It is fifteen months since I posted in this blog. In July last year, after some investigations, the doctors told me that I had a widely-metastasised cancer. It was a breast cancer, though not detectable in my boobs. It was in my spine, hips, adrenal glands and liver. I was put onto a course of chemotherapy - fierce and gruelling and that lasted until Christmas. Things seemed to be going well. The tumour shrank and though I lost my hair and felt a bit weak, I was basically very well. Andrew took fantastically good care of me and we slowly came to terms with what might happen, or what was in fact happening.
I had scans from time to time, to keep a check on the tumours and in the late spring, it seemed the liver tumours started to grow again. This time, my oncologist Dr Jennie Glendinning, put me onto a different chemo therapy - a targetted treatment, whereby the antibodies in the cocktail make holes in the walls of the tumour cells, and then the chemo part zips through the holes and so have the biggest effects on the cancer. It's true I have had far less challenging side-effects, but I am definitely very tired. I am buoyed up by the fact that this treatment is very expensive. (I'm worth it, evidently). I don't know how long it will have to go on. I have kept my hair... whoopee! And I have achieved a lot of things while I have spent a large part of my time lying down in or on my bed.
Lately I had another scan, of my head. Dr Glendinning remembered she had not investigated my little grey cells... She gave the result. 'I am happy to say your brain is normal....' (No, it isn't !)
For instance, I have taken part in three art exhibitions now, or more. One was dedicated to my cancer and chemo experience - drawings I made in oil pastel last year, a kind of speech-less account or journal of the first treatment. It also had a series of selfie photos on my phone: these I amended and edited to make more lurid... charting the loss and regrowth of my hair. And a set of nine single-colour panels which illustrate how things don't always turn out as you expect or plan.
This show was on in the town centre (12 Marketplace) for a week free of rent courtesy of the Town Council because I used it raise funds for the Hospice and for Macmillan Cancer Support. I was invited to leave the show in place for a further week during which a friend was recruiting members for the re-formed NADFAS group.... I was not selling originals of any of the works on show, just prints. The maximum price was £25. We sold £1380 worth of these prints. I am more proud of this than I can say. People came in, went out again as they couldn't face it (the whole idea of cancer is never really discussed....), or they came and cried, or they told me about their own cancer, or how their loved ones have had the cancer... I am now seeking ways to put the show into other venues round the world. We are starting at St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham, S London, courtesy of our friend and ex-neighbour from Brockwell Park, Prof Ian Judson late of the Royal Marsden Hospital. I hope to get sponsorship and exposure from Apple or iPhone for the photographic selfportraits. These form a narrative on their own.
I am here summarising a long period of time, a lot of events, experiences, visits, reactions ... Maybe I can come back to some of this later. Today I just wanted to break the omerta, the silence, my paralysis ... Just as the politics of the last few years have proved so depressing and alarming, this personal experience has also resulted in a kind of nothingness. I could scarcely read, let alone write. I have watched hours of crap television, retreated to a kind of contemplative stupor. I have managed to write fictional shorties for the Inklings (and indeed joined in a public reading at the last Faversham Literary Festival), and so it has not been entirely null. But the works have been lightweight, impersonal. Only gradually have I wanted to approach a more personal zone.
What triggered it today was to stop and look (as I do daily) at the tomatoes in my 4 hanging baskets at the front of the house. As usual I have in each basked a fuschia, a geranium and a Tumbling Tom tomato plant. We have carefully watered and fed these through the season and in recent months been harvesting a few every day. I bring them in to ripen on the kitchen table in the sun, and then halve them and dry them for winter stores. In the last 4 or 5 weeks, the leaves of the tomato plants have started to dry and wither, though the other plants have been as green as usual. Strangely and miraculously, the little globular fruits are still appearing on the dead-looking branches. Today I picked a huge handful of them; yesterday these were all green and this morning they had started to lighten to a golden or orange or blushing red. How is the plant doing this? It is also pretty extraordinary to learn how tomatoes ripen in general. I had always thought they had to go red on the vine. But no! You can pick them when they just start to turn colour - which they seem to do overnight, even if it's cold. Bring them in, put them with their fellows, and gradually (away from the probing fingers of passers-by) they darken and sweeten and turn from various shades of green to the welcome red.
. So - my thread here is about how death can come knocking, in a doctor's interview or down the branches of the plants - and we may not expect it and be worried about it, and expect the worst. But out of the new information we can also learn new things. That life goes on. That we always have resources. That things are not always what they look like.
