How did you see in the year 2000?

AS NYE 2019 rolls around, I'd like to tell you how, 20 years ago, I saw in the new millennium.

By mid-1999, I was a wreck. An alcoholic and coke fiend who'd hit bottom. My low point was not as bad as it is for some, but I think I can safely say that it was harsher than it was for the person I once heard in an NA meeting who described reaching desperation when she had to sell one of her polo ponies.

I started going to NA meetings. Whatever I feel about the 12 Steps, I'm pretty sure those meetings saved my life. I got clean, made friends and got some structure back into my life. Come December, I was ready to party with my new pals in the Fellowship. So I decided to go to the NA New Year party.

Me on 31 December 1999, before the stuff happened.

On NYE, I went to an evening NA meeting at Notting Hill in London. A bunch of us were heading straight from there to the party. As we turned onto the main road at Notting Hill Gate, an ambulance blue-lighted past us, sirens blaring. "Wouldn't want to be in one of those tonight", I said. How we laughed! (You can probably now guess where this is going.)

We arrived at Conway Hall to find the party already in full swing. And there, sitting at the side of the dance floor, was a girl I'd met before and found rather alluring. At the time, I was 28. She was…well, let's just say MUCH younger. Legal in my country, illegal in others. I found myself dancing with her. I had been dancing gingerly, due to an old skiing injury that sometimes made my right knee click out of place. But, eager to impress this youth, I began throwing some wilder shapes. It wasn't long before I felt the familiar crunch in my knee. I blanched and receded to the side of the hall, dragging my useless leg behind me. She carried on dancing.

"No worries," I thought. "I'll just do what I always do – click it back in and carry on." But would it click back in? Hahaha! No it would not. Eventually, I decided there was nothing else for it – I'd have to call an ambulance.

The friends I'd arrived with were nowhere to be found as I sat outside the main party area to wait for the ambulance. Two chaps I'd never met before sat either side of me with their legs out, to prevent anyone from bashing into me as they hurried past.

The ambulance came and took me away. I was on my own in the ambulance, and then on my own in a cubicle in A&E. I was thoroughly miserable. The staff at A&E took a shine to me (no doubt because I was the only sober patient they had) and decided to cheer me up at midnight, by bringing me a cup of tea and putting some party popper streamers round my neck. It helped a bit.

On 1 January 2000 I had surgery.

The moral of this story is: don't laugh at people in ambulances and/or try to get off with jailbait. Karma is a pitiless bastard.

On the other hand, I have a more memorable Millennium Eve story than most people. So I win. SCREW YOU, KARMA!

An everyday tale of suburbia

During a heatwave several summers ago, I bought a tent to sleep in on the nights when the house was too hot for comfort.

I pitched it again a few weeks ago. Well, I say “pitched” - the pegs are flimsy pieces of metal that come out if you so much as cough in their general direction, so I didn’t bother with them this time. My body weight was enough to keep the thing stationary when I was in it. It’s been gently free-ranging around the back garden since then.

Here it is, making friends with the shed. (Yes, I know we need to get the mower out.)

Earlier this evening, Mrs McGingersnap and I were sitting in the living room, enjoying each other’s company in the traditional manner (ignoring each other while interacting with separate screen-based gadgets), when we heard a strange “phhhhfffrumph!” sound coming from outside.

We looked at each other.

“What was that?” I asked.

Even as the words left my mouth, I knew the answer. I jumped up and ran to the patio door.

Friends: not only was the tent no longer in our garden, it wasn’t in our next-door neighbours’ gardens either. Or next-door-but-one’s. Nor was it in the alley behind our house. Mrs McGingersnap has been up and down the streets and into the local allotments.

It is gone.

I wish it well in its bid for freedom. No doubt it’s on its way to a festival. I just hope it doesn’t get caught in traffic - and not for its sake.

My arse is cancer-free!

I thought I'd write a quick post to wrap up the series on anal cancer. I realise I've given a big old spoiler with that title, but most of you reading this will already know I've been given the all-clear.

When the oncologist told me, I felt like I'd lost 12 stone (and I was only 7 stone 4 to start with). Allow me to depict my sense of relief through the medium of gif:

via GIPHY


It's been a strange old time though. After breezing through chemoradiotherapy in ridiculously high spirits, I started feeling low about a month after treatment ended. Going to the bog no longer felt like passing hot coals, and my undercarriage was no longer sporting blisters. But I was knackered all the time (even more than usual) and my brain felt like candy floss. I got frustrated. I wanted my life back.

I'm still knackered all the time. My brain still feels like candy floss. I still want my life back.

I'd also forgotten that, horrible as it is to have a serious illness, it doesn't half give you a sense of purpose. Since I found out the treatment was successful, I've felt enormously relieved (see gif, above), but also quite a lot like this guy:

I'm glad I don't have to run any more, but MY ROAD HAS GONE!

In short, I'm grateful to the doctors and delighted that I'm cured, but also feeling exhausted and, well, a bit rudderless.

This too shall pass, as the wise ones say. Or, as I say, you'll survive everything till you don't. And I've survived this, so screw you, anal cancer. And thank you to everyone who's followed my story on this blog.

Dildoes on the NHS

Today's title is currently top of my list of phrases I never thought I'd type, but it's true. The National Health Service has provided me with a set of multi-sized sex toys.

They slot into one another like pornographic matryoshka dolls. And look! They even gave me a bottle of lube! Better still, they come in a discreet white case for convenient portability. Simply pop them in your handbag and head on out to the opera. Or a fetish club. ANYWHERE!

OK, OK, so officially they're "dilators" rather than dildoes, and they do serve a legitimate clinical purpose. Pelvic radiotherapy can leave you with scar tissue in the lady parts, making you less...what's the word? Stretchy? Accommodating? Anyway, the point is, if left unattended your front bottom may end up being unable to withstand anything wider than a small pipette. (No, I don't know why you'd insert a small pipette in there either. It was the first image that came to mind. Leave me alone.)

So, you start with the smallest of your State-provided plastic friends and send it into your pleasure garden for a bit of hokey cokey. Repeat until you're ready to move up to the next size. And so forth. In time, you should be able to resume a normal sex life, as well as (hopefully, if treatment worked) a normal toilet-going existence.

Luckily for me, my radiotherapy plan didn't involve zapping me from the front, so I shouldn't be too badly affected in the love tunnel department. I still reckon I should give my new toys a go. Even if (warning: over-sharing ahead) I couldn't cope with much more than a small pipette in the first place.

Sunburn where the sun don't shine

First things first: I'm now on morphine, so please lower any expectations you may have. The sole reason I still know my arse from my elbow is that only one of those things hurts. I'm currently spending my days getting zapped at the hospital, asleep, off my knockers on painkillers, or smearing various ointments on my undercarriage. So it's an exciting life.

The blister finally burst, but it's still giving me grief. Anyone who's ever had a popped blister (which, let's face it, is everyone) knows how raw those little sods can be. And mine was a size that - as an old buddy of mine said when she saw a picture of it - made it not so much a blister as a flotation device. 

The morphine is helping. I was alarmed, however, to see this warning on the packaging:

I'm hoping this message means "It doesn't, but our lawyers told us we had to say this", as opposed to "Take too much, and this will happen to you":

Wicked Witch GIF from Melting GIFs

Anyway, I'm very glad to have the pain relief, because the effects of radiotherapy are akin to having a nasty case of sunburn and I'm certainly feeling those effects now. I even looked in the mirror today to see how my poor little rear was faring. I shan't traumatise you by telling you how it looked. Also, for no particular reason, here is a picture of a baboon.

I have eight more sessions to go.

My response to this: Yay! Only eight more sessions!

My arse's response: Oh God. Eight more sessions *whimper*

The other day, The Independent ran a story about a jellyfish that has a transient anus. I wish, my friends. I wish.

About those non-existent blisters...

Last week began splendidly, with a gift from one of my cousins.

Yes, I know it needs a wipe

I enjoy drinking from this. It makes me feel like I'm some sort of hero simply for attending hospital and lying on a gurney with my junk on display.

By 3am on Saturday morning, however, I was acting like a proper ninja, crawling round my house on my forearms and knees, in the dark. Walking from the bedroom to the bathroom was too painful. Which brings me to the title of this blog post. Those blisters for which I searched fruitlessly the other week were, it would seem, not non-existent at all, just undergoing a slow teleportation from The Dimension of  Blisters. In the middle of last week, they arrived en masse. My favourite was this one:

It's actually grown since I took this photo. It's started to move up my ankle. My oncologist thinks this is because the pressure I put on it while walking is forcing the lymph upwards. I have a different theory: the blister has learned that, impressive as it is, there is a structure capable of holding legendary amounts of liquid just above the top of my leg, and it has decided to make a pilgrimage.

It was the combination of blisters and general foot pain that led to me slithering across the landing in the middle of the night.

I called the Cancer Centre's 24-hour hotline. They told me to stop taking the chemo tablets and invest in yet another cream.

I'm now able to hobble around with a single crutch. When I saw my oncologist today, she was pleased about this, but still classified me as having Grade 3 hand-foot syndrome. Apparently, Grade 3 is as high as it goes. I thought the oncologist said it went up to Grade 4, which made me gape.  GRADE 4? I pictured someone with water balloons for feet, bouncing down the road, praying for them not to pop.

I put my mistaken belief / mishearing down to fatigue. Not that I'm getting muddled or anything, but when the receptionist asked for my surname today, it took me a good five seconds to remember.

No, don't tell me - I know this one

For now, they're keeping me off the chemo, which is just as well, because the radiotherapy is producing unpleasant effects of its own in the underwear department. I'll save that for next time.

  

Side effects!

When you embark on any kind of medical treatment, you run the risk of suffering side effects. It gets fun when the doctors prescribe you something to counteract the side effects, then you get side effects from that medication, so they give you something for those side effects, which also has side effects etc etc. This happened to me when my first transplant was failing: I went from high blood pressure to diarrhoea via water retention and gout. Good times.

So anyway, I wasn't surprised when I was told that both chemotherapy and radiotherapy have side effects. There are the obvious ones, like sickness and diarrhoea, but there are also some unexpected ones, like a craving for artichokes and a sudden passion for tiddlywinks. OK, I made those ones up. But I was told that the chemo I'm taking can cause soreness on the palms of your hands and soles of your feet.

When I heard this, a subconscious, non-rational part of my brain responded thus: I have never heard of this and it sounds implausible, therefore it definitely won't happen to me.

A few days ago, my feet were hurting. I searched them for non-existent blisters. Had I developed amnesia and forgotten about attending a fire-walking event that went horribly wrong? 

I didn't clock a thing.

It was only when this crevasse opened up on my thumb that I realised the thing that definitely wasn't going to happen to me definitely was happening to me.

Lesion caused by movements in the tectonic hand plates, which are definitely a Thing and not something I just made up

I'd asked one of the radiotherapy staff about managing soreness (albeit in a rather different part of my body) and he'd suggested "double bass". I asked if he meant Diprobase. No, he said, and repeated the name of the recommended cream: double bass.

I've met a double bass. I'm not smearing one of those things up my crack.

My Facebook friends have recommended Diprobase or red-top Neutrogena (ie the full-fat version, as opposed to the semi-skimmed blue-top variety I have in my bedside drawer). So they're on this week's shopping list. 

I shan't bore you by telling you all the side effects I'm experiencing, but I will say this: buy shares in Imodium now. 

Cancer treatment begins and I may be a world record holder

Treatment started on Wednesday with a syringeful of chemotherapy solution. It was this colour - 

- which was nice, because it matched my cardi. 

Seriously, though, when someone puts something that colour in your veins, you know it's toxic. You just hope it's killing the right bits of you.

Afterwards, I headed downstairs with a bagful of chemotherapy tablets, to have my first radiotherapy session. And this is where my proud moment occurred.

The team will only give you pelvic radiotherapy if you have around 200ml of liquid in your bladder, so they make your drink about half a litre of water 45 minutes before you're due to get zapped. Before switching the rays on, they take a scan of the area, to check everything's as it ought to be. 

I lay on the bed/table, surrounded by space-age machinery. They scanned me. I waited.

Then I waited some more, passing the time by imagining that said machinery was going to put me in stasis so I could carry out a very important space mission.

Eventually, the nurse came through. 'Your bladder is ginormous,' she informed me. 'Do you think you could fill two cups of wee and come back?'

I told her I could. I have not had children, so - to steal a Victoria Wood quote - I have a pelvic floor like a bulldog clip. Stopping mid-flow? Pah! Piece of piss (almost literally).

When I returned, they showed me the scan. The screen was entirely filled by my bladder. However, when they plonked an ultrasound wand on me to check how much liquid was left in there, I still had around 800ml. One-and-a-half cups later and I was ready to go.

This means that, when I initially hopped on the bed, I had around 1.5 litres in there. I have a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi in the kitchen. The idea that I can hold 3/4 of that in my bladder makes me feel both proud and disturbed. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? It occurs to me that what I thought were my breasts are in fact the rest of my organs, shoved into my chest by a land-grabbing bladder. Whatever - I feel I ought to contact whoever took over from the McWhirter twins at the Guinness Book of Records and ask to be included in the next edition. 

Computer says no. Well, it might do. We haven't looked at it.

I was meant to be at the Tears for Fears / Alison Moyet gig at the O2 this evening.

The hospital called me yesterday, telling me I had to go in at 12.30 today to pick up my chemo tablets. It absolutely had to be today, they told me, because there were no other free appointments before I start radiotherapy. (You can’t just pick up your tablets. No, you have to have an appointment where you’re lectured for an hour on how to take them.)

I have very low energy to start with, so was concerned this might affect my ability to get to the gig. Also, I have to get up and go to the hospital tomorrow morning for 4 hours of blood tests. But I accepted the appointment. Of course I did.

I turned up at 12.30. My appointment was at 13.30.

I waited.

There were no tablets for me to pick up because the doctor hadn‘t written the prescription. And the reason for that is because they won’t know what dose to prescribe until I‘ve had the tests tomorrow WHICH THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN I WASN’T GOING TO HAVE UNTIL TOMORROW BECAUSE THAT INFORMATION WILL BE ON THEIR SYSTEM.

So I’m at home, instead of having a joyous time with musicians I loved back in the 80s.

Fuck cancer. And administrative incompetence.

And you'd like that tattoo where, Madam?

I knew I was going to have a tattoo before I started radiotherapy, so that the people with the ray guns would know where to attack.

Given where the cancer is, I thought the tattoo was going to be in a place that meant I would only be able to show it off if I:

1. learned to twerk in downward dog pose;
2. went clubbing;
3. with my pants off,

and that the tattooing process was going to be eye-watering.

It turned out that none of this was true. I am relieved and yet saddened by this loss of anticipated comic material. I have a tattoo at the top of each thigh and one, um, about half way between the two, on my [insert euphemism of choice]. They're not even interesting tattoos. I was hoping for Japanese symbols that I thought meant "serenity" but actually meant "wanker". They're just dots.

So, apart from the palaver of trying to get a cannula into me - nurse #1 failed and nurse #2 entered the room to find me furiously doing press-ups in an attempt to make my veins pop up - my CT scan and tattooing were unremarkable.

Radiotherapy starts on 13 February. It's all starting to feel a bit real now.