Yesterday I had a hospital appointment. Nothing unusual there. I quite often have a hospital appointment.
Over the last five years I’ve spent a lot of time making the most of our healthcare system. Operations, chemotherapy, pulmonary embolisms, sepsis, scans, blood tests and port flushes. Cancer and frequent cancer scares mean that I’m a regular visitor whether I like it or not. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
This time I was in for a port flush and blood tests. I’ve managed to push my blood tests and I now haven’t had one for approximately six months. At one time I was having them every eight weeks and it felt like I was just living my life between appointments, my whole future hanging on whether the cancer markers had gone up or down. My mood dictated by an upward or downward trend of numbers.
I wasn’t looking forward to the blood test or the port flush. For days beforehand I’d been trying to ignore the stirring of unease.
The days have felt depressingly monochrome with Spring nowhere in sight, but yesterday the grey sludgy weather had been replaced by a bright blue sky. It was still unseasonably cold, but on my drive into town it was glorious to see sunshine and the hedgerows bursting with flowers.
Still the unease simmered. Feeling sick I managed to find a parking space in record time. Like the weather, I took this as a good omen. I’d already spent the drive in saluting every magpie, and as I navigated the pavements in town, I carefully avoided stepping on any drains.
I know it makes no sense, but these strange superstitions help me create the illusion that I do have some sort of control over what happens next. The reality is that it’s all down to luck. The idea that my luck might run out one day very soon is petrifying. Therefore, hopping over drains and waving at magpies is my way of trying to manhandle the fear.
I’m refusing to let fear sit down with me, there is no room for it at my table.
I headed to the bookshop. Its hushed interior welcoming me. Rows and rows of hardback books with their glossy jackets, silently lined up, tempting me. Then I saw it – the new novel by David Nicholls. Its cover eye-catching. There weren’t many left. Perhaps a Nicholls’ fan club had been in earlier on a rampage, ransacking the table.
However, there was one limited edition copy left and I excitedly picked it up to see what was different about this copy. The book was pleasing to hold. I don’t what to give away the plot, but it features a long walk. That’s all I’ll say. Anyway, on the cover were contours that snaked their way around the front and back of the book. You know, like the ones you find on ordnance survey maps and like a map you can’t help but trace your fingers over the lines. It’s an incredibly tactile book. Once you pick it up, you can’t put it back down. Well, that’s how I later explained the purchase to my husband.
I clutched the book to me and a young shop assistant enquired whether I had read ‘One Day.’ Have I read it?! Who hasn’t read that glorious novel? I didn’t tell her that I had read ‘One Day’ in a week over 14 years ago, when heavily pregnant with my oldest.
I didn’t tell her how I remember balancing the book on my swollen belly as I struggled to get comfortable on our sofa. How at first it had been a hot summer, that later turned to rain when Oldest was born. I didn’t tell her of that muggy July worrying about money and responsibility, or how I’d read with the front door open of our two up, two down terrace. I didn’t share how the light poured in as I turned the pages, dust dancing in shards of sunshine. I didn’t tell her how there’d been no welcome breeze so it did nothing to cool the stifling heat. Sweat trickling down my back as I escaped into the world of Emma and Dex. Instead, I just nodded and remembered.
In between reading I spent the weeks before Oldest’s imminent arrival, gardening. Bending over, on my hands and knees in the mud and lifting up heavy flagstones was not my most sensible move. There was a weed that populated the garden. Not quite knotweed, (it might have been horsetail) but it blighted our borders with the same ferocity you would expect from knotweed. I would think that I’d removed the weed and then the next morning I would look out and it would be back, everywhere.
The constant weeding and reading of ‘One Day’ distracted me from the worries of childbirth. I, however, still have not forgiven David Nicholls for the ending. Back then I was furious with him and I remember throwing the book down in a rage before sobbing. Let’s blame pregnancy hormones. Now I understand why the novel has to end the way it does.
Perhaps this acceptance of how ‘One Day’ ends is down to life experience. It’s now still a novel I come back to again and again. I also adore Us. But again I’m not a massive fan of the ending. I’m hoping ‘You Are Here’ might finally give me the traditional happy ending I not so secretly crave.
The hospital appointment went as expected. I never like going back onto the chemo ward. I feel like I’m almost tempting fate by being back there. I don’t know why. It’s not like I dropped cancer off there last time and it’s in the lost and found waiting for me to pick it back up again.
The oncology ward is not a scary place to be, but it’s a reminder of our fragility. As soon as I sit in the chair I can feel my veins recoiling, the sting of the chemo going in, the bitter taste of the drugs. Our brains are powerful and it’s amazing the physical reaction the body can have to such memories.
The blood tests are done. I’m still waiting for the date of my operation to have the biopsy, but now I have the perfect distraction in the shape of David Nicholls latest novel. I’ve already started reading ‘You Are Here’ and already I’m obsessed. I’m going to have to ration it as I don’t want it to end too soon.