Cancer 54

My PICC line is in, my arm has bled fairly heqvily, and tomorrow morning is chemo time. The PICC line just makes me think of related terms such as PICCaresque novels, ones which involve rogues or rascals doing stuff in episodic form, Captain PICCard of the Starship Enterprise, playing the PICColo, or PICConio the wooden puppet (something not quite right there).

After being woken at stupid’o’clock by the absurd burglar alarm of our unchristianly neighbours I am trying to go to sleep early. It is just after 8pm. No doubt I shall sleep and be wide awake before midnight with a rapidly filling stoma and no further desire for sleep until 5am, after which I will eventually sleep, have a bad dream and be woken by the alarm at 6.30am.

I used to remember a lot of my dreams. They were long, vivid and well structured. The vest ones were like feature films. I wpuld sometimes wake up in the middle, then go back to sleep and continue with the same dream. Often I had control over my character in the dream. My favourite memory of a dream is when I was walking along a mountain path, someone came at me with a pickaxe from behind and cleaved in my head. That woke me, but I quickly returned to the dream, rewound it a few minutes, relived it and, as the person raised the pickaxe I turned and grabbed it to shrvive the rest of the dream.

Can the pickaxe be a highly inappropriate metaphor for my cancer? Of course not, don’t be daft. This isn’t a bad course on Freudian interpretation of dreams in a bad creative writing class.

“To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub, for in the sleep of death what dreams may come?”