Things I Would Never Wear

1. anything with a roll neck (itchy!)
2. Anything out of itchy wool
3. a posing pouch
4. a pvc dress
5. a leather collar.

5 TV Shows I Like

I never watch tv.

5 Movies I Like

1. Pride and Prejudice
2. Ghandi
3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
4. Anything with Gene Wilder
5. Anything with Hugh Grant.

5 Famous People I Would Like to Meet (off the top of my head)

1. Charles Dickens
2. Jane Austen
3. Winston Churchill
4. Robbie Williams
5. Shakespeare

5 Favourite Toys

1. My palm
2. My ipod
3. My wireless keyboard for my palm
4. The one under my bed.
5. My cuddly dog that I cry on...

I think that everyone I would like to tag has done this, but if you haven't and you would like to, please leave your name in the comment box - I can't wait to see your answers!

*wicked grin*

Minerva

Blogging for Katrina - Blog for Disaster Relief

Today is not about Bush, blame or blunders, it is about compassion, tolerance and empathy. Today is about putting all those issues to one side and blogging for disaster relief for the victims of Katrina, or those who have succumbed to other disasters.

Please, if you haven't yet, whoever is to blame, whatever is happening down there, those people need our help. We only hear about one or two shots, but we know that there are tens of thousands of women, children, and old, frail, sick people who don't have the strength and the energy to stand up and shout for themselves.

It is for those people that I am blogging, for those people that I urge you to give, and for those people that I too am donating my hard earned cash...

I can't be there myself, but hopefully, that money will go towards rebuilding the great birthplace of jazz, that itself needs a midwife..

To donate to the Uk Red Cross please go here.

To donate to the American Red Cross please go here

If you are looking for relatives or know some people are alive that you know, please post their details here

If you are in the USA and want to volunteer, please go here

And if/when you have donated, please go and log your contribution in here.


There but for the grace of Insert Favourite Deity's Signature here Go I, you, we...


Minerva

rel="tag">international blogging for disaster relief day

Hurricanes and Guns...

In the days after Hurricane Andrew, our neighbours were very worried about the looting that was expected and urged my ex-husband and I to take one of their guns to protect ourselves. I remember telling my ex-husband that I was much more scared of either of us handling a gun than what might come in through my door.. Human, I can handle, brooding, death-bringing, insidious metal I could not. The mere presence of a gun in my house would have just weighed on me. Guns in our culture are such an anathema, such a rarity that having one would have probably made me feel physically ill.

And now, as I read the stories of armed looters, is this really what the right to defend yourself means? Is that what the constitution writers meant by the right to carry arms? Are you, the gun lobby proud of what you are seeing? Without guns, how many of the resources pointed at fighting armed looters could be used to rescue those who are sick, who are frail, and who are vulnerable?

Is this what being a civilised first world country means?


Minerva