You'd have thought that Mr A, who is staying with friends during his radiotherapy regime, is the winner when it comes to Long Journeys. Mrs A, who has come down to London to keep him company, tells me that they live in Scotland. There are no zapping facilities in the far north, and going to Glasgow would have been just as troublesome.
But now Mr A has been trumped by Ms C, who has come all the way from the Middle East.
Blimey.
She has been staying in a hotel since the summer, all through her chemotherapy regime and now through radiotherapy as well. They don't have the facilities where she lives either, so her government pays for people like her to have cancer treatment thousands of miles away, in America or Britain.
We end up chatting after our respective zaps. She invites me for a cup of carrot soup in the hospital cafe. This is because we have discovered that we are both researchers unable to produce the stream of academic papers that, on the face of it, we now have the time to write, what with all this sitting about.
It's a discussion I started in the radiotherapy waiting room with Ms D, who has just started her 3-week regime. She was dreading it, because when she had radiotherapy 20 years ago she got so tired, she almost had to crawl in every day.
How about work? I ask her.
Well, yes, that was a stupid thing to do, she now thinks. She worked all the way through that earlier treatment, and not just any old work, but teaching children. It's not as if you can let your head clonk onto a desk halfway through, as I have often done during my cancer-treatment-working-days. She used to go in and teach, then catch the train to the radiotherapy department, then go back to work and teach some more.
This time, she has wisened up. "How long do you need?" her GP asked her, back in September. Until January, she thought, but he'd have none of it. "He said to me, 'you won't be going back in January' and he wrote me off sick until March. So I can recover properly. I don't want to have to go back to work at the first sign of feeling better. I want to have a couple of weeks when I feel really well, before going back."
I nod approvingly, secretly thinking that I am absolutely determined to go back to work properly next week. But then I don't have a class of children to teach all day, and I only work part-time. Plus, I've had all that glorious time to do a bit of recovering during December. But who knows what's sensible? The pressure to work, we agree, comes mostly from ourselves.
I notice Ms C listen to this discussion. (That is how chats in the tiny waiting room go. You talk to the people who you have begun to recognise. The new faces (they might not be new to the waiting room, but they are new to you) pause their reading, and perhaps join in, or just nod and smile, and lo and behold, you've got another waiting room buddy.)
Does she work?
"Yes," says Ms C with feeling. "But I can't. I just can't do it. I'm a researcher, I have papers to write, but I can't concentrate. My mind goes this way and that way. There are all these appointments and all these things going on in your mind. I cannot do any work until all this is over."
They are brief, these discussions, because before you know it, one of you is called in for your zap. So when we both emerge more or less at the same time (there is more than one machine), she invites me to join her for the soup that is part of her daily routine.
We listen to each other's stories. Our diagnoses and treatments are more or less the same, but that is where the similarities end.
I marvel, once again, at how differently patients cope with what seems to be the same situation.
Ms C remains so deeply shaken by her cancer that she doesn't even want to go back home when the treatment ends in a few weeks' time. She is terrified that the cancer hasn't all gone. Shouldn't something else be done? Something more? Shouldn't there be answers, some certainty, more tests perhaps to show that she is cancer free?
It makes me wonder at the huge amount of worrying that goes on in this world-famous cancer hospital, the accumulated fear, the loss, the distress.
You can only guess at it, looking around the waiting rooms. You see patients and relatives, some looking weak, some looking stressed, but mostly, looking fine. The seasoned ones (that's me included) chat merrily over their hot chocolate.
One young woman, sporting cycling gear and some newly sprouted hair, shook her head when a fellow patient, clearly new, expressed distress and confusion at all this waiting in different rooms.
"I've become institutionalised," she said wrily. "I just do as I'm told and don't even notice it anymore."
It was Doctor's Clinic Day, when many patients, including myself, had to see the doctor in addition to having their zap. Confusion all round about having to go and get your notes from the radiotherapists, then wait in the main reception room (the one with the fish tank), or perhaps not, perhaps they want to do your treatment first, just ask them.
I probably still have a bit of professional confidence left, which comes with a feeling of entitlement, so I marched straight through the "Authorised Access Only" doors to the radiotherapists' command room and demanded my notes, which were duly found and given. But later I discovered other patients who had been waiting and waiting in our little waiting room outside those doors, wrongly assuming that someone would know they were waiting for their notes, and only discovering their mistake when a more assertive patient accosted a passing radiotherapist with a meek "my notes please".
Ah, I could write a book. All I'd have to do is spend a day or two observing proceedings at this hospital, then have a cup of tea with one fellow patient, hot chocolate with another, carrot soup with a third, and ask for their stories. No two stories are the same.
This evening, as I sat in our homely kitchen peeling potatoes and chopping carrots and cracking eggs for the family meal, I counted my blessings yet again. I don't even want to imagine what it must be like for Ms C, spending months and months going through chemotherapy and such like, thousands of miles from her home, and not even having a kitchen to crack an egg in.
Oh, and before you ask, yes, I'm still walking. But I've given up on work this last week of my treatment.
I do need a bit of a lie-down after I get home, and by the time I'm up again, there just isn't enough time and energy left to get my head round the academic paper I ought to be writing. Like Ms C, my mind still goes this way and that way.
Next week, I promise myself.
But now Mr A has been trumped by Ms C, who has come all the way from the Middle East.
Blimey.
She has been staying in a hotel since the summer, all through her chemotherapy regime and now through radiotherapy as well. They don't have the facilities where she lives either, so her government pays for people like her to have cancer treatment thousands of miles away, in America or Britain.
We end up chatting after our respective zaps. She invites me for a cup of carrot soup in the hospital cafe. This is because we have discovered that we are both researchers unable to produce the stream of academic papers that, on the face of it, we now have the time to write, what with all this sitting about.
It's a discussion I started in the radiotherapy waiting room with Ms D, who has just started her 3-week regime. She was dreading it, because when she had radiotherapy 20 years ago she got so tired, she almost had to crawl in every day.
How about work? I ask her.
Well, yes, that was a stupid thing to do, she now thinks. She worked all the way through that earlier treatment, and not just any old work, but teaching children. It's not as if you can let your head clonk onto a desk halfway through, as I have often done during my cancer-treatment-working-days. She used to go in and teach, then catch the train to the radiotherapy department, then go back to work and teach some more.
This time, she has wisened up. "How long do you need?" her GP asked her, back in September. Until January, she thought, but he'd have none of it. "He said to me, 'you won't be going back in January' and he wrote me off sick until March. So I can recover properly. I don't want to have to go back to work at the first sign of feeling better. I want to have a couple of weeks when I feel really well, before going back."
I nod approvingly, secretly thinking that I am absolutely determined to go back to work properly next week. But then I don't have a class of children to teach all day, and I only work part-time. Plus, I've had all that glorious time to do a bit of recovering during December. But who knows what's sensible? The pressure to work, we agree, comes mostly from ourselves.
I notice Ms C listen to this discussion. (That is how chats in the tiny waiting room go. You talk to the people who you have begun to recognise. The new faces (they might not be new to the waiting room, but they are new to you) pause their reading, and perhaps join in, or just nod and smile, and lo and behold, you've got another waiting room buddy.)
Does she work?
"Yes," says Ms C with feeling. "But I can't. I just can't do it. I'm a researcher, I have papers to write, but I can't concentrate. My mind goes this way and that way. There are all these appointments and all these things going on in your mind. I cannot do any work until all this is over."
They are brief, these discussions, because before you know it, one of you is called in for your zap. So when we both emerge more or less at the same time (there is more than one machine), she invites me to join her for the soup that is part of her daily routine.
We listen to each other's stories. Our diagnoses and treatments are more or less the same, but that is where the similarities end.
I marvel, once again, at how differently patients cope with what seems to be the same situation.
Ms C remains so deeply shaken by her cancer that she doesn't even want to go back home when the treatment ends in a few weeks' time. She is terrified that the cancer hasn't all gone. Shouldn't something else be done? Something more? Shouldn't there be answers, some certainty, more tests perhaps to show that she is cancer free?
It makes me wonder at the huge amount of worrying that goes on in this world-famous cancer hospital, the accumulated fear, the loss, the distress.
You can only guess at it, looking around the waiting rooms. You see patients and relatives, some looking weak, some looking stressed, but mostly, looking fine. The seasoned ones (that's me included) chat merrily over their hot chocolate.
One young woman, sporting cycling gear and some newly sprouted hair, shook her head when a fellow patient, clearly new, expressed distress and confusion at all this waiting in different rooms.
"I've become institutionalised," she said wrily. "I just do as I'm told and don't even notice it anymore."
It was Doctor's Clinic Day, when many patients, including myself, had to see the doctor in addition to having their zap. Confusion all round about having to go and get your notes from the radiotherapists, then wait in the main reception room (the one with the fish tank), or perhaps not, perhaps they want to do your treatment first, just ask them.
I probably still have a bit of professional confidence left, which comes with a feeling of entitlement, so I marched straight through the "Authorised Access Only" doors to the radiotherapists' command room and demanded my notes, which were duly found and given. But later I discovered other patients who had been waiting and waiting in our little waiting room outside those doors, wrongly assuming that someone would know they were waiting for their notes, and only discovering their mistake when a more assertive patient accosted a passing radiotherapist with a meek "my notes please".
Ah, I could write a book. All I'd have to do is spend a day or two observing proceedings at this hospital, then have a cup of tea with one fellow patient, hot chocolate with another, carrot soup with a third, and ask for their stories. No two stories are the same.
This evening, as I sat in our homely kitchen peeling potatoes and chopping carrots and cracking eggs for the family meal, I counted my blessings yet again. I don't even want to imagine what it must be like for Ms C, spending months and months going through chemotherapy and such like, thousands of miles from her home, and not even having a kitchen to crack an egg in.
Oh, and before you ask, yes, I'm still walking. But I've given up on work this last week of my treatment.
I do need a bit of a lie-down after I get home, and by the time I'm up again, there just isn't enough time and energy left to get my head round the academic paper I ought to be writing. Like Ms C, my mind still goes this way and that way.
Next week, I promise myself.
Comments
Post a Comment