Lisa's blog

Stolen

23/7/2015

I don’t seem to be very good at creating fanfare, and so my new novel, Stolen slipped into the world on the 8th of February announced only on my private Facebook page. Quietly, the novel made itself know, sales began, sales grew, all modest, but enough to make me smile, and hope that people were reading and hopefully enjoying my new baby-book.

Normally I know exactly where my novels ideas come from. My last book, That Elusive Cure, has very firm roots that I will explore another time. But the beginnings of Stolen eludes me. The reason is this story had been mulling around my head for maybe ten years. The plot evolved over the years, but the essence was always the same, a woman captive on an island in the Shetlands. The name sometimes changed, at one point it was going to be called Fifty words for Snow. The reasoning being she found a book in the cottage about the indigenous Canadian peoples and their many words for snow. Each chapter would have a different snow word, an explanation of what it was and that would then somehow mirror the mood of that chapter. A line from the scribbles I made at the time read: Today I am natquik - drifting snow. My soul is drifting along.

About four years ago I debated having another crack at the novel and along with new thoughts came a new title, The Stolen Life of Mandy Brown. A note I made at the time follows: Who do you see when you close your eyes? I hope it’s me, and that my image haunts you to an early grave.

The plot originally spanned two years and a much harsher imprisonment. As time went on, the plot matured like a fine wine and was distilled into a shorter time span and I think this made the essence of the novel far stronger. I do know that when I originally came up with the idea for Stolen it wasn’t long after I read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I wanted to be inspired by the sense of isolation and helpless imprisonment she captured in her novel.

Since publishing Stolen, I have written very little. Despite plans to have at least another novel out by now, I have managed virtually nothing. The chemo I was on during the first quarter of the year pummelled my brain and recovery was slow. I do think I’m back to par now, but the words still fail to flow. I’ve taken to crochet – to be honest it’s a bit of an obsession. I enjoy it, but a part of my mind is always, constantly thinking about what I could be writing. Maybe it’s a case of losing the ingrained habit of writing most days. Maybe I’m afraid to start writing again. Maybe I need to set myself a goal of a modest 500 words and see where it takes me. But then again, maybe I’ll go back downstairs and start crocheting another blanket!

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The Deeper Implications of Hair Loss

26/2/2015

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Most people associate chemotherapy with hair loss. Having been in and out of the Clatterbridge oncology ward on an almost weekly basis since September 2012, I can say that no, getting chemo does not mean you lose your hair. Seems to be more and more chemos don’t make you lose it these days.

For the last two and a half years I have been lucky enough to sport a long mane of blonde hair. It was my favourite feature, one I identified myself as – the woman with the great big thick plait of hair. The one with the messy, slightly wavy, mop of hair that reached halfway down the back.

But the thing is, the hair represented so much more than identity. I could be a faker. I know other people thought that way, as I pulled into a disabled spot, and got out of the car looking the picture of health when in fact I’d had chemo a couple of days before and felt like a bus had run over me then reversed to seal the deal. I’d see their sideways tut-tutting looks as they assumed I’d borrowed gran’s disabled card to use the easy spot neat the supermarket.

I didn’t mind feeling a fake. I could pretend that I really wasn’t sick with the big ‘C’. I was, in fact, okay. I was one of those awful people who build up an entire story of sickness to get sympathy. That’s who I wanted to be. Who wouldn’t rather be a pretender than actually have tumours on their liver?

But then the chemo I was on started to not work so well. To be honest, I got two and a half years on the same meds, that’s brilliant. Couldn’t ask for more. Hubby and I were waiting for when it would start being less effective. That time came late last year, and in January I started second line chemo (ie whole new load of drugs). The first thing the doc said was that I’d lose my hair. No big deal, I said to myself. I’ve been so, so lucky to last this long with my lion’s mane.

Then January arrived and a couple of weeks after the first dose, the hair began to fall. Remember I said I had thick hair? Well, I reckon a normal person’s amount of hair fell out that week, but I still had loads. The hair loss slowed. Then I had my next dose. A few days later the itchy tender feeling was back – it seems to be what proceeds a big fall of hair – and another headfull fell out. Yet I still looked normal.

This went on for a few weeks until mid Feb when finally I was left with the wispy fine remains of what once was. I put it in a ponytail at the base of my neck and chopped off what I was now calling a rattail. The bob lasted a week. Then I got my daughter to do a super short do. All those hours working at the dog groomers paid off and she did a fabulous job on me. But the fall out has continued and it’s time to shave it to maybe half a centimetre long. It’d be done already, but hubby is away on business and he’s taken his beard trimmer with him (yes, that is my planned mode of attack).

Okay, sounds good, right? Wrong. I have been more upset losing my hair than I ever thought. I think I have been more upset than when I was diagnosed with cancer, or any time since. It took me a little while to work out why tears kept trying to come. Why my session at the wig fitters had Mum and me crying and holding onto each other in the hall outside the salon.

It’s because I can’t be a faker anymore.

Suddenly I am that hairless cancer person. I briefly renamed myself Cheryl Noble (as in Chernobyl because I thought back to pictures of them I must have seen in my teens each time I looked in the mirror) and made light of it, but in reality I’m struggling to look in the mirror. I wear my head gear all the time. I even sleep in it.

Hair loss means something a little different to each person that goes through it. To some it’s identity. Or fitting in to what is considered the ‘normal’ look of a woman. To me hair loss represents my cancer diagnosis finally becoming real after almost three years of emotional avoidance. The good news is now it’s just about all gone I’m recovering mentally and getting back to my roll-with-it attitude.

My hair fell out. So what. Get on with life. It’s still there and desperate to be lived.

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What to work on next?

12/12/2014

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I am halfway through editing my upcoming novel, Stolen, and inevitably around this point I get sick of editing and start thinking of what comes next. I always have a pile of things in my head that I want to write and now is no different. I’ve been compiling a list…

Finish What Alice Sees. I started this novel in 2006. The first 30k placed in a few competitions, so I think it’s likely to be a really good book… once it’s finished. I’m up to about 45k and I reckon I’m about halfway through. I have the rest mapped out in detail, so I’m not stuck with the plot. Seems at the beginning of every year, I place this on my ‘important to-do list’ and I might do a little, have a fiddle with the words, then it gets set aside. Again. Poor Alice really wants her story told. Is 2015 the year for her?
Write Plague 2. Undeniably, Plague has been my bestselling, most popular book. It’s been number one on Amazon in horror for weeks on end, sold 10s of thousands of copies and I’ve had so many emails from fans asking for number two that I’ve lost count. And yet I stall. I was going to write it in the autumn of 2012. Like Alice, I have this plotted out in detail, along with a third instalment. Then in the summer of 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer, and writing got swept to the side. Part of me is afraid I won’t write the second part to the standard of the first, and I’ll disappoint my readers. No, not part of me, pretty much all of me.
Write the second part of Sacrifice. This was always planned as a series and I was in the middle of editing the first one in 2012 when I got sick. It was pushed to a back burner and only finished and released this year. I have yet to write the next part, even though (you guessed it) it is plotted out in detail. I sense a pattern emerging here!
And then for something new. I’ve got a paranormal series I’ve started. The first book needs to edited, but I haven’t written any more of the series and I’m loathe to release another beginning of a series just to abandon it again!
Rewrites. I have a horror book called The Crocodile that I wrote before or just after Coombe’s Wood, maybe in 2008? It needs to be completely rewritten, but would be worth it because I think it’s a brilliant story. Imagine your stuffed toys coming to life and stalking you…
And then the new ideas. I always have them. New ideas, old ideas, plots that want to be written. There are maybe four bouncing around my head right now, all clamouring for attention. Which comes first? So hard to decide. And that’s not including the partials, books I’ve written maybe 10k and plotted out and want to get back to. Sheesh, there just aren’t enough days/hours/weeks to do everything.

So there you go, I should be editing, but instead I’ve got this list of books that I want to move on to. Deciding what to do next is so hard for me. My usual default is to avoid the number twos that need to be written and go straight to number six on the list. That Elusive Cure happened when I was avoiding What Alice Sees. It was a brand new idea. Not plotted and written by the seat of my pants. Stolen, the book I’m working on now was an idea I’d had years earlier. It wasn’t plotted out, just a jumble of ideas in my head. That beat out Plague Two earlier this year.

So what’s next? Will Alice finally get her story told? Or is that idea about a brain transplant going to come first? Maybe I'll start the rewrite of the toy crocodile that comes to life. What about the adult fairy tale featuring a man with violet eyes? Or imagine being cryogenically frozen and waking up to a completely different world hundreds of years later? One thing I’ve learned from writing my list is maybe I need to stop plotting things out. Seems to kill books in my mind. Perhaps I’m a ‘seat of the pants’ writer and not a plotter.

How do other writers do it? Do they have the same internal battles trying to work out what comes next? I'm beginning to think maybe my problem is that I just need to learn how to type faster.

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At least it was quick…

9/11/2014

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Just to get it out there, no one has said this to me or insulted or offended me with this little cliché of a statement. It was me who thought it when watching one of those cancer awareness adverts that seem to be all over the telly these days.

Someone was diagnosed and passed away within weeks. My first thought was, ‘At least it was quick.’ Then I caught myself, I was stunned. Had that thought really just popped up in my mind? As someone who is ‘suffering’ (should that be afflicted, infected, fighting or just simply call me another person dealing with cancer?) with the same infernal medical issue, albeit of the bowel cancer flavour, I was horrified with myself. I may be poorly, I may be in pain sometimes, I may know that my life expectancy will be shorter than I had hoped (I was planning on doing a hundred plus, haha) but the last thing I want is for my illness to be quick.

I’m falling apart slowly. I know this as well. But it doesn’t change the desperate need in me to live. The last thing I want is for my time to be quick. I’m not fighting, like everyone says. “She put up a good battle fighting this horrible disease…” That’s what people say, isn’t it. But for me, it’s not true. I’m living my life, like any other person. I just have these awful masses on my liver that if I don’t go and get my juice (chemo) every two weeks, they will grow and take over my liver until life is no longer sustainable. But I’m not fighting. I go with this flow, get my juice, sleep a lot, and try and make sure I do fun things on my good days.

Maybe for some people it would be a relief to go quickly. Not me. I’ll put up with the aches and pains, the uncertainly and that damned scanxiety every four months as I wait to see what that latest CT scan is going to tell the doc. I’ve come to terms with the facts of my disease, and I am actually in a good, happy place. When the end finally comes, I want people to say, “At least she took a long time to go.” I’m that bad smell that refuses to disperse, and I’m planning on sticking around as long as possible.

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Worried about Ebola?

10/10/2014

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Then join an increasingly large crowd.

Ebola. The word itself sends a little chill through me. It’s been the focus of many a scary movie and book over the years. I imagine groups huddled, as much as you can in an internet way, as campfire conspiracy theories are passed around about its origins. Until now the virus has been contained in Africa, and Ebola remained the stuff of fiction and nightmares. But now it’s out. It’s escaped. There’s been a bid for freedom and while western Africa struggles to live through this outbreak the rest of the world is holding its collective breath and waiting to see what happens next.

People like me are probably more scared or maybe I should say ‘more easily scared’ because I’m a story teller. I think of this stuff, worry about this stuff, wonder when it’ll happen and how it’ll happen. ‘It’ being an outbreak of any infectious disease. Just happens to be Ebola’s turn. My normal concern about this kind of stuff has had the volume cranked up and now I’m panicking.

My book Plague was published in late 2011. I did more research for that book than I had ever done for any other. What would happen if there was an outbreak of something nasty? What lengths would the government go to in an effort to contain it? I envisioned people quarantined to their houses. There would be special helplines to call if you became ill, with people told to stay away from hospitals and their doctor’s surgery. The sick would be locked into their houses and left to fend for themselves as the health service was overwhelmed and then collapsed. Armed guards would patrol the streets to ensure the sick stayed put. It’s a scary vision of what might happen. More scary is how I’m now reading about those first stages being discussed by our leaders in the government.

Despite my husband and me trying to shield our thirteen-year-old son from all the Ebola scariness (me as a scared story-teller, him as the scared conspiracy theorist) James came home the other day unable to stop talking about it. His biology teacher had been telling them all about Ebola and the nightmare scenarios. Cheers, teach. My son had gone into panic overdrive. I told some hopeful lies about how it’ll come under control and calmed him down. Meanwhile I’m debating stocking up on bottled water and dried food, and buying one of those camping stoves with a bunch of bottles of gas. You can never be too prepared, right?

If you want to see for yourself how I handled an outbreak of bubonic plague on UK soil, here are the links for Amazon US and UK.

UK cover version

US cover
version

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Scratch one off the Bucket List

14/9/2014

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I don’t really have a bucket list. I thought about it at one point and did actually write a few things down that I wanted to do before… well, you know. But I lost the list and haven’t cared enough to write another one. For me, a bucket list means I’m imminently dying. I’m not, so I don’t need one. But the thing is, once I get to that point, then I’ll probably not be healthy enough to do many of the things I want to. Bit of a Catch 22.

So with the whole, health declining issue, Mike and I have been talking about Mt Snowdon. I’ve always wanted to conquer it – like a challenge as opposed to a bucket list item. I’m about to start full chemo again. A week and a half ago I had chemo, but only avastin. This week coming I get the full complement of drugs, and from that first big dose I will be in no condition to be attempting the mountain until probably December, when only insane and experienced people go up. My next opportunity will be next summer (at least that’s our guess) and who knows what will have happened between then and now. So this weekend was really the last time I’d get to attempt it.

We lucked out. It’s mid-September, and somehow the weather was with us. Hardly a gust of wind to the air, just enough cloud cover so we didn’t get frazzled from a day of sun, no rain, and dry trails. Couldn’t have asked for better. We left home an hour later than intended and got to the trail base at noon. Found one of the last spaces in the overspill car park that actually consisted of dumping the car on the grass outside the car park, and got a taxi to the base. And off we went.

I’d love to say I found it a breeze and got up the mountain effortlessly. I didn’t. I had many, many breaks. Usually every five – fifteen minutes I’d sit for a minute just to catch my breath. We’d chosen the Pyg trail, it’s a moderate trail. Mainly because we wanted to be able to say we’d gone up a decently challenging trail. About three-quarters of the way up I was moaning at Mike saying, “Whose stupid idea was it to climb this mountain, anyway?” (It was mine.) Then I started asking why people in general had this dumb urge to climb mountains. Our dog had no trouble and we decided that on top of being Collie crossed with German Spitz, there was also some billy goat in there. Any bit of rock there was to be had he was up with a couple of springy steps. I was very jealous.

Funnily enough, Rolo (the dog) took great pleasure at stopping at all the cliff edges. We were worried he’d take a leap and strangle himself on the lead, but then we realised he was taking in the view. He did this the whole way up and all the way down. Who would have thought a dog would even understand breath-taking scenery?

Towards the top my stops became more frequent and although I never even entertained the thought of going back down, the whole idea of walking up a mountain with stage four cancer having had only six weeks since my last chemo began to seem like a silly idea. But I made it, and the elation I felt at the top was enormous. I took a quiet moment and spoke to whoever it is who looks down upon us, figuring I was closer and therefore he might hear me better, and asked for a few things.

The map said it took an average of three and a half hours to get up the Pyg trail. We managed it in four. By the time we had a hot drink the time was five, and Mike was worried about getting down before dark. Several people we passed said they thought it was harder going down than up, and we were a little anxious.

Well, that was silly, maybe they were having us on, but going down was a doddle. We decided to see how the dog did without a lead on, mainly because with Rolo pulling ahead whoever was holding the lead was likely to get pulled down face first onto the rocky mountain path. Well, he resisted the built-in Collie urges to round up sheep and behaved impeccably. Other than rolling in some sheep poo, eating some sheep poo, and ten minutes later almost throwing up the sheep poo, I had no complaints.

The last mile of the trail was the worst. We were tired, Mike had a giant blister on one toe, our feet hurt, our calves hurt, our thighs hurt, and I had a headache. I’d long ago sweated the stickiness off the dressings that keep my picc line in place, and had to keep a bandage wrapped around my arm to stop it from falling off completely. Every curve of the path gave us more brilliant scenery, but not the buildings at the trail’s base that we were now hoping for. Two hours and forty-five minutes after leaving the summit we were done. Rolo was still bouncing, Mike gave me a paracetamol with codeine, and we gave up on the idea of eating at a local pub and made for home. The codeine and general exhaustion floored me within ten minutes of being in the car, and poor Mike had to drive for an hour and a half with me and the dog out like lights.

Funny things along the way: A mum and dad pass by with two young children. She says in a very serious tone, “No, I disagree. Elliot has got a good point about pee.” I kept hearing what sounded like one of those novelty pigs that do a strange ‘oink’ when squeezed. It was when we got to the summit that I realised it was a crow making the sound. Now I’m wondering if some kid ascended the mountain squeezing a novelty pig the whole way and the crow thought, “Wow, that’s a cool sound. I’m going to make that noise instead!” And on the subject of crows, there were a number of them circling around. More as we got higher. As couple of young lads passed by one said, “Yeah, they’re looking for the people who didn’t make it.”

Yesterday we climbed 7.2 miles in distance and 800m of ascent. I can now say I’ve climbed a mountain! Oh and for those who are better than me at finding things on the internet, there was a young man running up and down the mountain for Macmillan. He was seeing how many times he could run it in 24 hours. On the way up we passed him as he came down from his second one and on the way down we passed him as he was going up for the third time. We missed seeing him come down as we crossed from the Pyg trail to the Miners trail on the way down. If anyone can figure out who he is, please let me know, I’d love to donate a little for his efforts!

Last words: I’m walking like I very old person today. Legs are hurting, feet actually aren’t too bad, and my bum is aching! Walking to the bathroom for a hot bath has been pretty much my biggest exertion today. :)

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The Lump Theory

9/9/2014

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Anyone who writes probably knows the value of Stephen King’s book On Writing. It’s a definitive work aimed at the reader as well as the aspiring writer. Mr King started as a high school English teacher, and it shows in the interviews and lectures I’ve seen and most definitely in On Writing. After reading this book it’s apparent he’s never stopped teaching.

A new idea I learned from him recently is what I now call: the lump theory. More of that in a moment. The first thing he said that stuck with me in this particular lecture is this: “A notebook is the best way to immortalise bad ideas.” I’ve always kept a notebook. It’s how I remember things, ideas, snippets, book titles I have no book for yet, pictures, concepts, anything that has triggered an chain of thoughts in my mind. I use physical notebooks but I also have a Word document in the documents folder of my computer that I add to constantly with links to articles or anything that has made me look, made me stop and then made me ask, what if? How could the great Stephen King tell me I’ve been doing it wrong all this time?

I let his reality sit with me for a few days. I realised I never search through the notebooks for ideas. I write what’s nagging me, what’s at the front of my brain and jumping up and down screaming, “Me next!” I don’t open that Word document other than to add to it. I don’t read what I’ve put there and I don’t search through the links. I just add more ideas and go away. Okay, so maybe Mr King has a point. Notebooks are perhaps the best way to immortalise bad ideas, because if I needed them, if they were any good, I’d be going through them and taking inspiration from the pages, right? Then I remembered reading something about Roald Dahl, another of my literary heroes. He kept a notebook. This was a sketching type, with no lines, no constrictions, and he did just what I did, write down lines, words, titles, sketch things, adding to it over time. Okay, I’m on the fence again. Maybe it’s one of those things where you do what’s best for you personally? Everyone is different after all.

But then Stephen King said something I found very interesting. To paraphrase: He explained how if you were to put breadcrumbs in a strainer and shake, all this stuff that isn’t very big and isn’t very important falls out. But the good stuff stays, the big pieces stay.

So why did I find this interesting? Because he’s right, so much so that I’m debating throwing away all my old notebooks and deleting the idea documents on my computer. Put all your idea in a strainer and start shaking. Keep doing this for a few years. Have a look inside occasionally to see what’s there, what’s too big to fall through the holes. What’s left in my strainer are the ideas that refuse to leave me alone. The ones that whisper to me at night, the ones I think about when I’m half asleep getting my chemo. The ones that keep bugging me for years and years and never fall through the holes in the strainer. This is the lump theory.

Stolen was one of those ideas that took root in my mind and never let go. I think I first made notes about it more than ten years ago. Possible titles were Fifty Words for Snow (each chapter was to be inspired by Inuit names for snow, matching the snow type to the mood of my main character), The Stolen Life of Mandy Brown came next, and then eventually the book name became simply Stolen. I changed the name of the main character to Emily Jenkins and the original span of time the book would encompass went from over three years to just under a year. What originally was a story of unthinkable abuse became a story of survival. But the essence of the tale stayed, the feeling I wanted to evoke with my words remained. Stolen was one of those lumps that refused to fall through the holes of the strainer. The idea stayed with me, slowly growing until earlier this year when I sat down thinking I was going to write something entirely different and Stolen forced its way onto the page.

Am I going to throw my dusty notebooks away? Am I going to delete my many Word documents with forgotten ideas? No… not yet, anyway. They are a comfort blanket to me. I have a queue in my mind of ideas waiting patiently (and some not so patiently) for their turn on the keyboard. Stolen is now in the editing stage, hopefully to be released before the end of the year. In the meantime, please enjoy this preview of the wonderful cover Jane Dixon-Smith made for me.

And remember to watch out for those writerly lumps and don’t sweat the stuff you’ve forgotten. If you seem unable to remember an idea, chances are it never would come to anything, anyway. Instead scoop out those juicy lump ideas and gorge on them!

You can see the Stephen King lecture that inspired this post here.

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Anniversaries

18/6/2014

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Somehow time has run away with me. I only realised today how long it’s been since I made a new blog post. Today I’ve been thinking about anniversaries. In a few weeks I will be hitting a landmark date: two years since my diagnosis. Two years since I started getting gut wrenching pains that sent me to the doctors. There was none of that NHS delay people shout about in the news. I was sent from the surgery to the hospital. Less than a week later I was operated on.

I ended up with a foot less of my intestines and a diagnosis of bowel cancer. There was lots of surprise about my age. Too young, I heard this so many times. Too young, and yet here I am. While the doc had me open, he had a good rummage around my insides, and found the bonus tumours on my liver. I’ve been ‘fighting’ since.

Is it fighting? I’m not sure it is. I aim to survive each day. I try to hit goals, like birthdays. I managed to outlive my grandparents, the last died earlier this year. Now I want to outlive the oldest of my cats. I’ve seen in my eldest son’s twenty-first birthday and my youngest’s thirteenth. Now I aim to see in my daughter’s twenty-first. That means surviving almost another two years.

With this anniversary I can rejoice a little. I’ve already outlived expectations. Sadly many people I befriended who were in similar stages of diagnosis to me have passed away. It makes me both happy and upset to be alive. What made me different that I am still here, getting hit with chemo when friends have died? Life seems random, it picks and chooses who gets to stick around a little longer on this amazing world we have.

Two years. Two years too long. I’m bored with the whole problem. I want to move on, put it all behind me. But cancer is like a cheesy horror film, it keeps popping up and growling at me.

So what am I doing? Mainly I am writing, trying to get stories that have haunted me for years onto paper before I take them into the ground. All is not depressing and sad. I still have hope that chemo will do its job and suddenly I’ll find myself in remission. What is life without hope? Plus I’ve got my wonderful kids and parents, a fab extended family, more friends than I could ever have imagined being blessed with, and a husband who is so supportive and loving that he takes my breath away.

I guess my main goal right now is to conveniently forget that I have cancer and get on with enjoying each and every day. I recommend this to everyone. Forget the problems, wear a smile, and remember to live.

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Doubt

27/4/2014

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Short word, big impact, deep meaning: doubt. Roll it around your mouth and think what it means to you. Everyone is plagued by doubt at some point in their life, if not on a daily basis. Small feathers of doubt tickling your feet as you stand before the sandwich counter trying to decide which one the other half will want. Then there’s that elephant in the room as you jump into a new job, one you’re not sure you can do, and failure is so easy, success never a given.

My friend Graham noticed that I’d been a bit quiet lately. I’ve not been posting on Facebook. I’ve not put up any new blogs. I’ve hardly been responding to messages and emails. I’ve turned ostrich, my head is stuck in the sand and I am trying to pretend there’s nothing wrong here. It’s easier that way, to pretend. As children we grow up in a land of make believe. As a writer, I have chosen to continue on that path and it’s so much easier to dip into a made-up world and pretend everything is okay.

Problem is, that little word doubt, coming back to haunt me. That’s what Graham asked me. He understands me better than most. He’s had bowel cancer, been treated and come out the other side, hopefully free of the disease for the rest of his life. But he remembers that doubt, my guess is before every check-up and follow-up scan as part of his care, he worries himself silly – will this scan be the one that tells the doc it’s back?

I’m in the middle of my course of chemo, three cycles down, three to go. My body is tired and my immunity is struggling. I’ve had number four chemo postponed twice now as the docs wait for my bloods to come back to some semblance of normality. It’s now that my mind is taken over with the thought: is it worth it? There is every possibility that I am going through all of this and the tumours inside me are growing regardless. There’s also the possibility that they are being beaten back. But the second possibility only visits on rare occasions. Mostly I worry that the headaches that have been plaguing me mean it’s gone to my brain. Or the ache in my leg means it’s gone to my bones.

A little while ago another friend of mine, Tricia, alerted me to this article in The Guardian: link.

George Orwell has always been a bit of an authorly hero to me. I read 1984 at a young age, and it really affected me. This passage stuck out at me as I read the article:

Richard Blair (speaking about George Orwell) believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

Orwell is long dead, but his words can still make a difference. He gave me something I really needed, the opposite to that horrible word, doubt. He gave me hope. If not for me, for the people of the future, people who will look back at the suffering of people like me and shake off a chill as they pop a pill that cures their cancer in weeks. Because that time will come. To be honest, my chemo is not the worst out there; I am actually quite lucky with my treatments. Doesn’t make the drugs they give me any less horrific, doesn’t take away that snappy attitude that comes over me in the days leading up to my next session of chemo, it doesn’t make me dread going to the hospital any less, and it doesn’t make me forget that I’ve now had twenty-four sessions of chemotherapy.

But in the middle of all this grimness, I have remembered about hope, one of the things that has kept humans going for so many thousands of years. There are days when I feel like I am that sinking ship, too many days plagued with doubt. All I can hope is before I am completely sunk that the rats disappear.

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Introspection

17/4/2014

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I put this status up on my Facebook page the other day:

Coming out of Clatterbridge hospital yesterday, and something happened that had me struggling not to cry. By the entrance there are a couple of benches. It's where patients (and a few visitors) drag their IVs out and have a smoke. I hate walking past as I always get a great lung full of smoky air. Yesterday as I walked out a man had just sat down. He was older, maybe in his late 60s and looked like a visitor. I expected him to get out his pack of fags. Instead he rested his arms on his knees and his head on his hands and very quietly began to sob. I didn’t know if I should stop and comfort him or leave him alone. I’m not sure I would have helped, I would have been crying along with him. I hate cancer so much.

Since that happened, I have thought of that man frequently. I asked my husband if he’d cried for me. My husband is the type who just doesn’t cry. It’s not that he doesn’t have emotions, he does… I think. He simply keeps his feelings close to his chest. He reacts by going quiet, pretending it away until he can function again. When I asked Mike if he’d cried, he was decidedly noncommittal. He said he might have, that if he had it would have been when I was first diagnosed in 2012.

Thinking about the man on the smokers’ bench and weeping so openly has made me think about grief, how we all cope so differently. I have cried, but I guess Mike and I are a good match, as I have yet to fall apart and have a great big breakdown. I get though each day. I openly hate my chemo. I grumble about the short life I am likely to have, and I chide myself for not writing more, for spending too much time on Facebook and The Daily Mail. I waste time, and I do it knowing there’s a whole lot less in the bank than nearly everyone who is my age.

I admire my cancer friends. I have a number of them. I guess when you have a certain affliction, well to speak in clichés: birds of a feather flock together. Some of my friends are in remission. Some are fighting, but better off than me. Some are fighting and I’m the one that’s better off. Too many have lost their battle.

One friend in particular, I’m going to call her Betty, is no longer on treatment. Betty is amazing. Instead of curling up and waiting for the end, she is living her life in spectacular style. I have yet to see her without her wide grin. Betty is inspiring to me. When we were messaging each other one day, I asked her how she copes knowing the end is nigh. Betty has cystic fibrosis. She explained that all her life, she expected to die early. It is because of this that instead of falling into depression she has lived her short life. She has packed in more than most 70 year olds, and she’s mid-thirties.

Betty is a true inspiration to me. I can’t really hold a candle to her. I’ve spent too many years bumbling though life at my own relaxed, slow speed. And yet I have changed. She has made me a better person. I am certain I am not the only one. Betty has already left a legacy.

Back to grief, and that poor man, crying on the bench. I wish now that I hadn’t walked past. I wish I’d sat next to him, cried with him, held his hand and dug out a tissue to dry his tears. I wish I’d said stupid words that do nothing to take away the pain. I am human, we should protect our own, and maybe my ability to cope with my own situation might have rubbed off. To quote Lord of the Rings: to give him light where there is none.

Next time I will stop. I will weep with him. I will do what I should have done, what we all should do: comfort those in need.

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