I have not written for a few days.
Things have been bad.
In an effort to rectify them, I am attempting to get a handle on my emotions. I am doing this through a combination of medicine and the practical resolution of whatever issues I am able to fix by myself.
In the last four weeks the following things have happened, and I am fairly certain not all of them are good:
- Panic attacks in shops
- Shouting at my mum, who is lovely, and doesn’t deserve it
- Guilt about shouting at my mum
- Occasionally obsessing with the idea of making strategic surgical incisions on various parts of my body in order to ‘bleed’ the cancer out. Clearly this is a far more effective treatment than chemotherapy, and I have no idea why they abandoned it in Victorian times
- Overwhelming guilt at having defective cells that have not reproduced properly and have put everyone I love through this
- Being angry at people in the queue in front of me for being there
- Occasional high optimism about the future
- A recurring paranoia that the breast tumour was the secondary cancer and I. Am. Going. To. Die
- Panic attacks about dying from cancer directly following the above
- Occasionally obsessing over how to most effectively crash a car without injuring other people
- Being angry with other people in cars
- Occasionally obsessing over how to crash a car and just take out that wanker in front
- Exciting new creative ideas at 3am
- Shouting at a cashier in Asda
- A recurring paranoia that Nate is watching everything I do on the internet with spyware he has secretly installed on my laptop and/or the webcam
- Occasional terror that I am going to leave my children without their mother
- A black demon just behind my left shoulder that I can see really clearly out of the corner of my eye and which scares the living shit out of me, but that disappears when I turn round. The other day it was underneath me in the bath when I was lying underwater and that freaked me right out
- Crushing guilt about letting my second year students down during the January exams
- Bizarre thoughts about whether I believe in – and can actually see – a universal energy that are more disturbing than the cancer itself
- An unusually strong protective and nurturing instinct for my children
- Being angry at the cat/being in love with the cat
- Being angry at Nate/being in love with Nate
- And worst of all, physically attacking Nate when I was angry at him
Like I say, not all of these are good. In fact, probably only the creative ideas are good, and they might turn out not to be anyway, but if they occur along side the overzealous optimism for the future, I believe they are good at the time.
Another thing that is making me really angry at the moment is telling people any of the above has happened and them saying ‘it’s because you’ve got cancer’. No. It. Fucking. Isn’t. Cancer doesn’t excuse anything, especially attacking Nate. But that event did make me realise that when he’s been saying to me for the last few weeks that I’m being really short with him, he’s not actually being a prick and having a go at me, he was right. I have been.
I was aware over the past few weeks that a lot of my thoughts were not that healthy, but I honestly thought I’d get the all clear from surgery last Thursday, have a splash of radio here and there for a few weeks, get back to work and get my thoughts back in marching order. We were going to Primavera Sound in Barcalona in May if Nate’s redundancy money came through in time, I was looking forward to seeing The Postal Service. I was beginning to feel optimism for the future, a baby, and relief that I had come through cancer with nothing more than a few off-colour thoughts, snappiness that Nate would have probably forgiven, and a few days of taking myself off on my own to watch Breaking Bad whenever my head was bad and breaking.
But what I have now realised was that I was only really holding on tentatively, and that my grip was dependent on scenarios I had created that I have no control over. Now that I have lost control, both literally and metaphorically, I… what? What do I do?
I’m fairly sure Nate would say, ‘Man the fuck up and make me a sandwich’. Which is, in essence, all I can do at this point. I am not going to lay down and die. Yes I am utterly fucked off that I need to have chemo. Yes I am ashamed and appalled that I attacked someone I love. (I do not excuse that in any way, and certainly not with ‘cancer’.) I can only do the metaphorical sandwich things in order to gain some sense of control; make sure work is sorted, speak to a counsellor, organise finances, attend hospital appointments, ask the right questions, sort out IVF, get as healthy as possible before chemo, take the tablets every day, find the money for the electricity bill, read the pile of cancer leaflets and find out as much as I can without freaking out about how many times the word ‘cancer’ is repeated on one page, look at the Bestival line up, and make sure I have kicked this shit to touch by September… Because as well as still being here for my children and giving them a new brother or sister, if anything else is motivation, it has to be seeing Elton John sing Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting live in a field on a Saturday night and trying to film Jam dancing to it.