Well, after your praise and admiration that I’d lost nearly 4.5 st, I have lost the plot entirely and put a stone of that back on. It seems that anxiety is a HUGE trigger for me (no pun intended, although…). When I was lost in the exhausting treadmill of work/hospital/(briefly)home (rinse, repeat), I don’t recall being massively hungry – I really only ate marmite on toast for dinner for almost every day that month and maybe a snack at the hospital by P’s bed.
Now, though, the eating is out of control. I’m constantly hungry, constantly greedy and always thinking about what I can eat next. I’m also intensely anxious – and that is still increasing. Next week we ‘hope’ (if hope is the right word) to hear whether the ‘stormtrooper chemo’ has worked, has worked enough to shrink the tumours and that the tumours have shrunk enough that if removed, there would be enough liver left to perform its function. Every day I feel more anxious about this – it actually feels like someone is turning some kind of key, tightening my anxiety. I am simultaneously desperate to know and terrified of knowing. I have (probably) a week to wait – maybe more. They seem to think if they don’t make the purpose of the appointments explicit, you a) won’t realise and therefore won’t be worrying and b) you can’t hold them to anything. I can always worry. I was good at worrying before – now I am truly world class at worrying. But he has a scan tomorrow, ahead of the final dose of chemo next week and another scan on that day.
If the tumours have shrunk, I imagine they’ll want him in to operate on pretty sharpish, in case they start growing again.
I feel sick (and not just because of the amount of rubbish I’m eating) and constantly on the edge of tears. At night I lie awake, not even really able to think clearly, just with a whirlwind of impressions going through my head.
P is impressively sanguine. He has determined that it will all go well and seems to be able to just exclude any other possibility from his mind. I don’t want to confess how much weaker and more scared I am as I don’t want to give him the burden of dealing with me, as well as whatever he may face next week. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep it up, mind.
And really, the eating lots of rubbish thing is not helping with the feeling that I’m careering, out of control, in some terrifying analogous car. And yet, I’m finding it very difficult to stop.
