Cancer 224

This is the point where everyone says Happy New Year. I have never been comfortable with those kinds of phrases. Beyond a certain good manners, their words are not meant to convey any real meaning. I am not convinced this is going to be a happy new year for me. The growths in my abdomen are rapidly increasing in size and soon they will no doubt cut off some essential bodily service or other, whether concerned with input or waste. I assume it won’t be pleasant. Then I die or go through some horrid procedure. In the meantime, I will carry on.

I have completed a form which lets health professionals know my views towards treatment. Basically, if something goes wrong relating to treatment I am currently receiving then try and sort it out. If there is a choice between treatment and comfort, then comfort please. And no resuscitation ever. If quality of life goes, then it is time to die. I can cope with a lowered physical activity, but if the old mental element goes then it is time to leave the stage (exit, chased by a bear).

It took a while, but finally we are going for our first holiday of the year today – 2nd January. We are off to North Yorkshire, to one of our favourite country house hotels. It has good food, so I hope I can eat it, it is comfortable, and the staff are friendly. The only problem, and it seems to be a problem with many hotels, is that the lighting is not good enough to read by. There is a very nice lounge, with lots of settees and chairs, and even reading material, but wherever you sit it is too dark. These hotels assume their guests are not readers. I comment, but nothing changes. I suppose we are meant to be staring at screens. I will take my book light. It might look odd in a public space but I will not only be able to read, I will be making a point. The new year protests begin. Some might worry about Palestine, I need to read.

But what to read? I am in the middle of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and a strange kindle book about the Earth’s rotation speeding up. I probably won’t finish the latter. Instead I am starting The House by the Lake, by Thomas Harding,, which is unsurprisingly about a house that is by a lake. It is in Berlin and it is the story of the five families who lived there through the 20th Century. Apparently a few interesting things happened in Berlin during that period so it should be good.

I am persisting in writing. I have drafted a siege of Wingfield Manor article that will be submitted next week, and also a draft about the Battle of Sedan (1870), drawing on Zola’s La Debacle as the key historical (literary) source. The more I read history the more I think of it as historical literature without the fictional characters. Go back any distance in time and the evidence relating to events and people is often limited, yet historians still manage to extract a book from these few sources. I thought I would write an article that is explicitly trying to understand an event (the battle) from the perspective of literature (Zola’s novel). OK, I did a chapter on it in one of my books (Landscapes of Trauma), so it wasn’t difficult to draft. It was just a matter of turning around 12,000 words into about 2,500 words. I always seem to spend more writing time trying to lose words instead of gaining them. Writing is easy, revising and editing can be hell.

I am increasingly reverting to paper and pen for revising and editing. It is perhaps my age and upbringing, but it is much easier to edit with a pen in my hand – a proper pen, not one of these touch screen jobbies. My practice now is to draft, print, scribble on printout, and redraft. I am doing something similar with the MA thesis. I have written too much about parts of it, and will need to do serious editing. Instead of an MA, perhaps I should have gone straight for the PhD, which has many more words. The only problem is that it would take too long. I suspect that if I was not lll I might do a history PhD. Why not? I am not sure about the topic though.There are too many topics running around my head.

Anyway, it is holiday time, and I won’t be writing. I will be revising and editing, and I will be reading, because I am not much use for walking in the hills any more.

A new experience for me this evening. Tinnitus. I have discovered that this is yet another side effect of chemotherapy. I heard this low ringing in my ears, a low, constant buzz. I was trying to get to sleep and it disturbed me a little. It has gone away now but for how long? The side effects are building up, and hitting at different times. It is pretty shit really, and again it helps me understand why people give up on chemotherapy even though it is keeping them alive. But not yet. My blood results were pretty good yesterday, just high on white blood count, suggesting infection – there is always infection. I am no good at keeping away from all you sick people – so there should be no problem receiving chemotherapy next week,round 4 of the new regime, round 47 overall. This treatment is the more serious and hurty regime.

Happy New Year!