A dear friend of ours has just sent us a slim volume of self-published poetry entitled My Life in Verse. I am inclined to put out one of my own, viz and to wit: There once was a lady quite crabby/Who bitched when her life became scabby/She wore lots of hats/And had lots of cats/The cutest of whom was a tabby.
Unfortunately, Molly and the ShadowCat heard me reciting this, and now they're not speaking to me. It's tough, I tell you, being an Artist.
So. It's almost two weeks since chemo #6 and last. Nothing much happened, or nothing amusing anyway. Actually ... no, nothing much at all. It took the usual three attempts to get a cannula in (note to Becca, who asked: I don't know why they didn't give me a PICC line, but I don't think I would have liked it any more than I liked the cannulas, so I'm not that fussed), and nobody had ordered my post-chemo medication from the pharmacy so we ended up hanging around the hospital for an extra 45 minutes when all I wanted to do was go home and fall into bed - chemo is very sleepy-making, isn't it? - but that was it for drama. And you would never get a TV series commissioned on the strength of that. (Actually, you might, but it'd be shit.)
The only slightly odd thing was that my arm hurt afterward, but not where that session's cannula had finally ended up. What hurt was where they put the cannula last time. I guess my veins were totally traumatised by that one. If you can think of a more reasonable explanation, do let me know.
So, that's it for treatment for the time being. Now we wait for the end of the month, when I have a CT scan scheduled, and then I have an appointment with the oncologist on 13 February. Rush, bustle, and scurry, that's the NHS's watchword. (Bad self: do not be rude about the NHS. They do a wonderful job and are a national treasure, much like Dame Judi Dench.) (Well, okay, not much like.)
All of which leaves me hanging rather uncomfortably in a kind of limbo - and, you know, a woman as perfectly spheroid as I am doesn't stand a hope in hell of getting under that pole. I have absolutely nothing to do, and I am soooooo bored I can't even tell you. I am as bored as Sherlock, but with less of the shooting holes in the walls - and that only because I don't, probably fortunately, have a gun. "Hils," I hear you say, with the wisdom that comes with solving other people's problems, "then why do you not find something to do, and, you know - do it?" To which I respond, okay, cleverclogs - I get snotty when I'm bored, no wonder I have no friends: such as what? I'm not well enough to do anything physical, and my brain is too numb to do anything clever. And I have played so much Farmville of late that I am inclined to take my imaginary farmer by her scrawny little virtual neck and throttle her.
Silence.
Well, it's okay. I didn't really expect anyone to have a solution. The thing is, all the time I've been ill, I've been working toward When I Finish Chemo, which was its own kind of limbo: all I had to do was turn up for appointments and do what I was told, and not think too much about it. Now I don't even have to do that. I am measuring my life out, if not in coffee spoons, then certainly from one mealtime to the next. At this rate they are going to have to bounce me down the road to my next appointment.
The only distraction I've had was not a welcome one. Remember how my HR department told me to send my medical certificate and their SSP1 form to the job centre? They didn't bother to tell me there was a form I needed to fill in. A loooooong form, that needed to be filled in over the phone - of all the stupid ways to do anything, most especially if you happen to have breathing difficulties. So the forms came back; and then I had to phone one bit of the job centre to find out what to do next; and then I had to phone another bit of the job centre to do it. And then the printed copy of the form arrived, so I had to go through that and correct all the bits that they had got completely wrong - such as the address of the Churchill, which they seemed to think was in Eastbourne - and send it back. Actually, I wasn't supposed to send it back, I was supposed to phone them up and talk it all through again. I sent it back.
And I still have no idea how this affects my national insurance payments, or my NHS entitlement. It would be awfully sad if the NHS suddenly decided not to treat me any more.
From which you may gather that I am not entirely confident that it's all over yet. There is still the breathing problem, which worries me more than I usually let on - what worries me most is the problem of trying to explain it so that the doctors will take it seriously, since it is not a trick pony and refuses to perform on command. And my tummy is still hurty. But, as has previously been established, I can't tell the difference between Mr Crab and constipation, so who's to know if that even means anything?
Certainly not me.
