Having Chemo. And Not Having Cheese.

2011-12-19, 5:31 p.m.
Goodness me, this is taking a long time to write! Some of it started as long ago as last week, and then some of it happened just a wee while ago and some of it hasn�t quite happened yet (but might have by the time I get finished!). I�ll try to divide it up a bit but I cant guarantee that you wont get lost someplace along the way.

Last Saturday

There are only two things my Catering students actually admit to liking: sweets and cash. This would probably explain why I have been into town today and bought 12 bags of chocolate coins. I am an evil teacher, who shouts a lot, but I love my funny little students and their teeny tiny brains. I shall also write a Christmas card for each one of them (and none for anybody else!) because there are one or two of them whom I suspect will not exactly have a mantle full of the wretched things.

Last night when I got home from town, there was an ambulance and an ambulance-car outside our neighbour�s house. Because I am across the street and cant be seen from their house I could spy on them quite nicely from my TV room. The ambulance went away and a police car turned up. The ambulance-car went away and a big van-type thingy turned up. Then, just as I was going out to the studio to ask L what he wanted for dinner, two men came out of the house with a body on a stretcher, all covered in a blanket, and put it in the back of the van type thing. I am clever enough to work out that my neighbour died, and have enough of a conscience to feel bad about spying. We don�t know those neighbours very well, so we�re not sure which one has died. L says he thinks he saw the man and his grown-up daughter this morning (but he�s not sure) and the son�s car wasn�t there last night when the ambulance etc were all coming and going, so we think it must be the wife. I�d kind of like to send condolences but Im not sure of the protocol when you don�t really know the people and you aren�t even really sure who died. �Sorry one of you has died. Thinking of the rest of you� doesn�t really cut it, does it?

Tuesday

Sitting in the chemo place waiting and waiting and waiting. This time I saw the jolly nice Austrian registrar, who was not quite as po-faced as my consultant. Don�t get me wrong, the consultant is lovely, but he�s clearly used to dealing with the lowest common denominator in terms of �knowing about cancer� so he does tend to go through things at a speed even my Catering students could probably take in, which does tend to make me a bit impatient. The Austrian registrar was way more expedient. Asked me a few questions (which seemed designed to make a snap judgement on my overall level of intelligence) and then actually talked to me like a human being (which I do seem to still be, despite the manky boob etc etc etc).

He went through the stuff about side-effects pretty quickly and laughed at my jokes, which is always good, and we were having such a jolly hoot that he forgot to ask me how tall I am and had to proper chase me along the corridor to ask me. And I mean PROPER chase, with coat-tails flapping and everything! I felt a bit sorry for him as it was clearly my sparkling intellect and wit that had non-plussed him about asking about the height and all that, so I gave him the measurements in a nice clear metric, instead of a 5�7� imperial conversion. Im good like that.

In the afternoon I had to take Jooj to a meet-and-greet at the fancy schmancy 6th Form I�d like her to go to (and to which she would undoubtedly get a full bursary on account of her being poor and clever), but which she isn�t so sure about now as she�s found out they aren�t so keen on wacky hair and stupid clothes and all the other dumbass things that are less important than a good education unless you are 16 and then theyre SUPER important. Grrrr. Still, I suppose it is HER that has to go there and not me, and she needs to be somewhere where she�ll be happy (and therefore will study). No need to make our mind up just yet, and they were VERY kind to me when I explained that I just COULDN�T stand and chat any longer cos Im having cancer treatment, and then they sat me in a corner and went off and found all the people I needed to talk to and lined them up to talk to me instead of me having to go all around waiting in line and shaking hands and all that sort of thing. Oh, and I got TWO cups of tea. Yay me!

Wednesday

My dad brought my new car round. Ive got a new car. This makes me very happy and kind of sad at the same time. It�s a nice car and seems to run on fresh air as I have yet to put any petrol in it. It kind of looks like this:

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but it�s a bit newer. Its kind of a dull car, but its kind of a nice car too. Yay me!

Thursday

Chemo proper, then. First off, they wrap your hands up in a hot cloth so your veins pop up. Then they put a line in your hand and drip a load of saline into it, which doesn�t hurt or anything so you don�t need to worry. There�s loads of different chemo treatments, depending on what ails yez so I can only tell you about mine � yours might be different if you�ve got some other kind of skanky cancerous malaise.

Anyways, a fat nursey (who turned out to be the sister of the lesbian ex-barmaid from the pub over the road) will then turn up and say �I know you!� in a chirpy voice and tell you an anecdote about your own husband, which will be a bit weird and then she�ll tell you awfully patiently about the side effects of chemotherapy. After about twenty minutes, you�ll play the �schoolteacher� card and she�ll up her game a bit and stop patronising you, which will make your stress headache instantly disappear. She will give you a huge handful of anti-spew tablets.

Then she�ll get two MASSIVE syringes of stuff that looks like Tizer and start shunting it into the line in your hand, and will joyfully tell you that it makes you do red wee. And it DOES! Bright red wee which would REALLY alarm you if you didn�t know that was going to happen. After that, if you have had the misfortune to take your mum with you �for the company�, your mum will get into lots of very convoluted conversations with the nursey while she�s trying to do her job and will inexplicably tell the nursey that you cant eat cheese. This is not true, neither do I believe has it ever been true (although I did flirt with a lactose intolerance for a while in the early 90s) but you will hear it repeated several times to several health care professionals and other interested parties throughout the day so remember to keep a note of them so you can go back later and tell them all that it isn�t true. You may like to take your mother to one side a bit later (so as she doesn�t lose face) and tell her that its not true, too. She will look genuinely surprised and you will have to explain that you just aren�t really all that FOND of FANCY cheese, especially the smelly ones, but that you have nothing specifically against them as a food group.

After the two syringes of Tizer you get a couple more syringes of clear stuff and a bit more saline, then you get a cup of cheap-tasting coffee which will be too hot to hold and too far from the table to put down. Luckily the coffee will not be going into the line in your hand, it will just be searing the fingerprints off your digits instead.

While this is happening, you can fill in a survey for a research student (who is the wife of the maths teacher at the school which your daughters boyfriend has just left and who remembers him as she was a Chaperone at the Prom and he has very stupid hair). One of the questions will be �Are you self-conscious about the way that you look?�. You will look at your clothes: Biker boots, leggings, cut-off shorts, a Monster Munch t-shirt and a droopy cardigan covered with enormous multicoloured crochet flowers and will laugh for quite along time.

Then you can go home.

The research student will chase you down the corridor (in the same way as the Austrian registrar) because they have forgotten to give you a big bag of drugs which will stop you throwing up.

When you get home you will sleep the sleep of the dead. For many many hours. That may be the chemo. Or it may be just the whole exhausting mother/fat nurse/maths teachers wife/coffee/red wee/cheese confusion of it all.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) I have a CT scan. They helpfully told me I shouldn�t have it done if I think I might be pregnant.

later
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