How to Kill a Living Thing
Neglect it
Criticise it to its face
Say how it kills the light
Traps all the rubbish
Bores you with its green
Continually
Harden your heart
Then
Cut it down close
To the root as possible
Forget it
For a week or a month
Return with an axe
Split it with one blow
Insert a stone
To keep the wound wide open.
Eibhlin Nic Eochaidh.
I really like that poem, especially the last two lines. I understand what the poet is trying to say, like picking at a scab that is almost healed over. Not that I am healed yet, still a long way to go but you sometimes can't help but poke.
Three chemo sessions down, three to go. As my Dad keeps saying, you're half way there, at the top now, its all down hill from here, except that's not what it feels like. Yes, getting to the third session feels like a gigantic climbing spree, laden with bags of cement and wading through mud to get to the top of an almost impossible peak and now that I'm at the top, I somehow think that the next three sessions, the down hill bit, should be easier. But they will not be any easier, they will, each in its own right be as difficult as if never before experienced, when you find yourself reverting back to crawling on your hands and knees, an invertebrate all over again.
I think its the feeling of being cheated. The chemo, in three week cycles, the first week is like hell, a slow puking, constantly painful torture, the next week is hazy and sleepy and tired but less torturous, you feel by the end of the second week almost like your old self again. The third week you find yourself offering to cook dinner, go for a walk, embrace a physical activity and you practically skip down the street, feeling, apart from the shine off your bald head, like a normal person. Then, right when you're feeling on top of things, right when you feel like your proverbial mountain has been climbed and claimed, you get stuck...stuck with a big fat juicy needle full of crap and you revert right back to start all over again.
I felt a bit broken the last session, like I couldn't go on, not that you have a choice because life does that annoying habit, continues on, and like the poet, it returns with an axe and there are many stones stuck in the wound keeping it open but you have to keep going, going, going, till you reach the top and start descending. Eventually, you will get to rest and it will be over and you will look back and wonder how you did it.
Today I thought...I am so over this cancer business. I'm so over having no hair, so over puking, so over feeling tired all the time, I am so TOTALLY OVER this s**t! I want my hair to grow back and to start feeling energetic again, to be able to go for a run or a bike ride, spend a whole day awake and not have to go for a nap in the middle of a day like a terrible two year old! Mentally, I might be over this shiznit but unfortunately physically and medically I am not even near the end yet. And so I ate three muffins. Not at the same time....throughout the space of a couple of hours. They were home made and healthy and they did make me feel a little better.
Also, narrative nipple, well not in the plural, in the singular, is brilliant. www.narrativenipple.com - not that I am biased but its a great space for people to express themselves and listen to other people and to get it all off their chest, regardless of the size, shape or symmetry of that chest.
Speaking of which, my boob is misbehaving badly. My expander, with a life of its own, doesn't like its new home and in a moment of low white blood cells has decided that it wants to move....to move out...Now, naturally I'm not having any of that sort of business, so I have chastised it with horse tranquillizer antibiotics in the hopes that it will change its mind and decide to stay......watch this space for future potential unwanted surgery....oh the joys...never a dull moment!
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