Roasted boobs

I know I've been quiet for a while, but it's not surprising. We all know about navel gazers, but have your heard the one about the woman with breast cancer who watches her breasts turning the colour of steamed crabs as the radiation slowly kicks in and the preserved breast gets slowly roasted? Well, that's me right now. I just hope I am not going to end up with cracklings!

Otherwise, the week has been uneventful. I've spent most of the time at home, because my big toes have been really bothering me and it was hard to put on walking shoes. It also didn't help that it's getting hard to put on a bra as well and I didn't want to stop traffic with my unbound boobs flip-flopping to my jaunty steps!

I am sustained by the thought that it's only three more weeks and I am done with this phase of the treatment, and then....WATCH OUT WORLD!

I am not fretting, though. I've come out of the mental fog and now notice the lowly roaches that are hatching in the kitchen, thanks to my having ignored the parents for the past 6 months. So, yesterday I've attacked the kitchen cabinets and started an honest-to-goodness spring cleaning in autumn.

I am also going back to the books to finally learn how to use my super-dooper film editing software. It appears I am an antitalent in this direction! I don't seem to be able to get anywhere with it. So, I am trying to use the next three weeks to unblock whatever is stopping me from learning.

I've stopped going to the counselor, because I feel fine in my soul and think that with all those incredible good vibes coming my way, I'll truly weather the storm. Thanks guys.

Black humour

There's a program about the benefits of black humour on the radio as I sat down to write . My mind was suddenly abuzz with incidents of black humour from my life. They had people calling in, but I restrained myself, or I would have taken over the whole program and still not told all.

One of my favourites has to do with my mother. About a year after we got to London, we were sharing the upstairs of an East London row house with her cousin Anna, who was the same age as my brother. (I guess that would make her 30+ years younger than Mum -she was about 24.) One Saturday, Anna built a huge bonfire in the back yard. The smell was getting really pungent by the time Mum noticed it. She cupped her hands around her mouth as she leant out of the window and screamed down: "What are you doing, Anna?" "I am burning my poverty!" - Anna screamed back, to which Mom let out a big repost: "Burn mine too!"

And sure enough, Anna's fortunes improved and she had a very nice career for a long time. Mom was still treading water many years later, when they recalled the incident and Mum looked at Anna with an accusatory look: "You sure burned your poverty, but you forgot to burn mine."

And the two of them collapsed into heaps of laughter.

I love that story. I was there both times, it's true.

Anyway, I could tell you some black jokes about my current predicament........... Yesterday I went for treatment early, because I wanted to catch the doctor. For the first time I had a terrible sleepless night the night before and my feet were as painful as during the chemotherapy. I actually took a painkiller! Another complaint was the peeling skin on my right foot and left forefinger.

"That," said the doctor with a twinkle in her eye, "is Martin's fault," meaning the Professor who pumped me full of the chemo poison. Well, today I am feeling fatigued and nauseated from the radiation, so I guess they are equally guilty! (laughter please!)

Actually, this fatigue is very strange. It comes and goes, so you can do things quite normally for a while, but then suddenly you are out of puff and just have to lie down. And when things are fine, there is interest in the outside world, but it shuts down as soon as the fatigue sets in. I don't have patience to read, watch TV or anything, except mindlessly doing a really complex solitaire on my Palm that I am addicted to.

One good news is that I no longer feel I need the counselor. Maybe that will change, but at the moment I am fixated on the fact that I have only three more weeks to go before this phase ends, and I'll be out of the tunnel.

At this point that is quite enough to lift the spirit. I can't look very much further. Oh dear, I just remembered, I have to do my US tax returns. Well, that's no big deal. I hardly made any money last year. The cancer took care of that! (is that black humour? )

Timeline

I just had a good look at this blog and noticed that the first entry was in September. My goodness, that's seven months! It seems a lifetime away. I was so healthy and happy! I was mulling over in my mind how to reinvent myself in terms of making money so I could continue my fiction writing. Well, we know what happened with that: zilch.

In any case, it occurs to me that I have only four more weeks of this radiation wonder to go through and then I am done. But, even as I think this, I am reminded of Dr A. S.'s admonition when I asked if that would be the last time I see him.

'You don't get rid of me as easily as that', he laughed and I realise now that this cancer will be my life's companion from now on. Not that it's going to come back and suddenly kill me, because I don't think it will (and if so, I am not going to worry about it now), but I will never be free of the 'team', whether it be Dr A.S., the Prof, or whoever comes after them. I will be prodded and observed 'for my own good' from now on and I will never have the freedom to completely let go of this horrendous experience that I am going through now. Ugh, what an ugly thought.

I am trying to think of some bright side to this, and of course there are some. For one, hopefully the cancer dog has been pushed away. Another good thing to look forward to is that I will learn to do Dragon racing. I've always liked rowing, and there's a dragon racing team for cancer survivors. Amazing really, how organised these women are, and a bit strange to think that from now on I am going to be one of them.

Maybe it's just getting older and surviving longer that puts us in the 'survivor' category. Until now, it was the war, the Holocaust, the Revolution, the Escape. This latest 'surviving' seems almost mundane, but I have to say it's pretty harrowing, so I'll just tuck it away with the others. Do they give medals for how often you survive?

Wedding bells

Despite the personal miseries of cancer treatment, life goes on – thank goodness – and there are times when the joy of an event helps one to forget every unpleasantness. Such was Tunde's wedding to Zabrina yesterday.

There's nothing unusual in a pair of love birds saying their vows beside the family pool, but not many mothers listen in by phone and shed the wedding tears 10,000 miles from that body of water. Who said there's anything usual about me and my family?

Tunde told me in November, when he came to see what this cancer thing was doing to me, that Zabrina is the one and he is seriously thinking about proposing soon. I gave him my parents' wedding ring as a keepsake, perhaps to use symbolically, as I did with his father.

The proposal was accepted on Christmas day and they moved together a couple of months ago. Tunde had an instant family with Zabrina and her two children, Jerrel (8) and Nikeya (13). A few weeks ago they decided to fast forward the wedding, but since I can't fly while I have radiation treatment, the event would take place in two parts: wedding on Saturday, April 7 and the reception when I visit in August.

So, yesterday morning I was woken by my brother at 5:50am, saying that he wants to try and get a Skype connection. Of course I was unfit to do anything at such an unearthly hour, so we tried it around 8am. The wedding was scheduled for 7:30pm Saturday at their time, which was Sunday 9:30am at my end.

While it was a good idea, the Skype thing didn't work, and the solution was that Stephan stood next to the celebrant with his mobile (cell) phone in his pocket so I could hear every word at my end clear enough to record!

The celebrant was my niece Judy's husband Frank, who read beatifully. The first toast was something I found on the Internet, called the Irish Blessing. I just think it's really special, and Frank read it just as I would have. Thanks Frank! And thanks Judy and Stephan for making all this possible!

Irish Blessing

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

May God be with you and bless you;
May you see your children's children.
May you be poor in misfortune,
Rich in blessings,
May you know nothing but happiness
From this day forward.

May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home
And may the hand of a friend always be near.

May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.

A new routine

I've just finished listening to a 1949 recording of Mozart's Magic Flute, with Otto Klemperer conducting the Hungarian State Opera, and Mihaly Szekely singing the role of Sarastro. This was my father's favourite opera and somehow as I listened, I was pretty sure that dad was at that performance, probably as a duty medical officer. When it was over, I suddenly burst into tears. I really missed my dad, something I haven't done so intensely in decades. Cancer treatment does strange things to the mind as well as the body.

The digitised version is on a 1999 CD released by an Italian company, whose intention is to 'rehabilitate' Kleperer, "The Forgotten Man of Music." I didn't know he was forgotten, because I certainly remember him. I ordered it through amazon.com after I rummaged through my old records, which I am slowly digitizing (yes, I still have a record player and a reel-to-reel tape recorder -- for my museum when I get old, you understand), and found some recordings of Mihaly Szekely, who is my very favourite of all time. He was a base baritone whose deep base was only bested by Paul Robeson. One of the records looked pretty beat up, so I turned to amazon.com and ordered a few CDs that he was supposed to be on. I was curious to discover whether he was as good as I remembered. Yes, he was. And I am so sorry that he doesn't have a recording of Don Giovanni, which I saw as a kid and never forgot.

OK, back to the main issue at hand. Yes, I freaked last week. I just had enough. It was all becoming too much, too long, and who knows what the payoff would be. Well, after a few days and lots of talking with different people, I got my bounce back and here I am, looking forward to having a 'quickie fry up' at the hospital in one hour.

The new routine is: either take the bus or walk to the hospital, and then walk back or take the bus. It depends on the weather. It's uphill to the hospital and too much when it's hot and humid. I am being very sensible, you may be happy to hear.

It is amazing what the human body can get used to. The X-ray machine is an ingenious contraption that can move 360 degrees around the body, so you are not shoved into an early grave like with the MRI, you just hear little clicks as the machine moves around you and an electronic buzz when they give the 'juice'. It really only takes 5-10 minutes.

The stomach symptoms have settled down and, by now, I am used to remnants of the joys of chemotherapy, so the only side-effect of the radiation so far is fatigue in the afternoon and periodic, slight nausea. Now, the doc says the nausea is not from the radiation, but I've talked with other patients who complain of the same thing, so what do docs know? Right? Right!

Although the mental fog is gone, I still can't focus on important things, like work and administrative stuff. This blog is the only thing I can manage to write and it's not as frequent as before, if you haven't noticed. I seem to be wafting through time, if not space, and when I stop it's evening already. The feeling of being in the twilight zone has, apparently, not changed with the lifting of the brain fog. Ah well!

However, I am happy to report that my hair is starting to grow back. And how do I know that? Yesterday morning I looked in the mirror and, shock horror, there was a dark shadow under my nose. My mustache is back!