I’ll be honest. Any kind of plans beyond a couple of days seem a bit strange to me now. When I first got my diagnosis there was no real time horizon that I could think of. My life was over, as simple as that. We had a couple of days before treatment started and took the decision to go to London for a weekend, which was mostly my idea as I wanted to go on the London Eye and book a nice hotel – much nicer than we would normally stay in.
But then chemo took over, and planning anything seemed impossible – Even if I’d wanted to do something significant, I didn’t feel up to it, and most weeks would have at least one appointment, so there was little chance of doing anything even if I did.
And then with the second diagnosis that the chemo wasn’t working, we were effectively cut loose from all of that. So we’ve been doing more since then. We’ve been to Tenerife (T arranged a star gazing night which was all-time-epic level of greatness in terms of things to do), Torquay (yes, really), Belgium and Ibiza.
And this now leaves me in an odd position. I’ve done more in the last few weeks than I ever would have thought possible on January 13th. And want to do more while I still can. But the flip side is that I’m definitely getting less healthy every day. I’ve had an appointment with my palliative care nurse this week, and while it was a positive one, it’s clear that I’m following a path that she has seen before, and have symptoms which she recognised and understood quickly – and prescribed medicine for when this gets worse. Which it will. This is both reassuring (as what I had been starting to feel was worrying me, but it turns out for the wrong reasons), but also I know that my life is coming to an end, and it’s happening to whatever schedule it will happen to. It’s different for everyone, in terms of the overall timescale, but it’s the same thing that she has no doubt seen many times.
So I’m sat here in a quiet house (no-one else is up yet and it’s nice to let T sleep, particularly as it reminds me of the times before I got ill) thinking about this and trying not to start the day in a bad way. But contemplating oblivion doesn’t get that much easier even if you do it a lot.
There’s another trip we’re planning to take, starting next Saturday, which will be in the camper, taking in the Lake District (which we visited many years ago), a train journey on the west coast of scotland and then seeing Summer in Newcastle, a trip to York and then back home.
And because it’s a week away, I’ll be honest, I feel scared. It seems like too much to think that I’ll be OK for two weeks. But I didn’t want to be away during half term with loads of kids on holiday.
So that’s where we’re at. I’ve also been thinking about just writing ‘thought pieces’ having discussed this with T; reason being that I have things that I would probably tell the kids at some point (or will have already said a million times but maybe they’d want to hear it again). So I need to categorise things.
I had thought of ‘The World According To’, or ‘Things I Think’, but neither initialise well, so I’ll have to come up with something else.
