Ippi Ever After
by
Martin McMahon
Copyright 2012 Martin McMahon,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0965-8
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Names have been changed.
This story is dedicated to two beautiful girls. You’ve got the love.
Dad.
Chapter One
Crazy Mad, Crazy Bad
I don’t ever remember a time when there wasn’t some sort of pet in my childhood home and often more than one. We had cats, dogs, budgies, fish, even a crazy rabbit who liked to nip at visitors ankles. We also had unintentional pets, strays or injured animals that might or might not stay or even survive. The back garden always had a few little graves where we buried the ones that died. We had more cats over the years than anything else. A handful were killed on the road and some by natural causes. The first time I encountered cancer close up was in a cat. Kitsy was her name, not very original I know, but she was a stray that turned up at the front door one wet and windy night, so we didn’t know if she was staying. Kitsy was an interim name that stuck. She was probably an unwanted pet that some one left on the doorstep intentionally. We were known as a house that took strays and she wasn’t the first or last to find her way to us. Some one of us heard her crying outside and took her in. She was jet black with a small white patch on the front of her neck. She was small enough to fit comfortably in one open hand, maybe six or seven weeks old. She was a born survivor. She out lasted every other cat we ever had because she was quick to learn. She stayed away from the road and ingratiated herself with the five of us kids and mam and dad. She was with us for at least a decade. Then she had difficulty eating. Initially the vet thought it was a tooth problem but it only got worse. I took care of her when she couldn’t eat. I spoon fed her through her teeth because her jaw wouldn’t open and cleaned her face with a j cloth afterwards . No self respecting cat would let you do such a thing so we knew there was something more to the problem. Dad and I took her to the Royal Veterinary Hospital where they anesthetized her and did an x-ray. The vet there told us she had cancer in her jaw and that the humane thing to do was not wake her up. I was very attached to that cat, we all were, she was part of the family. The vet made sure she didn’t wake up and we went home. I’m not embarrassed to say I cried on the way.
Its half past midnight, another day has begun. Chemotherapy sits on the kitchen counter top, two steps away. All day it calls to me, ‘little pig, little pig, let me in’. I don’t want to, but I will, soon. I have to.
I read the text again ‘u don’t deserve any good luck in your life’. A year earlier that text would have floored me, reduced me to a quivering mess, but not now. ‘What I deserve’ has nothing to do with it. Bad things happen to good people all the time, and it’s not that I consider myself to be some shining beacon of virtue, I’m not, but the point is, what I deserve has damn all to do with it. Children deserve to have loving parents, that’s as far as deserving goes for me, everything else has to be earned. Death comes calling to everybody, you can’t deserve your way out of it.
I shifted in the seat. The 737 was an hour out from Dublin, I was on the holiday come down, work tomorrow morning, same old same old. Again I shifted in the seat, god damn but that mole on my ass was itchy. I must get it checked out I told myself and then I didn’t think about it again for six months. Work and family took over. In the normal course of events, I wouldn’t see the doctor until something went wrong. Six months or more could pass where I would never see the Doc for myself. I could and was there with one or other of the kids numerous times, but unless I pulled a muscle or something similar, I didn’t feel the need to see the Doctor, certainly not for an itch that lasted the duration of one flight from Malaga to Dublin.
I don’t remember the primary reason I went to see the Doc, it was probably a pulled muscle but while I was there I asked him to take a look at the mole on my ass. It was embarrassing sure, but the GP is about the same age as me, has young children like me, I felt a bit stupid asking him but not so much that I couldn’t ask him. I dropped my jeans and turned around. As he looked at the mole, he asked questions.
“How long is it there?”
“As long as I can remember”
“Was it always the same shape?”
“I think so”
The Doc gestured for me to pull up my jeans. I did and sat again beside his desk.
“I don’t think it’s a problem” he told me “but we should get it whipped off”
“Ok” I agreed.
I had no sense of anything but normal. Fifteen years earlier I had a mole removed from my chest. Exact same scenario. I’d shown it to the doc, he arranged for it to be removed. It was then biopsy and all no problem, very routine.
“Public or Private?” he asked.
“Private”.
An appointment with the Dermatologist arrived two days later and within a week I was sitting in front of him. He took a brief family history. No immediate history of cancer, generally long lived and healthy people. He got me to strip down and he examined me from head to toe for moles paying particular attention to the one on my ass. I’ve got Irish Skin, pale, freckles easily, burns easier still and I’ve got lots of moles, not unnaturally so but still, I’ve just counted them on one arm and there’s eleven.
“I don’t think it’s a problem, but we should take it off”.
A week later it was gone. A week after that I took the one or two stitches out myself and much like before I didn’t think about it again for two weeks, except once.
Mary and I were having problems. Well, in truth, one problem, the same problem for the millionth time. Mary screamed, Mary screamed a lot. It was nothing new, but it was getting worse, again. Harder than the actual screaming was the anticipation of the rage. I’d know it was coming for days before it hit. It was a cyclical thing. Many times I had asked for her to stop but she never did. In the beginning I’d made allowances, she told me her dad was struggling with cancer; I would have been devastated if it was my dad, so I accepted the excuse she made. It had been a whirlwind romance, there was a bit of the damsel in a tight dress and the knight in shining hair gel going on, there were two of us in it. Mary moved into my Rathmines flat within a week of meeting me. At the time she told me that she was getting a hard time from her mother. I offered that she could stay with me for a while and that was that. Two months later she wanted to have a baby. I was head over heels about her. We were getting on together really well. I thought we had more than enough love to include a baby. Maybe it should have frightened me off but it didn’t. Neither of us were teenagers, consenting adults and all that. I’d have done anything for her. Weeks later she
