out of me, now I just wanted to be better. The waiting room was as hot, crowded and uncomfortable as a cattle truck. Interferon was an outside chance but it was better than no chance at all. He explained the limited if any effects of interferon. I already knew, with the advent of google there are no mysteries. He told me that some oncologists don’t use it at all. I was sure that I didn’t want that kind of oncologist, I wanted someone who would throw everything, including the kitchen sink, at it. I believe that’s a reasonable expectation not just for me but for everyone with cancer. I gave up with him. An open wound meant no Interferon. I found it hard to accept that nothing could be done to make interferon possible. I left the clinic and decided to call the only person I thought could do something, the surgeon. He agreed to see me the following day.
Twelve days left.
Back in his waiting room, soft chairs, fifteen minute wait and all for one hundred and fifty bucks.
“I can close it with a skin graft” he was talking more to himself than me “you’ll need a vacuum pump, but you don’t have to worry about that”.
Forty eight hours later I was admitted for a day surgery. Recovery would mean that there was no going home that night, but once the surgery was done, they’d have no choice but to find me a bed. I was prepped and ready to go. Wheeled once again into the anaesthetist’s room I thought I knew what was to come and then the shock. I wasn’t going to have a general aesthetic. It was too risky considering the blood clot. I had to sit on the edge of the trolley.
“Stay perfectly still or you could be paralysed” the anaesthetist told me.
It was the wrong thing to say to me at the worst possible time. I immediately began shaking like a leaf. An injection was pushed into my spine in the small of my back. I had just enough time to lie back on the trolley before my legs went dead. I was wheeled into the operating room where everyone else was gowned, gloved and masked. I started shivering, I was so cold. My teeth were chattering. Someone wrapped my torso in a survival type blanket with a blow heater attached. I was light headed, confused. The same someone then injected something into the line in my arm. Instant headache, then not much else. I wasn’t unconscious but neither was I conscious. The job was done in my mental absence.
When it was over I was brought back to the day surgery ward. Skin grafts are an amazing thing. Skin was taken from my left thigh and spread out over the open wound in my left groin. A vacuum pump, a portable one, was placed over the graft to hold it in place and the whole lot was bandaged up airtight. I’d been warned that the area where the skin graft was taken from would be painful but it wasn’t. The nerve damage in the area was so extensive that I felt nothing. I couldn’t believe how quickly the area healed. Now there is only the faintest pink outline to show that a graft had ever been taken. The open wound was sealed. It was still a big hole, but a skin covered big hole, the risk of infection drastically reduced. Two days later I was home. The portable pump is about eighteen inches high and the same in width. I carried it like a satchel for five days.
The noise of the pump irritated Mary. She didn’t want to be around it or so she told me, the real truth was that she didn’t want to be around me, sick and vulnerable. Her body language was her only real communication. She kept her back turned to me almost all the time and that was only if she found herself in the same room. Most of the time she made damn sure she wasn’t. On the fifth day the pump was removed. It only took two minutes. I was ready for interferon, no excuses, no obstacles. Four days to deadline.
Oncology agreed to start me on interferon. It had to be ordered in by my chemist. It’s tricky stuff, it has a short shelf life and has to be kept refrigerated. The other thing is the cost, some where around twenty grand. The course of treatment lasts for a year, but only if the side effects don’t get you first. I was determined to finish the course, I’d come this far, I could take any side effects, and I did, but I still didn’t last the full year.
For the first month on interferon I went into Beaumont day oncology three days a week. The day oncology unit has seen a major revamp recently. Now it’s spacious, bright, almost plush with individual cubicles. Two years ago, it wasn’t. Back then, it was suffocating, patients sat side by side in old easy boy chairs with chemotherapy drips back to back dispensing poison from early morning until late evening. It was high density cancer care. The waiting room was always full, everyone waiting for a reclining chair to be freed up. The nursing staff did all they could to make it comfortable but it was an impossible hill to climb. It was a soul destroying place, no privacy, no dignity, it didn’t exactly inspire hope. I didn’t want Mary to see the place or me getting interferon. I worried that she’d find it too difficult. It never arose though because Mary never gave any indication that she wanted to go.
The first day I was in early, around ten. A blood sample was taken and I waited until the results came back. Then I waited until a recliner chair was free. The nurses were great, they kept a conveyer belt of cancer patients moving through the tiny room. It took some where around an hour and a half for the interferon bag to empty through a tube into my arm. Once it was over, a saline bag was hooked up which took forty five minutes to empty.
My dad dropped me in every morning and then collected me when I called him to tell him I was finished. I had looked up the side effects for interferon on the internet. There were tons but the most common were flu like symptoms, fatigue and loss of apatite. Early on one of the nurses warned me about the fatigue, she was spot on.
The first day I felt ok until I was on my way home. I began to shiver, my teeth chattered. Dad turned up the heat in the car. When I got into the house I was tired and cold. I lay down on the couch and the shivering started again. It took blankets and duvets before I heated up. Later on I was ok, sort of back to normal, except for food. From the very start the smell of food changed for me. It wasn’t enticing, instead it was mildly nauseating. My mouth tasted of metal when I thought of food. Apart from that I was doing ok. I was still limping and some days I needed a crutch. The fatigue on the other hand was progressive, as the weeks went by I grew more and more tired. I wasn’t helpless, far from it. I still minded the kids, made lunch and did a little house work.
Iris was there every time I looked around. Iris was Mary’s mother. Small, lean and wound tighter than thread on a spool. She is the only true misandrist I ever came across. I didn’t like her, but in fourteen years I’d never said a bad word to her. She was Mary’s mother, Mary’s problem not mine. She was too austere and superstitiously religious for my taste.
I left home when I was nineteen. Lots of the lads I grew up with did the same. There was no work in Ireland, emigration was our only option. I went to London and lived there for a while. Apart from the odd stop over, I never lived at home again. I was fully independent, I sank or swam on my own merits. I get on well with my parents but I’m happy enough to see them for dinner maybe once a month and a couple of brief ‘how’s you’ telephone calls a week. If I want advice, I ask, but I consider myself mature enough to make my own decisions. My parents don’t interfere. They would be wasting their time.
Iris is not that type of parent. She has three adult children, Mary being the second eldest. She has something to say about every aspect of their lives from what they eat and how they dress to whom they see and how they spend their money. She is vain in the extreme and openly scolds her daughters for not being as self flagellatingly thin as she is. Her eldest daughter is her constant companion. They are practically joined at the hip. From the start Iris didn’t approve of me. She was angry that Mary had decided to have a baby without her approval and without being married. Iris is a product of a repressed Ireland, an older twisted Ireland of Magdalene laundries, industrial schools and Kerry babies. She is the twitching curtains brigade. ‘What the neighbours think’ is all important to her. If it had been twenty years earlier Iris would have locked Mary into a Magdalene prison and thrown away the key.
