Week 2. The rollercoaster.

Well, what a week it’s been. Some nice stuff. Some shitty stuff. Where to start? Let’s do the classic feedback thing, and start with nice.

OK, so the capecitabine isn’t too bad so far. I’m aware that could change. Last time round, after thing went disastrously wrong, a chemo nurse told me “You get one free round” with cape. So next time might be worse, I’m prepared for that, but so far it’s just fatigue in the late afternoon and some mild, manageable nausea. I think fat doesn’t help, so I’m avoiding fatty foods (cheese! Sigh!) and I’m avoiding alcohol.

I’m aware I’m avoiding alcohol because we had a lovely Father’s Day meal in what is becoming one of our favourite pubs and I had a couple of drinks there and felt pretty ropey afterwards. We don’t really celebrate Father’s Day – my husband can’t bear commercial holidays – but we tagged along with friends, and her parents, and his mum and step-father – a really nice Sunday roast, all sharing platters and conversation. And then the day after that was our 30th wedding anniversary, which is officially pearl, but in our house was sun-lounger (him to me) and nothing (me to him), and our favourite small vineyard champagne (I know how that sounds, but honestly, we are very lucky to have Bray Valley Wines in South Moulton, and Charlie sells this great French champagne that comes from a producer too small to sell to the Big Boys, and it’s not expensive, and you could just sit down and drink a bottle over an evening for the pleasure of it. If you’re in North Devon (which I know you’re not) you should check him out.

So that was all lovely and normal and I survived, and feeling crappy afterwards was OK.

The bad stuff, then. I had a call from the radiotherapy team at Plymouth to run through my consent forms. “Has anybody talked to you about driving?”

“No”

“Oh, the doctors usually have that conversation. I’ll get someone to ring you”.

So the call comes later on. Very apologetic. I have to inform the DVLA, and I probably won’t be able to drive for a year.

A year!

I can’t imagine. We live a mile and a half from the nearest bus stop, and you can’t even walk there because it’s a country road that’s has far more traffic and trucks than it was designed for. There are Devon banks on either side (a Devon bank is a wall with a hedge laid on top of it, and grass and stuff growing over it. Very pretty, and a wonderful part of our heritage, but also absolutely solid). And anyway, there’s only a bus every 2 hours and it doesn’t go to our local town. So if I can’t drive, I’m dependent on the husband and the kids, which is fine while they’re at home, not so fine when they aren’t.

This is just practical stuff. We’ll sort it out. But it did feel like another door closing. I have a feeling that it might also have a massive impact on travel insurance, but I’m not going to think about that now. The nine months of treatment break feel like a dream – did I really trek through the rainforest in Costa Rica? Did I really walk 10 miles a day in Florence? Did I? – I don’t know when the next trip could possibly be. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

So, that was shitty. And the treatment was really quite unpleasant. I mean, I survived it, but I spent an hour clamped into what was a very uncomfortable, hard plastic mask. I came out with imprints on my cheeks and lips, and struggling to move my jaw for 10-15 minutes. I couldn’t move my face at all, not even open my eyes, and there were whirrs and clicks and beeps and rumbles, and obviously I was on my own because – radiation! – and I lost all sense of time. I cope pretty well with most things, but this has been tough.

And then we got home last night, and I was feeling weird – I’ve got this bizarre combination of medication sloshing around in me: capecitabine, steroids, and then loperamide (I was a bit squitty) and metoclopromide and a travel sickness pill (I was sick on the way down to Plymouth) and then my usual meds, and my body doesn’t know what’s what. I ended up taking the lunchtime steroids at 5pm because I just didn’t get to eat until then, so last night I was that awful combination of exhausted but buzzy that I only get from dexamethasone. But we sat outside and the rooks put on a massive display of aerobatics for us, and you could smell the honeysuckle and the roses, and the moon was a sliver of lemon rind, and for a few minutes I forgot this stupid body and was just there, caught up in it all. And it was beautiful.