Tropic of Cancer

Tuesday, 15th August, 2023

I’m sitting reading one of my favourite books from my youth. Fair Stood the Wind for France, by H E Bates. It’s like reading a new novel but with an echo of known excellence. I want to know if I feel it’s as good now, forty years on, as I did then.

It is.

The weird thing is I’ve not had an alcoholic drink or a coffee for four days. And the usual detox detriments don’t seem to have come on. Or not to the same degree. Nor the tiredness, bad energy, squalid thinking. Well, a bit, but in much larger spaced waves and with smaller peaks.

Wait! That’s not the weird thing. I’m reading because the skipper’s gone for a doze for an hour or two and I’m having a rest in the sun.

Skipper?

You see, I’m sitting reading on a boat. A yacht. It friggles and fidgets, sways like a drunkard’s walk, alters its position in space in three dimensions. Sitting in the cockpit with the sun on my back, changing horizons with other boats, the jetty, a distant bridge, the river. Even though we’re not moving, we’re tied to the jetty, we’re moving. Never still. Myriad colours of kaleidoscopic grey-y greens of the water, blues of the sky and whites shading to the different greys of the clouds. It doesn’t seem so dominant, the barely detectable movement of something that’s still, but still on a tide. Inside the cabin, in front of me is an oblong window, higher up, through which the movement of the mast and flying bridge of the boats opposite is more measured. Even looking within, at the panelled walls of the boat, my ears’ movement tubes (technical term) are detecting motion. It’s not unpleasant, just … different. Weird. It doesn’t affect my eyes’ movement across the line of the book, nor the reverse sweep cycads (now that is a technical term) that means my eyes arrive at the correct point to start the next line. Makes pouring kettled water into the coffee cup a skill, though.

Friday, 11^th, August, 2023

Having been a lifelong supporter of Groucho Marx’s not wanting to belong to any club that would have me as a member, I’ve joined a club. A yacht club, of all things. It’s quite posh. And, no, I’m not a sailor. Or posh. Despite Boarding School. I’ll explain later.

As a thank you, and a first reccee to assess the terrains for my gamboling disability gait, I’ve taken my landlady for lunch. It’s a lateish lunch, a Friday, and the restaurant is empty. Everybody will be getting ready to go out on their boats, Tracey explains. After the starter, but before the main course has arrived, we’ve both ordered fish, we’re sitting with a view of the River Hamble, my phone goes. I’m expecting a call from a hospital in Lymmington, so, and although I wouldn’t normally take an unregistered number, in these circumstances, I take it. Is that Mr Mortenson?, call me Guy, all that sort of nonsense.

I’m coming for a CT scan on Monday, apparently. Am I? Didn’t you know?

We eventually work out it’s Wednesday, which as an appointment I did know about, and it does involve a scan, which I didn’t know about. And I have to be fully liquidated.

I’m staring at two-thirds of a pint of San Miguel. Not that kind of liquid.

Two litres of water every day.

And nothing else.

Starting now.

Did I mention the two thirds of a pint of larger? And a bottle of Borolo in the car.

I’ll start on Monday.

Starting now.

I don’t tell Emily, the very pleasant but rather assertive nurse on the other end of the phone, but I’ll start tomorrow.

The jury is out on the effects of coffee as a diuretic, note I said there coffee as a diuretic, not caffeine as a diuretic. Emily insists I drink a cup of water for every cup of coffee I drink. Usually, I will have two or three coffees in the morning while I read, none during the rest of the day (I’m not vegan on this, if I’m meeting a friend in a coffee shop that afternoon, I’ll have a coffee). I have my own feelings on this coffee conflicting information, and have read a lot on the chemistry over the years — there’s a lot of chemistry in the study of caffeine and blood make up — but, here’s the thing, I have developed some house rules over the treatment of cancer and although I shall adopt some of my own wacky esoteric beliefs, I shall obey what I‘m told to do by Oncology and Oncology related staff. So, for the next six weeks (two weeks until radiotherapy starts and a four week course), no coffee, no alcohol. Note, again, I said no coffee. There is cafffeine in chocolate. Why do you think it’s such a huge industry?

There are two things I know (I think I know) about caffeine. Its molecules sit on receptors normally taken up by ATP (deep chemistry), when you stop taking coffee, ATP molecules reinhabit their now cookoo-less habitats. ATP molecules are slightly bigger than caffeine molecules so as they force their way through now smaller diameter blood vessels in the brain, you get headaches. 

The second is that substances like caffeine encourage the brain to produce dopamine (which is why they’re addictive) so the brain ‘forgets’ how to produce it itself. When the caffeine (alcohol, weed, etc etc) stops, the brain has forgotten how to produce dopamine itself (this is not a medical explanation) which makes you a miserable, difficult bastard. Hopefully only for the duration.

Combine those two effects, headaches, mood swings, low energy: lucky landlady.

Wednesday, 07th August 2023

It’s a feeling I’ve been expecting, anticipating. I’ve waited long enough. Since March 15th. First, I needed a PET scan, wait six weeks. Can’t have one, there’s no funding. As it happens, I’m moving to Hampshire. Gloucestershire graciously and efficiently hand me over to Hampshire. By the very nature of bureaucracy, and if that word has now become synonymous with inefficiency, with the very nature of administration, there is a delay. Oncology in July, 12th, Southampton. Sure enough, I’ll be in a zapper, but there is a six week delay. Waiting list, rather. I’ll be called two weeks before to go and see the kit, get a feel for the fitting etc. 

It’s now August 9th. Two weeks before six weeks. I find a number for Radiotherapy. They put me through to bookings. An answer machine. I wait an hour and ring again. They put me through to bookings. This time a human being. I have an appointment for the 16th. Wednesday.

A week today.

It’s a feeling I’m familiar with. Anticipating.

The numbness.

Seconds later, a feeling I’m not.

An avalanche of a feeling. Frightened. Terror. 

Quickly it goes; it’s not suppressed, it dilutes. This is what I’ve been waiting for. A date. A start. Now we’re in play. Vague thoughts can now crystallise into plans.

Wednesday, 19th July 2023.

Nothing to do with cancer this time. Add it to the list. Yesterday I saw the nurse again, Emma, not the specialist nurse I’ve seen twice, Jane’s on holiday. About my swelling. No, keep it clean.

Jane, whose specialisation is ‘tissue viability’ as a phrase a new one on me, but I like it, handed over the process to Emma who did my cancer jecky (Injections before I switched to pills). It turns out Emma knows what she’s doing anyway. The swelling is noticeably diminished, the bandaging hasn’t been too uncomfortable, although it is intrusive if sleeping on my side with my legs together, and fortunately the weather’s a lot cooler. With Tracey’s help I’ve been able to get my foot into a proper shoe and that makes a hell of a difference to the self-worth. I covered most of the stuff about the compression bandages earlier, other than this has been two weeks now and my third iteration of wrappings. The leg is looking closer to normal than it has for half a decade.

At the end of the process I asked Emma how I’d find out about the results of the X-rays to my knees. The results are in, she said. She didn’t really, I can’t remember what she said, but it amounted to the results are in.

MS can, obviously, be severely debilitating, to be amongst a bunch of MSers at a meeting is to see a whole bunch of people ‘walking’ similarly, and it isn’t a new version of disco dancing. The thing that is heavily debilitating for me, no the thing that puts me in constant high-level pain, is my right knee.

I’ve had two key-hole surgery ops on my right knee, one in the nineties and one in ‘09. The second one left me with the observation that the cartilage of my tibia was in real trouble. This time they carried out a new procedure where by they drill holes into the surface of the bone, let the blood and stuff congeal and that forms a protection barrier. 

For a while.

Additionally, the MS physio in Gloucester was confident a lot of the problems for my right knee, much worse than the left, were MS related.

Emma read the notes. Some of the stuff, she said, was above her pay grade but the X-rays showed there was no protective cartilage at all on either surface of the bones, so my knee was effectively bone rubbing on bone (which I could have told them from the pain) and there were signs of osteoarthritis which X-rays had indicated back in 06 when I had first been investigated for symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as MS but were missed at the time.

‘What can we do about it?’

We booked an appointment with a resident knee doctor for 3rd August.

I should be most concerned about the cancer, but right now I just want the pain of my right knee, a constant companion for ten years, to go away.

Wednesday, 12 July, 2023

Well. In one way I’m connected again, in one way I’m connectionless. The connected is more important, the connectionless fixable.

The mystery as to why my first initiation consultancy in Hampshire is with Urology. Oncology (at least for prostate cancer) work out of the Urology suite. We’re on level G, C was the ground floor, and I wan’t paying attention in the lift but if there’s one floor per letter we’re four floors up. The view from the Oncologist’s window is lovely (I suspect Southampton General is on a high bit of ground too), north over plenty of trees and not too many high-risers. Maybe a brief glimpse of 10,000 years ago, before we started farming. We have some chit chat.

If I was seeking a second opinion in that “I want a second opinion” sense, I wasn’t, my Oncologist is very complimetary about Cheltenham and Gloucester Oncology, I needn’t have bothered. ‘I think Dr Bowden was right,’ she says, ‘because of your very high PSA I don’t think we can cure you.’

How does that make me feel?

Nothing at the moment. And this nothing isn’t the nothingness of numb, like my PPMS diagnosis, this is an absence off emotion, not a suppression. I’ll think about it tonight. Since I’m writing this tomorrow, as it were (I tend to write these posts with an early-morning coffee, after my daily dose of day-intro fiction, in the dawn hours of the next day, my favourite time to write) I thought about it last night.

It’s complicated.

And different from when I first heard the same words. Although I took my voice recorder, I forgot to activate it so can’t listen to the convo again.

There is a brief flare of ‘oh my God, this thing is going to kill me’, then the Watcher, having been on low-level surveillance, hands over to the Catcher and the thought is dismissed, quashed. Again, not suppressed, dismissed. How to explain the difference? How to explain nuances of feeling? This thought has been flushed away. Is it still within me, deep somewhere, planted, nurtured and now part of the garden furniture? : no it isn’t. Practically, as I say often and to everybody, I’m 61 years old, I’m still breathing, plenty of others didn’t get to my age: no complaints. There are other practical thoughts, my two sons at their father’s funeral, the odd woman I haven’t pissed off crying, the kind platitudes on Facebook. The Catcher kicks in again. Bollox to that. I’ve still got things to do. Novels to write, people to affect through literature and writing (I wasn’t watching what my snazzy fingers were writing there, but autocorrect came up with ‘rioting’), a woman to catch and tame.

More than that, I’m teaching myself to talk to my body. Which seems a bit of a surreal concept. New-Age Witchery. Many moons ago I read a book, it is just coming to me. If this was real time you’d have to wait as I search my memory. Tall blond Californian with a Californian name. I’ll just go pop the kettle on, resist a Google search for mow, and be back with you.

Fresh coffee made, I search Google. ‘californian wman [sic] cured herself of cacner [also ‘sic’, welcome to typing after two decades of MS]’ gets me a load of press bollox. I’ll think about it no get back to you, talking to my body for another time. I think I need to read this woman’s book again. Oh look at that, the disfunction of an old person’s memory revealed in real time.

[Brandon Bayes.]