Friday, 27th October, 2023
I’ve been a bit naughty. If I was fit and well, it would still be a bit naughty. As a convalescent, I’m being even more than a bit bit naughty. Very naughty, in fact.
I was a bit naughty last night too. Tracey, my housemate (landlady really, but she isn’t large and round with curlers and stockings round her ankles living in Brighton) and her boyfriend were going down the chippy. Did I want anything? Oh yes.
In terms of health and body weight probably not a good idea, but boy did I like it. There’s a chippy just up the road but I haven’t been there in the seven months I’ve been living here. It feels a bit disloyal to my friend Sam who runs a chippy close to where I used to live in Cheltenham. What a weird kind of loyalty. On the last weekend with a then-girlfriend, over a year ago now, we had a clash over the milk having gone off. From then onwards I don’t take milk in my coffee anymore. How weird is that?
So, when opening up my thoughts about dealing with cancer and the treatment’s after-effects, I guess it’s important to frame the thinking with the observation that some of the stuff I can thunk are a bit weird. Or unconventional, at least. Different from the norm, maybe.
So, the four tins of beer I bought today for this evening’s rugby 3rd v 4th game, although a bit naughty, I don’t care. Psychologically, I need to feel ’normal’. When treatment finished, after seven weeks without an alcoholic drink, I lost it, slipping back into old habits of alcohol every day. That wasn’t naughty, it was bloody stupid. Both in terms of my convalescence and losing weight. On the one hand, I’ve lost four stone since Christmas. On the other, I’ve still got two and a half to go. And as the weight comes down, it gets harder to loose. In truth, normal has been for me alcohol every day. Lots of it. Partly pain management if I’m charitable. Addiction, habit, weakness of character maybe if I’m honest with myself.
How to change forty years of normal
Get cancer, maybe?
Weight-loss which is imperative for me to reach a BMI from which they’ll ‘consider’ operating on my knee, changes another aspect of my game. Not just relief from the constant pain. Feeling better about myself too. Weight-loss so far has been a by-product. I’m not completely well yet, far from it, but I’m well enough to consider a time where if I don’t think — control — weight-loss it will stop happening as a by-product and I’ll start putting weight back on, a by-product of an addictive personality, without noticing.
Sunday.
Four more beers and a bottle of wine on a Saturday night. That’s normal, right?
Here’s the thing. Alcohol, and other addictions, but I don’t run marathons or shop for another pair of boots, alters your current state. It alters you out of the state you’re in, you may or may not consciously know what state you’re in or that you want altering out of it. Much of the stuff of addictions operates beneath the surface. The radar. With alcohol, once it’s altered you into another state, you’ve also lost control and the gates that would stop you spiralling keep getting altered in rapid succession. And then operate differently. But I don’t want my state altering anymore. I like the state I’m in. Once I’m out of bladder radiation cystitis, of course.
Today I feel real shit. It’s 1430 and I’ve just got out of bed. And the clocks went back last night, in old money it’s half-three. Is this the result of the alcohol? I don’t think so. Was it worth it?
No.
But if it results in me finding out at that low-down sub-conscious I don’t want to be a drinker anymore. Then maybe, just maybe, it was.
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