Wednesday, 04 October 2023
Sometimes it’s the little things, right?
Yesterday I had half a bottle of Moet. A couple of glasses of Prosecco in the evening with a nice supper, not worrying about the effects of materiality in my bowel or rectum.
The scanning days are done. Can I resist writing ‘for now’? I don’t want this thing to come back, even though at first, when it was initially discovered, I didn’t care. Life could do what it wanted.
The scanning days are done.
For now, let’s not dwell on the scanning days are done … ‘for now’ bit.
Let the Champagne times begin.
But, the little things.
This morning I had an apple. Then another one. For most of my adult life I’ve been a meat and two veg man, a real men don’t eat quiches man. Lettuce is rabbit food. For women. Of course, for women. Brilliant, welcome to whom I was, welcome to me. In the last ten years this has changed. Maybe age, maybe the ripples of a chronic diagnosis bouncing off a wall somewhere and coming back within a polarised light. For the last five weeks, seven including the two prior to treatment, I’ve not eaten fruit. No spices either, no pulses, no herby veg, no apples. Two Wheatabix in the morning, soup in the evening. The odd ‘treats’ on a Friday evening, like loads of chocolate, because there is no treatment on the Saturday or Sunday (for me, anyway) so my bowl can be evacuated in easy time — no man-made enforcing agents — by the Monday morning and my worry-mind can relax. (For each treatment, the large and small intestine have to be in the same kind of fullness condition and the bladder at maximum balloon. Each internal organ pushes on the neighbours creating equilibrium that changes throughout the day and with ‘evacuations’. Before treatment, a CT scan is taken in order to ensure the prostate is being jostled into the same geometry as it was for each of the preceding days, the X-ray beam has the same ‘shape’ each day as it ingresses into the abdomen to match the shape and the position in the body of the tumour.) That felt like a paragraph in its own right, not a bracketed aside. As that was … probably a bracketed aside.
I feel like I’ve been living a kind of lie for the last five weeks. A projection of a personality. Not for any one else’s benefit, my exposure to other humans has been exclusively Radiology staff and Patient Transport crews. The odd taxi driver, and my house-mate Tracey, who has been away or ill most of the treatment schedule. Now, today, there is no longer a need for a projection of a life, a channel of positivity to show my mind can beat this thing. I’m ok, I’m strong. I can handle the treatment, take the side-effects. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be ok. Obviously.
And I will. The projection has gone, but there’s still a burned-in silhouette on the wall. Maybe I am actually like this, after all. But, and here’s the thing, I never used to be. I used to be somebody else. Who? Does it matter who? A diagnosis of a wheel-chaired life altered me. Successfully completing college too. Two diseases architected to kill me in 2018. Two post-marriage love affairs to, excuse the expression, to die for. A friendship-love affair I wish hadn’t ended but it has. The love bit, although the friendships still strong. My dog. Two sons entering adulthood and all the pain I, and every other human has gone through, still to come, still to endure. I’m no longer who I was, having thought I’d changed versions of me a few times in my life but now realising I hadn’t, I’d just changed clothes. Now, I’m not me anymore.
I went through a St Francis of Assisi stage and threw all the old clothes away.
Cancer does that like nothing else. Who am I now? I don’t know. I don’t know yet. But I prefer, infinitely prefer, this version of me. This for the rest of time, me.
This apples-man me.
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