With the fact that I had a huge surgery hurtling toward me
in mind, everything started to go quite quickly. I was desperate to do things I wouldn’t be able to do for a
while. I went to see a very good,
old and dear friend (I hate saying ‘dear friend’ – makes me feel like an ageing
West End luvvie, but it does say what I need it to) do a stand-up show that
he’d been doing to much acclaim for some time, and that I’d never been able to
go and see. He was doing it for
the last time at the Tricycle Theatre, and everything about it was wonderful –
from the convenient parking to the joy of watching his passion and politics
combine with comedy into a brilliant harmonised whole. I loved the show, but just as much, I think,
I was delighted by the look on his face when he came out into the lobby after
the gig and saw that I really was there.
On the way home, though, I thought about how ridiculous it was that my
friends had all come to expect me not to show up to things; how had I let my
life turn into that? Why had it
taken me so long to decide to have my ileostomy? And jeez, I couldn’t wait to have the proctectomy, the final
piece of the puzzle, and complete everything, once and for all.
A much-loved (dear) friend was coming over from
Australia. She’s an actress and
was doing some shows in Dublin and was popping over to London for a week’s
visit before going back to Melbourne.
It had been planned for some time, and at first I’d thought I might be
in hospital when she came, but happily that wasn’t to be the case. The last time she’d seen me had been
during our visit to Australia when I’d lain shivering on her couch, feeling
dreadful and had to leave ten minutes after we’d arrived for what was supposed
to be an evening of dinner. We’d
met many years before when I’d been pregnant with the teen and she was going
out with a close (dear) friend of mine, and had become friends then. These days she’s a mother of three
gorgeous little boys herself, and she and her family had been to visit us a few
times over the past few years.
Every time, I’d been in bed, and husband and teen had picked them up
from the station. Her eldest boy,
when he was just three, used to hang out on the bed with me, asking questions
and trying to be grown-up about my refusal to let him take my pills. This time was going to be
different. I was going to pick her
up at the station. Dressed and
healthy, with my bag cleverly concealed beneath my stylish swing dress.
On the day she was due to arrive, it was grey and rainy, but
it was late September and that’s often the way in lovely London town. And I didn’t care, because I was going
to pick my friend up from the station.
Just Finsbury Park, you understand, but one has to start small. Teen adores this friend, so he came
with me and we sat in the car, with the rain beating down on us, watching the
entrance to the station to see our friend as soon as she appeared. We were there a while; it’s a long ride
from Heathrow to north London and there’s no point in expecting calculations to
be exact. But she arrived
eventually, her small frame and giant suitcase heading towards us as teen and I
leapt from the car, teen snatching her case and putting it in the boot as we
hugged and squealed as girls do, even when they’re supposed to be women.
Despite the rain, we wanted to take advantage of my being
upright and not in pyjamas, so we stopped off in Crouch End for a coffee and a
bite to eat, normal things I still got a disproportionate amount of joy out of
doing. I still felt like I had a
secret from everybody else in there.
We were in a café I go to regularly; the manager and I know each other’s
names and she occasionally slips me a free coffee or cake, in recognition of my
regular patronage (I imagine – don’t see what else it could be), but she and
her staff have no idea of the bag of poo that hides beneath the picture of me
they see. Teen had just started at
Central St. Martin’s, so he was telling the friend about that, and we were
asking him questions and hearing about her boys, and a tv show she’d just filmed,
and how the play had gone in Dublin and behaving for all the world like three
people just meeting for coffee.
One day I shall take these things in my stride, but I kind of hope it’s
not for a while yet. I like
marvelling at the everyday, the mundane, the magic of basic existence. Though not so much in the rain, if I’m
honest.
Some time while our friend was here, I had my pre-op
assessment; where you go in to the hospital and a nurse takes your blood, and
talks to you about the operation and what will happen (yes, even if you’ve
already had 9 of them) and you go and get an ECG to make sure your heart won’t
give out under anaesthetic and basically half a day gets used up seemingly
managing to do little other than make you just that teeny bit more anxious than
you were before. But it didn’t
matter in the end, because ultimately it meant my operation was that much
closer. Just over a week away, in
fact.
Our friend was out when the post arrived a couple of days
later, including a letter from the hospital, which I assumed would be a few
more details about what time I was to arrive, etc. Only it wasn’t.
It was a postponement. My
proctectomy was no longer to be on the 12th October, but two weeks’
later on the 26th instead.
No big deal, you might think, and you’d probably be right, but when
you’re waiting for something that big, that major, that meaningful … when
you’ve been packing everything you can into your life so that you can take a
few months out of it to recover and all the dates are planned to the minute,
it’s more than a mild inconvenience.
More than a big deal. It’s
like somebody’s messing with your destiny. I know now that sounds – and is – stupid, but back then it
was terrible. My previous
operation – when I’d had the actual ileostomy – had been postponed by a couple
of days due to a ward closure because of MRSA and that had been bad enough, but
two weeks – fourteen days – they had to be joking, right?
I rang them in a fury.
I got on to some poor secretary and insisted that there must be some
mistake; that my operation was going to be on the 12th, but that
this letter had arrived, obviously erroneously, saying that … I tried to hold
on to my anger, to be reasonable; I knew it wasn’t this woman’s fault, but
really I wanted to scream at her, to demand she get my surgeon on the line,
convinced that if he only knew what had happened he would remedy it. If he just knew it was me, because he
of all people knew how much I wanted this done, needed it done, wanted to be
skipping through life with my surgeries all behind me and my bag hanging in
front of me. And all the time I’m
thinking those things, and trying to be polite to the secretary at the same
time, there’s another stream of thought; another creature on my shoulder,
reminding me of my surgeon’s words, ‘Of course, if a cancer or something else
life-threatening comes along, we’ll have to change your date’, and realising on
some level that my surgery being postponed could well mean that another
person’s life would be saved and that it was only two weeks after all, and why
didn’t I just shut up and let this woman get on with her job, and eventually
that was the voice that won out and I apologised for making a fuss, explained
that I was just nervous and anxious and thanked her for her patience. See,
underneath it all, I’m not really a bad person. I just wanted the scary stuff over with.
I look at my diary for last year, and on the 12th
I see the words ‘Hospital.
Surgery. 7am’ crossed out and DO TAX written underneath. It seems stupid doing tax when all
you’ve earned that year are a few royalty payments on a couple of tv shows you
wrote in the last century and a few pence for a kids’ book published in 2008,
but I’m not Vodafone or Richard Branson and I’m not a friend of David Cameron’s
so the law says that I have to. I
suppose I would’ve done it sooner if the op hadn’t been postponed, but I do
like to leave the boring stuff to the last moment. Apart from that, I filled
practically every minute of those two weeks – had dinners and lunches with
everyone I could think of; went to the Tate with the teen, the movies with my
littlest sister, lunch with my other one, and a couple of meals out with my
husband and friends and no kids. I
met beloved friends in Covent Garden and wandered around shops and the market,
then sat in the sunshine drinking lemon juice. I had a wonderful night watching
old Buffy episodes with the teen and our close (dear) friend who introduced us
to the Slayer in the first place, complete with copious amounts of chocolate
and salted sunflower seeds to munch on.
It was all great, and it did feel like a free fortnight,
like a gift I hadn’t been expecting but still there was too much time to
think. To wonder if maybe the
postponement wasn’t some kind of message from the universe – did I really want
to have the surgery done? Was I
sure that I wanted to remove any possibility of changing my mind? To declare myself a baglady completely
and permanently; to never again have the option of pooing from anywhere but the
stoma that protrudes from my belly?
All stupid thoughts, of course; why on earth would I want to go back to
rushing to the toilet upwards of 20 times a day? To constant, doubling-over
pain? To an insanely restricted diet? Nothing had changed in my intestinal make-up
(except there was more of it missing); my disease was still there, I wasn’t
cured. To reverse my ileostomy
would be to go back to the life I had no longer been able to bear. Of course I wanted the
proctectomy. But I’d finished my
to-do list – I’d been to the cinema, the theatre, comedy clubs; I’d seen people
I’d not seen for years outside of my bedroom; I’d shopped and sat in cafes and
even walked in the park on good days.
I hadn’t swum yet, but I hadn’t planned to do that before the surgery;
that was on my ‘after’ list. My
‘before’ list was completed and I wanted to be heading for the next one. I did want the proctectomy, of course I
did. I just wanted it now.
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