It's not been the best week of my life, but I've had worse I suppose. The death of Freddie, though, unleashed fathomless grief, wailing and general OTT blubberiness. Much more so than for example, another marriage down the pan, being diagnosed with cancer, and any manner of things that have gone tits up in the last year. Maybe it was the culmination of it all, and this vaguely crossed my addled mind as I sat in the middle of the field last Monday, snot and tears running down my face and into my mouth as I howled like a banshee, although louder I imagine. I don't recall ever having cried this much or this desperately before and it wasn't cathartic just bloody messy. I went back later that evening to see my other ponies and it happened again, I emerged like hurricane swept tree, leafless, nearly uprooted, battered but to my own amazement, still standing; I think it's gone now and if I feel the wave of it approaching I can mentally run. So, wrong metaphor, not a hurricane, a tsunami.
Now, if someone mentions Freddie, in fact writing this, then the tears fall but not the howling, with luck that was it, thank all the gods and little fishes, big ones even.
I started with the jolly chemo again this week. I don't give it much thought before I arrive at the hospital, a coping mechanism because I'm not brave or strong and am constantly terrified, but like all strong emotions I can't spend all my time in a constant grip of terrifiedness or dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, ponies and visitors would never get fed and watered and I'd be dead. Luckily I have a butterfly mind that's easily distracted and while the direction it can take is a matter usually out of my control, I can follow along and tamp down anything I don't want to address with some success. The only downside is too vivid an imagination which can make the most minor procedure into a massive undertaking. Apparently, so I have read on the net, that source of perfect accuracy and fact, that imagining something is the same as experiencing it and your body knows no difference. I can't say that I believe this 100% because I'm sure George Clooney in the flesh would be a better bet than in my imagination, but hey who knows?
When I was in hospital at the beginning of May being debulked of all the bits I can apparently manage without I was panicking about a) the anaesthetic, having previously crashed in theatre and being allergic to GA n'all, b) cannulas which are getting harder and harder to insert as my veins get more and more battered. My mind whisked over recovery without much conscious thought to how I would be afterwards or the pain I might be in. I didn't address what would happen if things went wrong and I was still alive. As a result I wasn't prepared to die, but i was prepared for the fact that getting a cannula in was going to be a nightmare of epic proportions and indeed it was (was this because i imagined it would be?), in the end I refused to let them have another go, there are only so many holes a girl needs about a body. This is the power of imagination (and battered veins) then, when you're scared and stressed veins collapse, in fact if it doesn't go in first time, they collapse in case you're being stabbed by an adversary as opposed to a doctor, to prevent bleeding i guess, arteries are worse and if you've had arterial blood taken you have my sympathies, they're not doing that to me again either!
What I wasn't prepared for was the amount of pain a blocked gut can inflict. I had what's called ileus as a result of a kink in my intestines when Mr Surgeon stuffed them back in after their sojourn on the table. Well I've had 2 children, a kidney stone and arterial blood taken and I can tell you this was worse! And made worse by the fact that their are very few decent nurses left in the employ of the beleaguered NHS. The majority of ward staff are untrained health care assistants, some are brilliant, most are one step from useless. The NHS is still excellent, treatment (mine anyway) has been second to none but there is no ward care. How this stupid, greedy government thinks that a profit can be made from the sick when there's insufficient money available to staff hospitals is beyond belief. And the money wasted is shocking. I was in a gynae hospital across the road from the General and had to go over for a CT scan. Because it involved crossing the road, an ambulance had to be called. There were two emergency ambulances available but as this wasn't an emergency one of them was not allowed to spend five minutes ferrying me across, instead an ambulance with a two man crew was called from Poole, some 60 miles away. A porter could have pushed me across in moments, but the worry was he might have pushed me under a bus and the hospital has no insurance for wayward patients crossing roads in the 'care' of hospital staff. They tell me that they built a tunnel connecting the two hospitals but when it was 4/5ths finished they ran out of money from that particular jam-jar. The cost of ambulancing patients across as now exceeded the cost of finishing the job 8 times over and that's in 18 months, different jam-jar though, so that's ok.
To return to this weeks chemo, (I bet you can't wait, that's if you've got this far along with my verbal diarrhoea) I made a particular point of not thinking about how they would get the cannula in until the moment the lovely chemo nurse (and they are ALL lovely) had my arm in her hand and I went into meltdown, the veins vanished as if they never were and my blood stopped dead in its tracks. She tried heat pads and beating me senseless but when she tried digging around in there not a vein to be found. It hurts when there's no vein but that's not the main objection I have although it's pretty high up he list, I just don't like needles and the more I have the more pathetic I get about it, I think it's verging on a phobia now. The lovely nurse sent for an older more experienced colleague who thankfully managed to cannula my other arm. As more and more people have managed not to find a vein, I can now feel when the needle is actually in the right place or not. Not a skill I wanted to add to my repertoire of body knowledge, I'd rather know where my G spot is.
Anyway the stuff dripped through and I had a visit from a great friend who first helped me when I had Freddie as a foal and he was a wild and untouched colt straight off the New Forest. We cried buckets but not the howling snotty stuff, just the sadness of a young life cut short through illness, and we tried not to make comparisons because we were in the oncology unit and there are plenty of young lives here that will be cut short.
But then we also talked of other things, and there was laughter as well as tears. And despite the chemo and cannulas I'm getting better. It truly is a miracle. Nine months ago they didn't give me six and here I am boring you all to gnawing off your own arms and there is a chance the cancer won't come back. I fall into the most likely to come back category but I'm not at the shit end, I'm at the less likely of the likely which is good from where I'm sitting. And have I learned anything at all from this experience? Yes i have learned that there are people who really care about me. People who i don't even know very well who are thinking and worrying about me and wishing me well. And I count anyone reading this who has been kind enough to comment. Knowing you have worth even in a small way makes a real difference to feeling life is worth the living of. But in general I still feel the same about most things as I did before (except the ex, who came round the eve before chemo to have a shout at me, which he does from time to time in case I should be managing too well without him, yes thanks). I do know that thinking how I might feel about a situation is very rarely how I'll actually react in reality, but that's probably true for most of us. Day dawns whatever shit you're in and life plods on. It's not being brave, strong, special, at least not in my case, it's just being alive and that's enough.
