And the weekend turns out to be quite good in terms of human connectivity and normality. We went to my Welsh best friend’s house for dinner on Saturday night and on Sunday my husband’s parents came over for food – which was the first time we have seen them since lock down. On the outside I’m looking good. Wigged up – little bit of make up on. These moments bring back what I need – time without cancer and a head that screams ‘she’s having chemo!’. I busy myself with writing, working and cleaning so to the word it is business as usual.
Except inside it’s not. I’m quite low. I’m triggered regularly and the force field of emotions this represents isn’t easy to process and move on from. I am trying. Honest. But today I feel like I fail. Spectacularly. I don’t think I have coped as well this cycle. I feel a total failure and ashamed with the fact that this time ‘I didn’t turn up’. I think this time the side effects lingered longer and I am looking at where I was on weekend#2 of this cycle and I am comparing it to weekend#2 of the first cycle. I don’t think they’re the same. Seeking reassurance from my husband, I’m trying bloody hard to make some sense of how I am feeling. Shit. I feel like shit. I feel useless, hopeless and cannot bear others to see me this way.
I have told you about ‘parts’ of our personality that we have constructed to survive, cope and manage our lives…. I’ve now got another part of me. In fact I see myself now as two halves. One half is me – Heidi – pre-cancer – and the other part is Heidi with breast cancer. One lead to the other, and inevitably these two bigger parts overlap. Leak into one another. It’s like trying to separate oil and water. You can’t. So they have to find a way of co-existing together. When you have cancer, one aim is to survive. I (we) have the treatment to live. To carry on being who we are – who we want to be. I’m having chemotherapy so I can see my 47th birthday, then Christmas, then my daughter’s 18th birthday. When living is no longer a ‘given’, ‘a right’, absolutely everything you have ever been, ever believed and ever wanted comes into question and the guarantee you once thought you had for a life disintegrates right in front of you.
Fragments of your former life are seen everywhere. In everything. A car you can’t drive. A friend you can’t hug. A job you can’t do. A drink you can’t have. A day you can’t move. A body you can’t touch. A thought you don’t trust. A moment you don’t want. A disease you can’t control.
You see my external shape and expensive wig. I see my internal shell and hollow gap where I once was. I am winging it and I am struggling. Right now – this weekend – despite the aura of normal-ness that ran through it – I am scrabbling around in the dust of my once vibrant existence, desperately trying to find something of substance I can cling to and make sense of. Something I can nurture and establish and grow. Something I once took for granted, that now, no longer belongs to me.
Cancer – 2 Heidi – 0
Game over.