Another blog post, I hear you ask. Why, Ambassador, you spoil us. But the good news, at least, the good news for me is, I don't actually have to do much writing on this one; most of it comes from a conversation I had with Little My. You see, I commented on someone's post that I felt like a fraud sometimes, when I read other people's stories, because - so far - my cancer experience hasn't been nearly as horrible as might have been feared. And then Little My rose up like the Doom of Ragnarok (or at any rate, I think she might've been looking at me severely over the rims of her glasses) and said, in so many words, are you mad, woman? And she listed a few of the things I've whined about in these pages - the lung drainage, the tiredness, the poorly tummy, the baldiness, and so on. And I said ...
Well, first I told her about a new poo song: Cat Stevens's I Can't Keep It In. But after that, I said ...
Judy tells me off too, every time I say I'm lucky, or that I'm doing fine - although her argument was that I was downplaying things to the doctor which would, it's true, be baaad. But, cancer-wise, I really am better off than many, probably most.
To get one thing out of the way: I don't know how bad it is. I don't know how long I've had it - if some of my suspicions are correct, it's been developing for a good many years. I don't know what the prognosis is, and I'm happy that way. I'm not looking any farther ahead than the end of chemo, which will be early in January, and the possible prospect of surgery after that. Judy thinks I might have to have another laparoscopy. I would very much rather not, but if it happens, it happens.
Now, Mr Crab hisself. These things are good: he is in my tummy. He is not in my face, my neck, my arse, my ladybits. All of these, I think, I would find much, much harder to bear. And - here's the thing: he doesn't hurt. Okay, maybe he hurts a bit, he can be quite bitey when he's in a bad mood, but I lived for forty-odd years with menstrual pains so far off the scale worse than Mr Crab that it's practically astronomical. As well as the menstrual cramps themselves (referred to, throughout my acquaintance, as 'Lady Pains' - let that be my legacy!), there was a knock-on effect of bowel pain so bad that it sometimes made me faint. I bled so heavily that I'd get in the bath and find myself surrounded by what appeared to be floating lumps of liver. There was mess, there was fuss, there was distress to the Nth degree. Cancer - at least for me, at least so far - is a doddle.
"Only women bleed," as Alice Cooper so rightly sang. I'm glad to say that I don't any more. It stopped, short, never to go again, when I was 50 or a little over.
Now, with hindsight, some of this might have been early warning signs of the cancer, which my consultants did originally think was ovarian. (I wish it had been. Then I'd have my own coffee morning!) We'll never know. I never took it to a doctor because, well, you don't go to a doctor with dysmenorrhea. You suck it up and take an aspirin. Or two. Or however many it takes.
And that, kids, is how Mommy became hooked on Solpadeine.
All righty, so much for the cancer. Poorly tummy/sickness = sleeping on the bathroom floor: a very rare occurrence; we do have carpet on the bathroom floor here; and, again, I sometimes used to have to do this when I had bad Lady Pains. And back then the loo wasn't in the bathroom, it was in a small, cramped, uncarpeted room on its own. Not at all comfy! (Going back to the fainting - I used to do this in the loo a lot. Having then to pick oneself up off the floor and somehow clean up blood, poo and pee, without anyone else knowing, probably doesn't equate to the Baggy Manoeuvre, but it's as close as I care to come.)
The draining of the lungs, I will grant you, was not nice, especially having to have it done twice in one week! But it's over now, I think - I hope - the lung is fixed, and we won't have to do that again. And I got a funny story out of it. No?
Chemo ... well. It is what it is. This is where the constant tiredness becomes a blessing. It may be six hours, but it's six hours that I pretty much doze through, while poor Judy gets to sit in an uncomfortable chair and occupy herself as best she can. I could do without the after-effects, especially the twinges up the girlbits and bum; on the other hand, I have not, as yet, spent my post-chemo hours puking my guts up. The extremely dodgy tummy on the way home last time was, I must say, Not Required On Voyage. Next time, I'm going armed with Imodium.
Baldness: I didn't think it would worry me too much, and it doesn't. It helps that I look quite good in hats (for a relative value of 'good', that is). And it'll grow back. If anyone else is bothered by it, well, fuck 'em. My hair = my business, and mine alone.
And that really just leaves the tiredness. As a blessing, it's a mixed one. It does mean that I'm more or less drifting through my life with cancer - I sleep more than I'm awake these days. On the other hand, there are things I want to doooo, or which need to be done. Internet stuff, for one. I've said before that I can really only do one thing a day at the moment. Internet-wise, I can blog, or I can answer comments, or I can comment on other people's blogs: not all three. RL-wise, our boot-buying Expotition to Bicester Village, which took maybe three-quarters of an hour, knocked me out for the rest of the afternoon. My wonderful brother comes every week from Bristol to see me, and after less than an hour I'm wiped out; my sister comes all the way from Penzance, and almost all I do is sleep at her! I couldn't go to a gig I'd been looking forward to since May. My house is a disgrace. And, you know what? If I weren't so tired, I'd be fit to go back to work, if they didn't mind me being in the loo half the time. As it is - no chance, not even for a few days a week, not even for half days.
There. That's pretty much the state of me. Taken all in all, it's not so bad, is it? And don't forget that I have Judy. And my dear, loving kitties, when they're not vanishing and sending me into a flat panic. And loads and loads of lovely friends, both online and three-dimensional, not one of whom has yet tilted their head at me.
So, okay, my 'lucky' may be in roughly the same ballpark as Alice Sebold's. But still. Better than no luck at all, eh?
