Throwing out a pineapple skin I brush the inside of my wrist lightly with the jagged edge. It’s such a brief encounter, and soft, like a dandelion clock. But a second later a dull red bruise is spreading before my eyes across the veined area. “Huh?” I hear myself say.
One week after the first chemotherapy and I’m a walking biology lesson. “D’you know how they discovered this treatment?” Julie, the chemo nurse, had asked chattily, while she was putting in the drugs. “After the war, they did autopsies on mustard gas victims, discovered the gas had stopped bone marrow growth, and the bodies had low blood cell counts, so some bright spark figured they could use the same stuff to stop cancer cells growing.”
And the effect of this particularly nasty and debilitating first world war poison on me, circa 2005? Well, white blood cells are your line of resistance against the outside world. Chemotherapy, in its race to kill off the mad, mutating cancer cells, attacks the good guys along with the bad. When your white cells are down, the faintest scratch looks as if you just took a hammer to yourself.
The fatigue is still low grade, ditto the nausea. It is, as I keep saying to everyone who asks, very like being pregnant, not to mention the exhaustion of the years after giving birth. But the post-chemotherapy weariness has this edge to it - if I push things too far, then I end up in bed at night with trembling limbs and a racing heart. It’s an anxiety that feels like a druggy reaction.
One sleepless night, when my older children are at their father’s and Anthony’s are at their mother’s, I try every bed, looking for rest. Ours is the quietest room in the house, I realise, but we sleep the least.
Underneath all the symptoms, and maybe this is the drug anxiety again, I feel an unease that because I’m still functioning pretty normally - I’m not laid up, it’s nothing like the dread stuff intimated by people’s shocked faces when they hear the word chemotherapy - it can’t be working.
So, when they appear, I welcome the second wave of distorted bodily functions. As the nausea settles, diarrhoea and mouth ulcers take over; like pit stops, the drug is taking on its route round your body. The diarrhoea’s fine, because it makes swift work of the weight you put on from the steroids they give you to counter sickness; and the mouth ulcers get treated by a bright green mouthwash called Difflam, which becomes my drink of choice for a number of days.
I keep trying to imagine what losing a breast will be like. This right breast is going to be cut away, I say to myself, trying to get some sense of the reality of it. In my life I have lost days with my children. Every other Thursday they go to their father for a long weekend. Though I spent months discussing the children’s arrangements before implementing them, the words were meaningless. I did not understand the loss until the day it happened. When I describe it, I say it was as if a piece of my body had been hacked out.
The stomach settles, the mouth ulcers subside. Two weeks after the chemotherapy and I feel normal. And then my hair starts to fall from my head. Like being at a bad hairdresser, it is round my neck, in my eyes, gently drifting down my face, entwined in my fingers every time I put hand to face.
It’s all over my pillow, too. Just single hairs, but every time I open my eyes I see a strand in front of me. There is a frizzing sensation where hair meets scalp, as if I’ve had a terrible 70s perm, and each hair has been burned at the root. In the morning I don’t touch my head, but I go to the mirror to stand and stare. I’m blearily surprised at how much hair I still have.
This column appears fortnightly.
18 March 2021: this article has been edited to remove some personal information.
