I'm a leaf on a windy day
Sixth floor, second dose and a poor attempt to stay on the level
This thing has been creeping towards me for weeks but somehow I’ve managed to ignore it. Dismiss it. “It’ll be fine, I’ve done it before. What’s the worry?” Slow as growing grass, it keeps making almost negligible steps towards me. Getting closer, millimetre by tiny millimetre. And then, the little bastard known as chemotherapy was there at the hospital door. Rictus smile and an in-depth knowledge of exactly how things are going to go.
For a few seconds, I harboured glorious thoughts of escape while the nurse had difficulty finding a workable vein in my hand (the chemotherapy drip needs to go in low, rather than at the easier-to-spear level around the elbow where bloods are normally taken). As the needle bounced around, a blurry few seconds of brain fog left me questioning whether I’d actually been a skaghead at some point, thanks to my battered, unpokeable skin (no… I mean, I don’t think so? Was I?) Once blood was found, chemotherapy’s vicious water-soaked gremlin took control, foot slammed to the accelerator. Ratcheting up the speed, taking control of everything.
Call this naivety but throughout my adult life I don’t think I’ve actually known what chemotherapy really is. I knew it was a vital, brutal part of a healing process but beyond that… very little.
Having had one dose last month, that picture is now a lot clearer. Chemotherapy starts in a room on the 6th floor of the hospital. The nursing staff on that floor seem to exist on a higher plane when it comes to care and attention. Every sentence spoken is to help ease you through the upcoming stages of the process, each detail is meticulously explained with love and grace. These people are very much the anti-gremlins.
The treatment is simple, and will be repeated six times at six week gaps. Come in, get plugged into the drip, take a bunch of pills. Go home, take more pills for the next 10 days. Use the following four weeks to recover, then come back and here we go again. The pills are handed over with the kind of warning you wish you’d had before a bad E at a Primal Scream all-nighter at Brixton back in the mid ’90s. “These are poisonous, approach with extreme caution.” When dispensing pills at home, wear rubber gloves, chuck them down the throat and dispose of everything in the bin after. If you soil the bed, throw the bedding away as it won’t come clean afterwards. You are poisoned, and you are now poison.
I realise a lot of recovery processes are based on similarly strange scenarios but I haven’t found myself in a situation like this before. The nurses point out that my boat will stay afloat as long as I down the poison pills and don’t eat mature cheese or Marmite or grapefruit or vitamin C tablets. I’ll later discover that this boat will wildly hit a squall to let you know that diet Sprite is now a total no-go zone, a fact it will tirelessly remind you of for four hours or so after you’ve gone to bed. In this boat, so much of what is taken for granted in terms of recovery food - soul replenishing comfort food - has been stamped with a No Go symbol. There are now so many red lines everywhere you eventually just stop bothering with anything other than white toast and butter. Everything else is man overboard.
One of the aspects of chemotherapy I hadn’t processed was that all of this poison is being directed at one specific space - the new hole in my old head. I’d always assumed that chemo-drugs would be an all consuming terror that would enter the body and wipe out rotten cells from allover, taking out bad stuff in the ankle, the kneecap, the spine, the nose. But no. The Procarbazine tablets I take are specifically designed for brain cancers, targeting the quickly dividing cancer cells that grow there. All those rotten ankle or nose or wherever cells will have to wait until they get their own specific prescription.
As I write this, I’m in the second week of my second dose. It’s been hard - much harder than the first one - and I have to say that the ‘what’s the worry’ approach in the days prior was incredible naivety on my behalf. And it’s a mistake I am sure I’ll make again next month. Since starting, a couple of new things have been added to the No Go list. I’m sure there’s an Ocado delivery van’s worth of things out there ready to join them in the coming months.
Deep breath.
This will pass.
And when it does it will hopefully have been hugely beneficial to the head hole that the operation left behind.
If it’s ok, this week I might just scribble down a few things below that are taking my mind off this dose as it’s been a complete brain buster. Normal service can resume on the other side.
Until that other side is reached, it’s gloves on, chuck the poison pills down the gullet and let’s just see if we can keep the boat afloat. Maybe even chuck the fucking gremlin overboard at some point.
Currently I am…
listening to… super heavy new number by Tom Rowlands ‘We Are Nothing’ - a master returns with an absolute killer reality warping acid tune that lyrically really nails the 3am ‘why is my mind bending’ moments I seem to find myself having almost every night… Deftones ‘my mind is a mountain’ is just under three minutes of utterly unrepentant heftiness from the one band I really did not want to cancel Glastonbury… Mastodon 'Oblivion' - alright, I appear be heading off on a tip here. I was reminded of this utter classic after the band did an early slot at the Ozzy Osborne golden watch gig the other day. Don’t think they played this, would still be No 1 in the hit parade today if they had. Features a singing heavy metal drummer FTW… a lot of heaviness there, so calming things down massively is Gwenno's 'Utopia'. Gwenno is an artist whose records get better and better as she grows. Language isn’t a border anymore, it’s an open door, an invite into strange, beautiful new worlds, be they alien dystopias or American ones (like her temporary former home Las Vegas). Her new album has a kind of Broadcast liquidity and lushness running through it, creating a kind of bliss that gently overpowers you as it flows onwards and upwards… also, sticking in Wales, Gruff Rhys’ ‘Saf Ar Dy Sedd’. A perfect example of Gruff’s spectacular talent for bringing things back to Earth, it’s a record that sounds like the season we’re having, all bleached out and mellow with occasional creeping rain clouds visible out of the corner of your eye. Glorious sound to loose yourself in…
watching… I paid up for a non-Slow Horses era of AppleTV because they started series 3 of Foundation last week. This is exactly the kind of mega-boffin sci-fi that I’ve avoided for years when looking for the usual bang-for-the-buck nonsense that’ll keep the blood pressure numbers high. But Foundation has shifted that. The first two series were stunning, the third is already looking great. And the blood pressure seems to sustaining at normal, non-hospital worthy levels which I have to take as a plus these days… perhaps the best thing I’ve seen all year is The Rehearsal series 2 - I mean, it’s genuinely one of the most incredible bits of broadcast anyone’s shoved down the telly hole. There’s no real way of describing what happens as it’s far too fucking crazy to capture in a sentence, you need to stick with it as it the madness properly escalates over the six episodes… the other night, head spinning from the medication, I found myself watching Trainwreck: Poop Cruise on Netflix, which was mind-blowingly crazy and totally worth it for the line, “It was like lasagna.” Am going to assume all Trainwreck shows are this good now, might be all I can face watching…
reading… Sadly reading falls by the wayside during chemotherapy. I’ve got a stack of books here that are staring at me, hopeful that they’re picked up next. Don’t hold your breath, is all I’m saying. Last book read/loved was Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium - brilliant, deep and strange, read cover to cover in one sitting. Pile currently includes Werner Hertzog’s Every Man For Himself And God Against All (thank you Rachel for sending!), A City on Mars and the mighty John Niven’s even mightier The Fathers. Hopefully all extremely smashable in the weeks between medication.