In the last 2 or 3 weeks we've received all the dates for my husband's treatment schedule. A second US guided biopsy was done yesterday which hopefully will find some cells this time. The consultant had requested CT guided but was overruled!
not pleasant but bearable. Now a week or so free before the induction day and then portacath and treatment day 1 soon after. My husband was so anxious about the biopsy (the first having been somewhat trying) that it had dominated our thinking for some days. But with it passing the reality of his condition and treatment has hit me hard again. I know this will pass and writing today does help.
Meantime our day to day life is still focused on finding a permanent home. We should have received a mortgage offer this week but a combination of staff holidays and the sheer incompetence of our financial adviser mean not only is it delayed but in serious doubt. If it fails the howls of rage and frustration will be heard across the country and steps will be taken!
However one bonus of having time on my hands is the opportunity to reflect and read - and vice-versa.
One thing about a life threatening condition is the need to continually communicate and update family and friends. Having now sat through innumerable WhatsApp videos with family and us together attempting to describe the current situation I have discovered something about myself and i wonder if others feel the same. When we are telling the story together I have a desperate need to control the narrative. To establish a story beforehand and then stick to it. If J describes something in a way he has not shared previously with me I am furious. And this also goes with one to one chats he has with people. I haven't worked out why this is and am trying to overcome it but it sneaks up and bites all the same.
whilst having time on my hands I have been reading a huge amount and catching up -via the library- with a lot of modern fiction. One thing that has struck me is how many modern novels use Cancer as a device and my response to it. For example Dirt Music by Tim Winton is a gorgeous, elegiac novel set in Western Australia. A character traveling on his own hard journey meets a couple nearing the end of their own travels and his wifes journey with bowel cancer. I responded at an emotional level but I also wondered at the practicality of living out of a caravan with advanced bowel cancer in a landscale with very little water- gallows humour on my part maybe.
Ishiguru's Never Let me Go deals with cloning as a solution to many medical problems including cancer and I found myself wondering how many cancers could realistically be cured through major organ transplants and how they'd know it hadn't snuck off into the bloodstream already. Thoughts I would never have had without this experience.
That's all for now
