“Let’s do this whole f***ing village!”

Emma Sola
Emma Sola
Sep 4, 2018 · 7 min read

Bunny, Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

Travelling light for first chemotherapy session

I am aware that many people with cancer reject the extended metaphor of treating the disease as a “battle” in which patients are valiantly fighting off an enemy invader. I haven’t explored the reasons why people feel this in detail because I’m currently choosing not to read anything cancer related for my own sanity, but my basic understanding is that if the battle is not “won” by the patient, that reflects negatively on their perceived strength of mind and of will, that they somehow did not try hard enough. As if cancer can be defeated by an individual’s own character.

My own feeling is that what I am experiencing does seem very much like a battle against a devious and vicious foe, but I am not participating actively in the war. Rather, I am the battleground.

My friend Piers put it like this. First, they are going to cut the cancer out of you. Next, they are going to deluge it with chemicals. Then they are going to burn it. And for good measure, use chemicals on it for the next 10 years. I have grown up watching films about the Vietnam war and have spent many years teaching World War I poetry, and this description of how the cancer will be treated resonates strongly with what I have internalised from those texts about the horror of warfare.

For the next four months, I am in the phase of treatment where my body is having chemicals systemically pumped in every three weeks that kill the enemy (or stop it from proliferating) but also damage the landscape. How effective it is at dealing with the enemy is the oncologists’ business. In amongst that the land needs to recover enough each time for a new assault to take place — or there will be no land to actually fight for. And that is my business.

My husband and I go to the first session of chemotherapy with three (it turns out unnecessary) bags of food, books, crosswords, cushions, and some not inconsiderable trepidation. I had already visited the unit and was cheered by its 1990s Changing Rooms style “funky” décor, all limes and fuschias and oranges and curvy shapes, but the oncologist had said to me the first cycle would be a test of how my body would respond. And ever the swot, I wanted to do well.

First test was where I might sit. My husband is constantly irritated by my inability to settle for the first table I am given in a restaurant or anywhere there is a choice of seating. I’ll always have my eyes firmly peeled for a better option and chemotherapy was no different. I tried three chairs before I was happy, eventually plumping for the one I always knew I’d have because I had sat in it on my previous visit. It was by a window, with a charming view of some sort of industrial generator or chemical plant — but crucially also, sky.

Because I hadn’t been able to get an appointment to get a PICC line installed in my arm / heart before the chemo session, I was to have a cannula today into a vein in my hand. I had to soak my hand in warm water to get a vein ready and have a heated mat on my arm to keep it big. I might remind any of my readers who have read all my stories that I am incredibly squeamish in relation to matters sanguineous and those be-unitarded dancing red and white blood cells of my youth could not have been more firmly on my mind during this whole faff. Even worse, once my nurse started literally syringing in red cancer destroying stuff into my hand, it actually HURT. It wasn’t supposed to hurt. I almost pretended it didn’t because I wanted this shit in my body so badly and I couldn’t bear the thought of any problems delaying it happening. But I knew that was ridiculous and owned up, so we had to go through the whole vein rigmarole again and find a bigger one. I might have to go and be sick.

The process was surprisingly speedy. There was barely time to read. My exuberant nurse was hand syringing the chemo into me so she was always there and wanted to talk (mainly to upbraid me for any perceived slight dips in my Positive Mental Attitude). My husband and I tried to do the Guardian quick crossword but the much vaunted chemo brain was instantaneous it would seem, and catching, because neither of us could fathom it.

After about two hours and many emptied syringes, we were free to leave, laden down with bags of medication for the next few weeks. I managed to eat a proper dinner and be reasonably sociable before descending into a state that I can only compare to a Code Red, Force 10, Critical Alert Hangover. Toxic catatonia. Abstinent readers will not be able to empathise, but I was raised in the 1970s and 80s in a family and culture awash with booze and so I understand the subtleties and nuances of hangovers intimately.

My grandparents punctuated their daily lives with alcohol. As Foreign Office diplomats who lived all over the world, it was the lubricant of their existence and it remained that way whenever they spent any time in England. There might be a pre-lunch G and T, but lunch always involved wine. G and T at 5. Wine with dinner. Whisky after dinner. Standard. They spent a few years in England when I was about 5 and lived in Shepperton in the most 70s bungalow ever imaginable, wafting about in suits and kaftans and clinking glasses just like Margot and Jerry in The Good Life, and then returned permanently in the mid 80s to that same routine. We didn’t have such routine lives in our household as Grandma and Grandpa but there was always alcohol in the evening. If my grandparents were Margot and Jerry, my parents in the late 1980s were Tom and Barbara. Our little house in Walton-on-Thames was basically an allotment with some rooms attached. In addition to the pervasive smell of brewer’s yeast, there were egg boxes with seed potatoes in on every available surface, tomatoes ripening, alfalfa sprouting on windowsills, bushels of runner beans, huge bulbs of garlic, spaghetti squashes and black horseradishes loitering with intent to disgust me and endless demijohns filled with foraged concoctions, and the resultant bottles of homemade beer and wine in every warm nook and cranny, often exploding like gunshot in the night from over effervescence. My parents were health food early adopters and we would make trips down to Brighton to go to Infinity Foods for supplies of strange food like sauerkraut and seaweed (which we ate in vegetable stews. A lot of vegetable stews.) and bags full of not yet fashionable grains. We ate healthily — more healthily than any one I knew — and everyone in my family played a lot of sport. Family holidays were more likely to include a 15 mile walk than any beach relaxation. But alcohol was a constant companion. Thus setting up a perennial inharmonious and contradictory state of being in my life — an imbalance of health and the pursuit of physical well being on the one hand, and on the other, alcoholic hedonistic excess. Of course I am not alone in this. Everyone I grew up with drank to excess and continues to do so in varying degrees now. Culturally, it is very much an issue of mine and my parents’ generations. In every walk and significant moment of my life it has been there, except during my pregnancy and breastfeeding. It has quite possibly contributed to my breast cancer. I might never know.

I haven’t drunk any alcohol now since June and I may never drink again. But I remember the hangovers that feel like your soul has been scraped out and all that is left is vulnerable flesh and a mental search for vital signs, with a side salad of existential dread. A flatness. A greyness. A fear at a cellular level. Street sadness, Martin Amis called it. I wouldn’t have been capable of walking outside on this first night after chemotherapy, but had I, all I would have seen would have been the Benson and Hedges cigarette butts amassing in gutters, the forlorn litter, the pathetic attempts at graffiti, perhaps a visceral used nappy or condom. The seagull’s screech in the poisoned sky would be from Mordor and every other human encountered would be either seem close to death or murder. The snarled, wizened, distorted and facially tattooed would congregate nearby; my brethren.

I took myself up to bed but the malaise was so potent, I couldn’t bear to be alone and my boys had to protect me. I knew I wouldn’t sleep yet. I didn’t quite dare to release my vigilance of my body and descend into the healing waters of sleep so remained in a kind of poisoned stasis for two hours while they watched Hellboy 2 next to me. At about 10 we packed our boy reluctantly off to his own bed and in the quiet and softness I lowered my guard and slept.

And slept for the first time in over a week all the way through to 6 am. Oh sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care…you were most welcome that night and I felt, on waking, if not refreshed, blessed and nourished. The days that followed required a daily re-evaluation of my physical and mental state, often as awful as the first night. But at least on that first morning, my body the battlefield showed some small, green tendrils of recovery and of withstanding the violence enacted upon it which gives me some hope for the next time hostilities break out.

Emma Sola

Written by

I am 44 and have just been diagnosed with breast cancer. This is my attempt to make sense of it all. I know I am a bit liberal with the capital letters. Sorry.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade