You may be coming familiar with the excitement I feel when it is the last weekend before chemo. This is the weekend I am close to me and close to feeling like I can enjoy what makes me happy in life. I have hope on these few days, as I know I am going to feel Ok and I know that in a few days I am closer to picking off another treatment – so closer to the end! So ‘weekend #3’ in our house gets packed with the good stuff and is always something to look forward to. Having the weekend #3’s has helped with the weekend#1’s when you feel like total shit and want to bow out of cancer town and cry yourself to sleep.
The something good this weekend? Our wonderful English to Welsh friends from Swansea are coming to see us. I have the most delicious conversations with my friend and she listens and I listen and we cry, and we laugh and we drink lots of wine and this weekend we are celebrating. Champagne toasts the empty space in my boob where once lay a cluster of cells that have been annihilated by chemo. I find myself wondering where they have actually gone? Do they just die and disappear? Do I pee them out? Do they just vanish completely? Are their empty little shadows floating around my body, pissed off they have been stripped of their danger? Looking for trouble? Seeking a place to hide, in shame, angry that the chemo, the enemy, were stronger…more powerful? I wonder if they surrendered quietly, with grace? Or went out kicking and screaming. I know what I would have done if I was a cancer cell 🙂
Saturday brought the sun with it – so the day was long and relaxed. We had food in a pub that is safe and clean, and spent hours in the garden under the heater and the candle lights of the late dusky evening. Stripy pink skies hover above us, protecting our bubble. Bats flit over head, birds song trills in and out of the garden and I feel so alive and supported in their company. When the temperature drops, we are introduced to a quiz on the PlayStation, so load the table with crisps, dips and the spiciest chicken strips I have ever eaten – and try and out-wit one another wit the fastest finger first type game!
In bed by midnight as I have a COVID test at 9.30am the following day. I have to have one now before each treatment.
And it was horrible! I was expecting it up my nose – oh no! It went down the back of my throat and I was gipping and wrenching. It was just horrid! It took her about 6 attempts to get a good enough sweep. My God. My eyes were watering and I left thinking chemo was actually easier to have than this!
Sunday saw another beautiful day, and we had a family BBQ planned for the evening so our friends stayed on for this. Beforehand we had walked to the beach and gone for a glass of wine in a pub garden. I felt breathless walking up the hill – this was the first reminder of this day of the chemo side effects. I was out of breath and puffing like an old woman. Tried to disguise the panting by keeping on walking but I don’t appreciate these cruel reminders that I am not working to my full capacity.
It was lovely to end the weekend with our family and of course, two of our closest friends….enjoying the warm weather and my husband’s BBQ skills were on full display……My friend is so assured and chats to people like she has known them years. She has always been like this and exudes confidence. It is so easy to be around her and she chats comfortably with everyone. Now it may be the wine, or the heat of the afternoon, but I have an out of body experience in these moments. I am sat in the chemo unit wired up to the bags of medicines hanging behind me. I’m looking at my weekend#3 as it plays out live in front of me. I can see and hear what is going on but it’s fuzzy – like my head is under water. My senses are on full alert and I stop myself screaming out ‘I am here…I can see you’, please look away’. I am so anxious. I do not want them to see me like this, having the chemo administered whilst they are eating burgers and drinking wine. I feel disgusting. I want to pull the cannular off my hand and run back to be with them in my garden, under the gazebo. I am in both places at once and this spins my head out and makes me feel sick. I am fighting to be in the present but my body is not with me. It is in Wednesday – 3 days ahead of me and I am feeling the needle in my hand and the chemo going into my vein. If you have had chemo you will know exactly how this feels. I cannot fully describe this to you. It is one of those experiences that you can close your eyes and ‘feel’. Maybe it does not need words. So I will leave it there.
This time round will see me having a new chemo drug. I tell no lie. I am scared. I kind of got used to the other one and knew it’s language and what it did to my skin, my heart, my fingers, my digestive system, my ability to function. Although every cycle was different and brought a spectrum of side effects to master, I had the measure of it and it of me. We ‘got’ each other and we had a respect for one another. It did push me hard and take me to places I would never have gone by choice, but I felt it always knew when I had taken enough and brought me back from it’s brink. Dropped me in a heap at it’s feet and turned it’s back on me.
To say this now is very strange – even typing the words make me shudder – but I will miss it. I will miss my chemo companion and the banter we have share since 10/07. I tilt my hat in respect for what it has done for me. It has killed every last cell in my breast – all 4cm wide of it – and walked away, ready to move on to another person, another breast cancer and another tumour to assassinate. A hitman was hired to kill – it did what the brief said and now it has left the scene of the crime. I am still there – at the scene….reeling from the battering, and very pissed off I have to wait for the next silent assassin to join me and continue with the physical and mental abuse it brings with it.
It is at this moment, I spring back from the unit and land back in my garden, in my BBQ, back with my beautiful friend hearing her melodic voice, exchanging views and opinions with my brother-in-law and sister. They have no idea where I have just been and what I have just been thinking. I am going to miss the chemo I was used to and I am scared to death I won’t have the same relationship with the next one.
Try explaining that.