not waving drowning.....

Yesterday I began to cry and I couldn't stop. It has been a while since one of those cries. Those guttural and animalistic cries that comes from the bottom of the sadness. The cry appeared at one of those unexpected times, at the kitchen sink whist doing dishes. I had kept the lid on the sadness for a long time it had not broken by needles, vomit, nausea, insomnia or hot flushes but strangely it couldn't make it through the domestic chore of dishes. I had been suppressing any urge to realise that although I was making it through this bizarre journey with a large amount of ease and at times confidence it is also true that it's so dam heavy.

When you merge all of the colors in your life it becomes black, this blackness is what I distance myself from, but sometimes it just eclipses the light.

My present insomnia is painting my days in a thick non -lucid cloud and I am finding it challenging to remain so muddled in my daily activities. From so much action to a state of inaction, a challenge in itself. My body is also feeling the constraints of being a lot more stagnant and languid. It longs for the fast paced life of an acrobat, a taught and constantly fluid state of being.

Insomnia is a bitch! Last night I went to Barney and Lou's and was dosed up on sleep tincture and Valerian tea to try and assist my passage into sleep. I awoke at three and did the routinel removal of bedding to ease a hot flush. But then surprisingly I found sleep again and we enjoyed each others company till dawn.

At dawn I woke and remembered that the boy who a year ago broke my heart and allowed a stampede of buffaloes to run over it left the country for seven months. Sometimes I wish it was seven days, others I wish it was seven years.

"The fall from you is such a long way down" (Beirut lyric)

Hearts are a slow mending organ, possible symptoms include eternal scarring, emotional baggage, spontaneous tears, fits of anger and a glimmer of regret, please see your doctor if you haven't began to heal in 3-5 years.....

Pets and paradise

Last fortnights chemo # 5 was fucked.

Chemo was long, hurtful, boring, nauseating, confusing and ultimately left me with a burnt vein and a state of delirium. My body has begun to realise that chemo is not its friend. It is slowly rejecting the poison traveling through its transport system. The veins are for blood vessels full of oxygen and white blood cells, vitamins and life, no place for the thick acidic poison that burns the sides and scrapes the bottom. My veins raise to the surface in protestation and chemo must be halted, saline is then flushed through the veins as some kind of compensation to keep them quiet for a few more IV bags. Then it happens again, this time pain accompanies the visible presence of the inflamed veins, heat packs are placed strategically to try and once again cox the veins into submission, lull them into a false sense of acceptability.

The pert blonde intern came up to me during this slow and torturous process.

"I can go find out your PET results Joh if you would like"
"ummm sure"

The Pet scan is the ultimate scan for cancer patients it is the big entrance exam into a new staging or ultimately diagnosis of cancer. The "Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan is a nuclear medicine imaging technique which produces a three-dimensional image or map of functional processes in the body." Thankyou wikipedia. In other terms it highlights every cancerous cell in the body.

I had gone for my scan the week before with Steph. Appointment was at 8am. Once again I had radioactive sugars dripped into my 'not as sore' arm and got to watch the first half of another dreary American comedy. The scan is much less intrusive then an MRI or a CT scan involving the dye's.

The blonde intern returned and just spat it out
'There is no signs of cancer in your body'
'really?' I managed a look of increased excitement through my crippling chemo experience
'the PET scan is completely clear' she stumbled in delivery as her smile was in the way of the words. It must be such a relief disclosing this news to cancer patients in comparison to the hundreds of times you must utter the word 'there has been no change' or 'the cancer has now spread to other organs' or 'it seems that cancer is terminal, you have three weeks to live'.

With this news I felt invincible, strong, empowered, in control and felt the duality of holding a degree of gratitude to the same poison that was making me feel so dam lousy.

A few days later Stew and myself were once again waiting in the cancer clinic to talk to Dr. George about the PET results. Kerry Ann was on the TV and the clinic was bursting at the seems with patients and their cancers.

Anup congratulated me on the news of the cancer and then launched into the fact that this didn't mean I didn't have to complete my full cycle of chemo. He reckoned I would have 5 more chemo's and a possible course of radiation therapy. The previous PET result buzz began to dissipate. 5 more chemos.........fuck.......radiation therapy.........fuck

I left feeling disheartened and ultimately pissed off. If the scan was clear could we not just pop a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne at grandma's and enjoy the floral arrangements from the extended family and a celebratory toast to being cancer free and get on with living. Chemo was an insurance policy to reduce the chance of 'relapse'. There is still a chance there is microscopic cancer cells that are more resilient to the chemo, if left untreated they will rapidly reproduce, recolonise and led me back to the dance with cancer.

5 to go and count down.........

Toxic....

So tomorrow is the first performance of the Britney Spears cover band that I am in named Toxic. We have had only three and half rehearsals but feel almost as ready as Britney did for the MTV music awards last year, when she forgot the song and stumbled around rebounding off back up dancers and looking obscenely confused. So armed with a blonde 'party tina' wig from the celebrity wig store and an outrageously obscene plunging gold leotard I am to take the stage for the first time since myself and chemo were holding hands. Besides the constant 'bung arm' that I have held since the last chemo I am feeling relatively fresh and full of beans. So it is with an air of excitement that I will play with two lovely ladies the fantastically and musically gifted repertoire of miss Britney spears. I must say that although I haven't played the drum kit for over ten years for longer than a minute, it is the old riding bike scenario and a lot of the co-ordination is slowly seeping back into my limbs.

So this weekend is a lament to popular culture

these particular britney lyrics I feel a very close connection to due to my present dance with the chemo devil. ..........possibly not the part about being addicted.....that would be totally fucked up

with a taste of you lips
I'm on a ride
You're toxic I'm slipping under
with a taste of a poison paradise
I'm addicted to you don't you know that your toxic
and I love what you do don't you know that your toxic

pills

I am sitting in our lounge room while Archie Roach Croons on the cd player. It is saturday night and I had planned to embrace the cold, the possible awkward conversations and alot of pissed people to go to a friends party in North Carlton. I used to be so comfortable wrapped in the arms of a large party, flitting between groups of people or possessing the dance floor. I now sit watching the clock unsure as to the state of my nausea and whether I am feeling confident and comfortable in my own skin to feel those same arms around me.

Last night I had the heart racing sensation that I seem to get after chemo for a few days. It is like a constant sense of panic in the heart and a tightening of the chest. It leads to extended periods of not sleeping, nor really having the clarity to read or watch a dvd. This is accompanied with the ongoing tussle I have with night hot flushes and shivers. Hot flushes invariable lead to the dramatic removal of all of my bedclothes and sometimes my clothes in a fevered rush like a horny teenager, to then be absolutely freezing and intently grappling for the bedclothes, as I do sleep.

I awoke and my lover who said he would come over last night around 11am was standing at my window, it was 8am. His eyes revealed a night of debauchery, drug taking and possible hooliganism. It was at this point unwrapping my body from my comfort blanket and spewing the contents of my bed including my thermometer, empty antibiotic wrappings and the discharge of clothing that I saw the absolute disparity between our realities. We ate porridge and in his MDM haze he giggled and reflected on the downers he would pop and possible home tattoo jobs that might be born from this mental liberty. I sipped my green tea, pulled my dark green woolly jumper tightly over my hips and got into my car to make a trip to the naturopath.

The naturopath commended me on my hair (yes it is still persisting against all odds) and the color in my cheeks that now eclipse the ashen color of the last couple of days. He thinks I am doing really well, and have a lot less symptoms then a)possible or b)expected. To this I felt some sense of achievement. Fuck yeah, I have been coating my wheat free breakfasts in rice bran and LSA, I have been concocting cocktails of vegetables in the juicer to 'enliven' my digestive tract and support my spleen. I have been popping pills to protect and nourish my lungs, suppress my urge to purge and generally nurture the very much wounded immune system that is taking a bashing for the team.

So ultimately I feel a great sense of pride in my slightly thinning but still present hair, my pink cheeks and the ability to still partake in the majority of activities I aspire to.

Four treatments down, a few track marks and a lingering sour taste of chemicals in my mouth. If this is all your gonna throw at me, we're laughing.

now maybe I should go attend this party......is it too cold for short shorts?

Party people

A photo from a mask stall in San Cristobel De La Casas in the mountains of Mexico.

This fortnight has been one of celebrations as two of my best friends, Zak and Steph had their birthdays. For Zak's we went down to my parents holiday house and enjoyed a candlelit meal of exquisite Eggplant Masala, salmon and a ominous looking dark chocolate and raspberry wheat free birthday cake. The irony being that although it was wheat free and therefore Zak could technically eat it, he doesn't eat chocolate or large amounts of sugar after 2pm as the caffeine would keep him wired until dawn. So we sang and all munched down the rich birthday cake with zak licking the cream. The view of the Mornington Peninsula bay was exquisite a darkened ocean peppered with the fairy lights of neighbouring houses and distant cars.

Steph's birthday was the following week and her celebration was a house party and some food festivities. I had spent the day nursing what is now a full blown chest infection. Green slimy sputum that could easily be projected down the plug hole of the shower or spat into the garden on command. I graced her door at nine with almond croissants and a bunch of tulips, tulips being my favorite flower every since reading the engaging poem by Sylvia Plath when she was hospitalised with depression.

"The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons"

The party began and I chose to wear Steph's large Jim Beam t shirt converted into a mini dress. It was hilarious for a while, and then it was much too cold. The party was filling when I decided it was time that although for once it was my lungs not my liver filled with liquid I must escape home to the warmth and anonymity of bed. I was dragged on my way out to the dance floor, and true to form was coerced by the base and opulent volume to stay put for the next hour or so. I hadn't danced since I became sick, unless you count the random acts of spontaneous interpretive and highly dramatic dancing I perform nearly on a daily basis in the kitchen or my bedroom. It felt great to be at a party doing what people do at a party, interacting, laughing, forcing laughter and interaction with those who you find hard to engage or understand, dancing hard and rough and wrong to the dj's mixed bad and laughing at the antics of old friends in feathers and fish nets.

I rode home content that I had partied. That although I had forgone the magic mushrooms, LSD tabs and copious amounts of hard liquors circulating the party I had had a marvelous time.

I was still me, although I feel a lot of the time like Sylvia that I have given my body to the doctors and identity to the illness. I also have a simultaneous sensation of being exactly myself, in control and completely happy.