Nobody mentions amnesia as a side-effect. But in the middle of the night I remember that it is Anne Fine who I’m interviewing on Friday. Perplexing emails have been arriving from colleagues, asking whether I should be doing an interview this week, to which I’ve replied that I’m not. Suddenly, I wake, bolt upright, the whiteboard in my head blank no longer: Oh yes, I am due to meet a former “children’s laureate”. To top that, for days I have been thinking Anthony’s birthday is a week away, only, yikes, it’s tomorrow.
Today is my first chemotherapy session.
We drop our son at nursery in the pouring rain; Anthony’s mother will pick him up for an afternoon of prime pampering. One of our daughters is going to walk home from school herself. Another, my eldest, who turned 16 the week I was diagnosed, is highlighting her hair for the first time – more real to me than the chemotherapy – and I text her on the half-hour: “How’s it going now?”
The private wing of Mount Vernon is called Bishopswood. It looks like a motel, in shades of beige, pink and green. You don’t see other patients like you do on the NHS side, and the corridors don’t echo in the same way.
I still don’t really know what chemotherapy is. First comes the usual form-filling - actually, all they want is the insurance authorisation, and, grimly, the next of kin. The thing about weeks of medical treatment is you begin to feel so dependent on the person squeezing the needle, on how they will make you feel, that I’m almost dancing when today’s nurse appears: Julie, movie-star eyelashes, already speed-talking as she comes through the door, a little barmy, pretty, kind.
My oncologist, Peter Ostler, with his direct, unpatronising look, follows her in and perches on the bed. He asks how I am, if I have any questions, and then pulls out a tape measure. I stand up so that he can measure me against a wall. He looks confused, wondering where I’m going. “Uh, no, not you - your breast,” his research assistant says. “Oh,” I say, “you’re measuring my breast. With a tape measure.” In fact, it’s the lump, which goes down in the notes as 7.5cm by 7cm.
Two more hours, channel-hopping on the TV, texting the kids. Anthony and I have brought a laptop with us, on which is downloaded the latest series of Curb Your Enthusiasm, because I’ve loved the couple of episodes I have already seen. We also have the two series of 24 that we resolutely missed, after the first hijacked our life. The idea is not to even notice the chemotherapy.
Finally, at 1.30, Julie flies in carrying a blue tray. She wraps a warming cushion round my right arm - “Gets the veins up,” she says - and then tries to put a needle in. Only her back goes, just as she succeeds, and she practically crawls out of the room on all fours.
I miss this, because I’m looking away, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s making me flinch, though - nothing like needles for putting your emotions on edge. What seemed brilliantly diverting last night is now Larry David’s grotesque trampling over everybody else.
Like a transparent extra finger, a little plastic tube has grown into the vein on my right hand, and all the medicine will go in through that.
Julie comes back, slightly stooped but smiling, carrying one of those huge, old-fashioned shower hats you would see on somebody ancient in Coronation Street, but so cold it’s emanating icy smoke. This is the famed cold cap, the device that’s supposed to stop your hair falling out. “If you don’t get on wi’it, we’ll take it off,” Julie says. It looks freezing from the end of the bed; once on my head it’s like going under glacier water, or skiing straight into snow. Julie wraps cotton wool round my ears and neck to protect them from the cold and a warm towel round my shoulders.
Finally, the chemotherapy, a liquid in a plastic bag. The adriamycin and cyclophosphamide is raspberry-coloured, and Julie has to stand next to the bed, physically squeezing it into my veins, because if any escapes the blood stream it will kill. “It’s a beautiful colour,” Anthony says. “Aye, I like this one,” Julie says. “I don’t like the purple one, it looks unnatural going in. Red seems more right for the body.”
“I can feel it,” I say.
“Some say it’s like rats crawling up,” says Julie.
Forty-five minutes later, it’s over. I nick the soaps from the bathroom, and off we go.
This column appears fortnightly
18 March 2021: this article has been edited to remove some personal information.
