Well, it’s been nearly six weeks since I finished part four of this journal and quite a lot has been going on. We have just past the very middle of the year and Stonehenge has been temporarily defaced by the ‘Just Stop Oil’ group, I’ll pop in an aside about this and Jedi knights later. The King and Princess of Wales, fellow members of ‘club cancer’, were out and about for Trooping the Colour, and England will, probably, wobble through the group stages of the Euro’s and go out on penalties in the quarterfinals. Oh, and we have a general election in July.
And my cancer is celebrating its first birthday!
It really has been a life altering year. At times I have felt very physically sick, and the emotional roller coaster has been very bumpy. I’m still here though, and the continuing support of family and friends is life affirming. Right now, I feel OK, well, sort of OK.
To use a football analogy, June has been a month of two halves. More accurately, a goalless 90 minutes and a burst of action in extra-time. I heard absolutely nothing for several weeks and then a flurry of phone calls and weekly visits to London to finish the month. I will describe my London cardiac adventures in subsequent entries; suffice to say, the pace of activity appears to have been turbo-charged.
Back in May, in ‘Smelling the Roses’, I described how hard waiting for action is, and how I am trying to appreciate the good things and keep busy. And, that I will soon have a counsellor to help with the head game. I am very conscious now of how the existential threat of my lurking cancer is impinging on every minute of my life. I have had two on-line meetings with my counsellor, and I think these will become more helpful once we start to properly get into the deeper weeds of choosing between hideous surgery or hideous pooh-cancer death. It is, as one friend has observed, the actual space between the rock and the hard place.
It could become very easy for my cancer to be the sole focus of every day. We are reliant on our medical teams to organise treatment and, understandably, this impacts on planning other parts of our lives. Prior to cancer, in the years BC*, I did not consciously think about my mortality, and we vaguely planned for the longer term and detail planned for the shorter term. Now, it is difficult to think ahead in terms of years.
However, I think we have been pretty good at getting on with things. And as the medics had gone all quiet on us, we went on an actual holiday! A week in Cornwall, and it was really good to be somewhere different and do some ordinary and enjoyable things. We last visited Falmouth over 20 years ago, when our two eldest children were very young, and the third one was not even a bump. It’s an interesting and historic town on a beautiful stretch of coastline.
We walked on the coast, browsed in galleries, travelled by boat and ate in lovely old pubs. Sometimes, the cancer receded to the background, it never went quite out of sight; was it sitting at that table in the corner booth, just on the periphery? And sometimes, it threw a proper spanner into the works. Like, when we walked from the Lizard.
The Lizard is the most Southerly point on mainland Britain; a few miles South of the more famous Lands End. It is a truly glorious spot, a peninsular pushing out into the Atlantic and marking the very start of the English Channel. We planned to follow a route from the Lizard that went North up its West coast to Kynance Cove, then turn right and cross the peninsula, rejoining the coast at the ‘Devils Frying Pan’ and head South back to the start. The guidebook said a shade under 8 miles; so well within even my reduced expectations for a ‘proper’ walk. And there’s a café at Kynance Cove to provide an incentive for the first half.
It was a beautiful day. Bright and sunny, and a cooling breeze was coming off the sea. Seals bobbed soporifically in the sea; they can sleep in the water with just their heads above the surface. The walk to Kynance Cove was lovely and the café tucked into a secluded cove was picture perfect. We headed inland, across a heathland studded with orchids. And the cancer decided that this was the point to remind me which part of my body it was inhabiting. Fortunately, when you walk away from the Cornish coast, you also leave all the people behind. We coped with the situation, but a hole was punched in my confidence and fatigue set in early.
The walk from the Frying Pan back to the Lizard was along an interesting and historic section of coast; Marconi did pioneering wireless radio transmissions from the cliff tops and the old Lloyds telegraph building is still there; ships would communicate with the shore using flags. I love all this historic and natural history nonsense, and I hate that my unwelcome cancer impacts my enjoyment of these simple pleasures.
I mentioned Jedi Knights earlier. For many years I worked for a large national charity that cares for ‘places of outstanding natural beauty and historic interest’ (you can research this mission statement!) and a colleague of mine was responsible for some historic vertical stones in Wiltshire. He shared with me a dilemma, how should he respond to the British Order of Jedi Knights request to be recognised alongside the Druids, Pagans and Wickens at the Solstice?
(3rd July 2024)
BC* - before cancer (AD – after diagnosis)
