Before the hurricane

This post picks up where Dear steel city followers left off. I publish with Jackie’s blessing conditional on my sticking to the facts and my own inner states rather than hers …

On Monday we met with a doctor and nurse in the Northern General’s oncology team. New scans confirm what we’d suspected: primary cancer in the lungs has spread. As well as brain,  throat and spine, it’s in the liver and lymph nodes. Treatment will be palliative not curative.

It’s too early for answers on How Long. They want further data via a second MRI scan yesterday at Sheffield’s Weston Park Cancer Centre, and a biopsy this afternoon at the Northern General. Regardless of what these show, Jackie is to begin chemotherapy shortly: three rounds with a week off between each. Much hangs on how she responds and, indeed, on whether she’s able to stay the course.

She is currently well, all things considered: physically in good form while steroids have tamed the headaches, her worst symptom. She tires easy and needs to sleep at least once in the day but otherwise you wouldn’t know anything is amiss. She can and does cook, iron, water the garden and take short walks with Tebay and me.

This won’t last.

Mentally she’s incredible: her usual practical self. Much of our daily focus is on the banalities of existence, though yesterday she used a phrase – “when I’m gone” – I’ll likely be hearing more of. The context was ensuring I don’t lose access to our joint bank account though other things, notably care of lakeland terrier Tebay – a mummy’s boy if ever there was one – come with the same genuinely, i.e. unfeigned and unforced, matter of factitude.

Taken yesterday in Weston Park while Jackie was having her scan

Her down to earthness helps focus me, and God knows I need it. She’ll rely on me for practical help, increasingly as her illness progresses, though our situation is better than that of many in the UK, never mind by global standards. We’re middle class so have privileged access – Pierre Bordieu’s social capital – to the medical trade. That includes two doctor friends of my daughter Annie – a very bright GP plus, as luck would have it, a cancer specialist at Weston Park. For her part a cousin of Jackie’s daughters, Charis and Rhianna, is an oncological nurse. All have been unstinting with inside track information, advice and procedural explanation.

Above all, we have between us four very smart and switched on daughters who’ve risen to the challenge amazingly. They’ve formed a WhatsApp group, ‘The Sisters’, with Annie and Rhianna taking the lead on keeping tabs on appointments and assorted next steps, while Rhianna the qualified solicitor turns Annie’s inside info, supplemented by her own innate astuteness, into questions she puts with polite firmness to medics and secretarial staff.

The current period feels like the lull before the hurricane. After the bombshell and subsequent poignance of two weeks ago, followed immediately by the beauty and sorrow of WOMAD, our days are marked by banality – drat, the Internet is down just as we’ve been glued to the settee by Slow Horses on Apple! – with moments of deep acceptance of an unremarkable truth: that our stay on this earth is but an eye’s blink. I try to keep my tears to myself. Self pity is not much use to Jackie nor, insofar as I can separate the two, is my grief at the wonderful gran she’d have been (she’s stellar with Annie’s Louis) and all the other things – like finishing our new garden, and flying with sister, nephew and daughter to Budapest and Vienna – she’d wanted to do.

We hold hands and kiss more.

Me, I’m discombobulated. The physical exertions of WOMAD and distance driving aren’t what the doctor – literally – ordered, as she gave me to understand on my release in early June that full recovery from pneumonia can take up to a year. I tire the way I did in those first weeks out of hospital: sleep deep, yet nod off an hour after waking. My habitual absent mindedness is more acute. I make silly mistakes, though I drive OK if we set aside my frequent navigational errors. I suspect the setback to my own recovery from unavoidably greater physical activity than is ideal is exacerbated by stress; that fatigue, a recurring sense of disconnect and lapses of focus reflect my body’s response to shock being ahead of my mind’s capacity to take it in.

At another level I’m calm. That too may be shock. Uppermost in my thoughts is the imperative of taking care of myself for her sake.

Right now the demands are easily managed, given the loving support at hand, but as they step up in frequency and intensity this will change. I’m blessed by true friends.

With love,

Phil

PS my earlier post, Dear steel city followers, generated many kind responses for which I am deeply grateful. I read every one even if I haven’t been able to reply to them all.