It’s 19:28 pm, I am in bed, reflecting on this question. Let me tell you why. My dear Welsh to English friend came today to see me. She also brought her husband as well as her company! Her county goes into local lock-down tomorrow so her visit is tinged with sadness too as I don’t know when I am going to be able to see her again. It is 72 from chemo so she gets to see my vulnerable side. I can contain this through a message or video call – but this close after treatment – in the flesh – I can’t. I choose not to. I choose to show her the real me. I am tired, and can feel the remnants of the treatment swilling around in my body. It will leave today, probably tonight and I will feel it go. It is the strangest thing ever. I know when it takes it’s last damaging bites out of me and leaves my system. As we all chat, have food and share some ideas about something my husband and her are planning on doing together, I can feel it etched on my face. My post-chemo chops say it all. I have make up on, wig is still curled and looking good from my chemo visit on Wednesday, but I can feel deep set dull eyes peaking out behind the sparse eyelashes and compensatory eyeliner. My tear ducts are daring you to say something.
Seeing her though always lifts me and my mood. We chat together, sharing bits of our lives, the bits we haven’t squashed into a text message or video message. I tell her about my feelings. But more importantly, she asks me about my feelings – paraphrasing and summarizing my words, then bringing 20 years of friendship and her own observations of me together. Like I do as a counsellor, she remembers ‘hot words’ and reaches back a sentence or three to craft another new question. It fits together perfectly and I am on a carrousel of communication that is making me open up and making me cry. I am going round and round, and peeling back layers of my thinking that have remained within myself and my thinking treasure trove for months. It is like being interviewed. Which is what it turns in to. She is making a series of podcasts about real life experiences of COVID. She wants to record an interview with me asking about getting diagnosed with breast cancer on the backdrop of COVID. She does voice over work for a living and has the most silky smooth voice. My initial ‘erk’ in the belly came from my fear of what I would sound like with my northern tongue on tape. I know the answer to this that’s why I erked! I sound bloody awful – but actually when it settles, I do not care. She wants to hear me and share my story and I want to be heard and help others.
We sit in our lodge, I look for her to lead and she presses record. She’s good. She mixes up the brief with her personal friendship with me, and out of this comes a selection of questions aimed at finding out what it was like for me getting diagnosed, to where I am now – vulnerable and tired but concentrating on getting to the end of the treatment and back on with my life. This is where her question comes in ‘Have you ever felt sorry for yourself’. We debate it on tape, and ‘No’ I tell her. I have never said those words out loud or thought it – they sound weak and vulnerable to me – and that is something I have aimed to avoid at all costs. Even though that should be written on the consent forms of side effects you sign before you agree for chemo. One of those side effects are ‘Mental weakness and vulnerability’. Your metal ability to think and stay emotionally stable is removed from you. I contempt sharing this feedback with my Oncologist. He has most definitely missed out the most important side effects from his list and I think others should be prepared for them.
But, have I felt sorry for myself? I reframe the words in my head. Have I ever wished this was not happening, and the fact that it is has caused me to feel very sad, angry, scared, and envious of others who don’t have to feel the way chemo has you do? The answer is yes. YES. I have felt like that and I continue to feel like that. It presents itself in different spectrums – mild to severe- black to white – all to nothing – but on that spectrum my thinking sits and tonight I have had the opportunity to think about this differently.
Although I cried most of the way through my podcast, I felt relief at the end of it. The further you get down your story, the different it feels when you start from the beginning again. Like a jigsaw, you see the bigger picture or at least what you think is the bigger picture. I see mine now – a fair few pieces missing but as I write this and reflect on how I felt a few days after diagnosis, I can see a real measure of the distance travelled. I felt so sick, dizzy and frightened those few days after 26/05. The enormous flood of emotions and the anticipatory fear that I was going to die was unbearable. I lay in bed clawing at my skin, hoping I would move the mental pain onto my physical self. Hours were spent looking helplessly at my ceiling, looking at the life I had already lived, the breaths I had already taken, the family I had already been part of …. and the funeral I was not going to attend. My own.
So. Do I feel sorry for myself? Yes I do.