A Weekend Away

This weekend, Sarah Emma and I went to Robin Hood's Bay over on the East coast. Our friends from way back, Steve and Katy, have a B&B (The Manning Tree: well worth a visit - there you go Steve!) at the top of the bay, with the Cleveland Way running straight past their front door, and they let us stay there for nothing, yet lavish us with all the loving care and attention you could expect from a five star hotel.

Preparing to go away now is a little like preparing to go away when you first have children: there is so much to pack, so many eventualities to be considered, that it requires a great deal of planning and double checking - both skills I am sadly lacking. Add a certain lack of my usually razor sharp awareness due to the drugs, and you have a recipe for potential disaster. Fortunately, Sarah is still capable of organising me, and ever since I once left all my drugs on a taxi in Florence (a tale I am sure you'll have heard by now), is only too willing to double and triple check that I have all the necessary equipment with me. The necessary for this weekend being: colostomy supplies (bags sufficient for two days, plus a few extras in case I happen to eat or drink something that disagrees with me, because if it disagrees with me these days NOTHING in the immediate vacinity is safe), drugs (all kept in a plastic box together so that they are easy to find), walking stick, batteries (for my morphine pump, as to be without replacements would result in me having to be taken to hospital within a few hours incoherent with pain), emergency phone numbers (doctors mainly), a sheet to lay on top of Katy's bedding (which is antarctically white and might never recover from my external tumour's seepage should it find a way around the dressings) and bags of gauze, specialized dressings, antispetic wipes, saline solution and the kitchen sink.

On Saturday morning, we collected Emma from her sleepover at 11, and drove to the Bay. This in itself was a bit of a test, as on the trip to the dales the other week, I found sitting in the car awkward as the pains in my groin protest at me being folded in two and having the seat belt across my lap pressing into me. The sores on my backside can be prevented from having to spend all the trip pressed into the car seat by my placing a folded jumper underneath my thighs, lifting the sensitive areas off the point of contact with the seat, but the pains in the groin are a little harder to manage. However, with the aid of a couple of extra boosts of morphine and anaesthetic from my pump, and one stop to let me get out and stretch my legs for a few minutes, we were able to make the hour and ten minutes trip without me suffering any great deal.

As with the dales, the Bay has always been a place Sarah and I love to visit, as there are the cliff top walks, and the beautiful and strange rock formations on the beach were always something of an attraction to Emma when younger, and we'd often walk along the beach to Boggle Hole searching the rocks for fossils before traipsing back along the cliff-top path. The steep descent into the Bay was beyond me on the first afternoon, as the use of the booster had left me too unstable to walk down the slope without falling over - so unfortunately I had to settle for watching Steve prepare our evening meal and going down the pub with he and Paul at 4.30! (I've been taken off the nastiest of the antibiotics now, metronizadole, which is, I am told, chemically similar to the drug they give to recovering alcoholics. When taking it, even the sniff of alcohol could result in projectile vomiting, so I have wisely been off the beer whenever I've had the infection necessitating the metronizadole. Now I am on a low dose of flucoxacillin all the time to prevent the infection recurring hopefully, and that allows me a beer. Hurrah!)

We sat down to eat at about 6, Sarah, Emma and I, Steve and Katy, Claire and Paul, who'd also come over from York for the weekend with their daughter Hattie.

It is, I should say, quite possible for Sarah and I to sit down with friends, and the topic of my illness not be raised in the conversation - at least when I am present: I know that sometimes, usually when I have departed to go to the loo, Sarah is bombarded with a sudden rush of questions people have not wanted to ask while I am around, usually of the "How-is-he-really?" ilk. But this evening, once Emma and Hattie had left the table to catch a bit of Strictly or X Factor, it did come up. Sarah and Claire were discussing in particular the language that is used about cancer, and how much it is the language of war.

A while back, Sarah read the book by John Diamond, the BBC journalist and first husband of Nigella, who wrote a column on his cancer experiences and took part in a documentary chronicling his illness. It was he who Sarah remembered as first highlighting for her the use of all the combative language. Cancer is always, it seems, a fight, and you (the victim of its onlsaught) have to be "brave" and "fight it", and if you are then you can "beat it". Ever since my first diagnosis, I've always been uncomfortable with that language, and I think it is because it can create a feeling of pressure as well as an all too easy sense of failure. It's as though those who do not "win the fight" have somehow been lacking, have not fought hard enough, or done everything they could, or, worst of all, they have eventually capitulated and "given up".

My apporach has always been to attempt to somehow be inclusive of my cancer, to treat it as something I created (for whatever reasons, as I mentioned in the bit on attitude). To fight it would be like fighting myself, or at least fighting something I have been somehow responsible for creating. When it came back last year, both Sarah and I did both say at first, "Well, it looks like this bastard really does want a fight!" But I still cannot use that language comfortably.

So I thought I'd just say a bit about how I do handle the illness, and what I am doing that enables me to hold onto the belief that survival is possible.

First off, there is the meaning of the word incurable: to me it means that the doctors have just reached the point where they have to say "I don't know", and not that there is no cure somewhere.

Second of all, there is the homeopathist we see: I don't know if homeopathy works or not, but she is giving me some stuff called Zeolite, which apparently has a reputation for being a good detoxifier as it attracts a lot of negative ions in the body and takes them away, much like antioxidants in red wine and tea are said to do.

Then there is the meditation and the visualisation: I spend a lot of my waking time visualising my daughter's graduation from university, my 73rd birthday, and Sarah and I walking together hand in hand on a beach near Perth in five years time.

Then there is the dietary stuff I picked up from the Bristol Penny Brohn Cancer Centre when I visited. By no means do I stick to it rigidly now, but I do try to eat fruit and vegetables more often, try to avoid processed foods, and, even when I am off the antibiotics, avoid the alcohol.

And there is my Best Man (in many senses) Stuart, who is so determined to see me recover he is buying Colloidal Silver and nutritional supplements for me by the bucket load (based upon the advice of a woman with a pendulum apparently!)

So that's what keeps me believing - it's not that I'll be fighting it this way, but rather this way I'll be around a long time, and I'll be around a long time either with or without cancer.

And that's why, on Sunday morning, I walked down the 3 in 1 slope to the bottom of the Bay and walked back up again having fortified myself with a 100g bag of strawberry bon bons at the bottom of the hill! It's why I loved walking holding my daughter's hand and hearing her voice, or standing next to Sarah with my arm around her, or laughing with them both, or looking at Sarah and feeling the tears come because I love her so much. It's not because I want to prove to my cancer that I am stronger than it and will beat the hell out of it, but rather that, if I am going to live with cancer, I am going to live as fully as I possibly can and not let the threat of pain or falling over or being too weak or being embarrassed or whatever else run the show! It's just living now, and, as I've said to so many people like Claire who love both Sarah and I so much that the thought of us parted, or one of us dying, breaks her heart, now is all there is, and if I am not living fully now, then it's highly unlikely I'll be living fully any time in the future either!

So, I think that's all for today: it's not my intention to write something every day, but I'll do so when the mood takes me or when there is some news. As tomorrow I get given a device to assist the putting on of socks, there may be something to add - a picture at least, as I am curious as to what a sock-putter-onner looks like!