The drugs didn’t work last night. Hell no. I was up at 02:30 am feeling mmmmmmhhhhh. I tucked into the digestives which helped. I was hot. My head felt wet but it wasn’t. My tiny bristles are flaking off – I rubbed my head and they flaked off onto my cheeks. Horrible feeling! I’m in two minds whether to get up for toast and tea.
I fell back asleep and had the most strangest, lucid dreams I can ever remember. Once my Dad had left my Mum for his pregnant teenager girlfriend, she moved us in with her parents and her alcoholic brother. We lived above a greengrocers shop on a busy junction in Blackpool. Think late 70’s here OK. Next door was a hairdresser – she was called Lesley. I must have been around five years old. In my dream I am in her kitchen but she’s not there. My Mum is. She’s angry with me because I haven’t made an effort to see Lesley in the time I’ve been staying there – in her house?! But the kitchen I am in is familiar -it wasn’t Lesley’s. It’s the kitchen we had when we moved to Southport. My Mum remarried when I was eight ‘to get away from her parents’. I do not believe this to this day.
I’m trying to butter toast in the kitchen. The butter is in a long cardboard box – like a cling film box. I can’t get my knife into it properly and she is shouting at me to hurry up and get out of the way.
I look at her. I am bald, frail and she glares at me with eyes of ice and rage. She has cold, soul-less eyes. I feel absolutely terrified. I’m clinging to on to the knife but it’s getting warmer and warmer. I can’t hold it now. I drop it and it clatters on the work top sending a steel echo of a sound through the kitchen. She lunges at me and pushes me to the floor. I’m still. I don’t move. I look up to see her chubby short frame come towards me. I’m paralyzed with fear and don’t make one noise or one sound as she plunges the poker hot knife into my right breast.
I’m sat back on my sofa looking at the front door. It’s Simon Cowell. Dressed in his legendary black, his white porcelain teeth almost blind me. He waves and a warm smile enters my home. He seems shorter than I thought he was. I’m sat under my grey blanket, old PJ’s on, glass of tepid meat tasting water next to me and he sits by my feet. He looks so smug. He pulls out his phone and is showing me pictures of my best friend from Blackpool. You have met her a few posts ago. My ‘well’ best friend. She’s playing with her children. He smiles and shows me a collage of videos of her and her family. I want to smack his armitage shank teeth into the back of his rectangular head. I am being eaten alive by envy. I am not well. She is. He is. I am not. I hate my life and I want my old one back. The sadness surges through me. I’m gone. I’m lost. I’m lonely. And Simon Cowell, and so called Mother have just reminded me I am a nothing. A no one.
As a distant ‘beep beep’ penetrates my dreaming, I reach out to my husband. He’s there. I grab him. He comes to and jumps involuntarily at my touch. He has no idea where my head is at, and where it has just been. I’m desperate to tell him but nausea gets in first and I need water and deep breathes. The guy with the crowbar is back – trying to crack my sternum open. Paracetamol. Banana. Ibuprofen. I know the drill now.
I regulate my crazy subconscious and share the night’s tales with my husband. I can see he is fearing for my sanity. I omit the bit about being stabbed as I can see his Monday morning features just won’t appreciate that. He has to get up for work. I want to look at him for as long as I can because he is on planet normal and I take advantage of any opportunity I can to sneak back there and take a peek.
I felt so sick by lunchtime I rang the chemo unit. Advised to continue with the anti-sickness meds. I’m sat on the toilet in the bathroom trying to breathe in and out of the waves of nausea that crash over me in rapid succession. It’s relentless right now. I remember this happening at exactly the same time on the same day three weeks ago. Strange comfort can be taken from knowing your chemo routine is taking shape.
I couldn’t make food for my family and I had my PJ’s on by 3pm. I lay on the sofa watching shite TV – something about Donald Trump making his way in the world in the 80’s. I couldn’t be bothered turning it off.
Noise and life carry on around me and I want to scream. I want them all to shut up and leave me alone and leave the house. It’s unbearable lay here having this general noise waft over me. I’m bubbling with rage now – feeling very very angry. But I know it’s more than that. It’s vulnerability. This is me at my lowest. Ineffective, frustrated and lay flat out unable to face these feelings head on.
Then some stupid woman calls me from the Council Hub informing me my name is on their system as someone who is shielding. She wants to know if I need any help getting my shopping or medicines. How I didn’t tell her where to stick her paracetamol and potatoes I will never know. I replay what my response wasn’t in my head. It gives me a little space to move these destructive feelings out of me.
I have an internal traffic jam inside of me and a huge need to move a few cars out the way so I don’t feel so congested.
By the time my sister appears with her cold hands ready to pinch the flab and jab, I’m right royally pissed off. I want to let rip at her – not to her – and tell her right now I want the f*** out and can she please take me to her house. I’ll go anywhere. But I don’t because she has been working all day, and has come out of her way again to stab me with my immune system kick up the ass.
I hate the feeling of helplessness and weakness. It’s crippling and has no purpose for me. No matter where I go right now that feeling will be there. I’m a prisoner in my own mind. Crawling invisible walls and getting absolutely nowhere. I have no other choice but to wait this out. Absorb the bombardment of the emotional and physical onslaught that chemo has a PHD in.
The name’s ‘Therapy’…’Chemotherapy…… licensed to kill’.