Читать книгу Ippi Ever After - Martin Jr. McMahon - Страница 6

One day out and Mary was screaming at me. A month of pent up anger was released in my face. I was too friendly with other patients, I was having an affair. I didn’t care about her. I was a lazy bastard, a prick on crutches.

It wasn’t true. That month I spent in Blanchardstown was by far the longest time I had ever spent away from Mary and the children. The kids had visited with Mary on several occasions but still I missed them desperately. All the time I was there I wanted home. Mary didn’t like me being away from her at all. Her reaction was a variation of the same response I’d become used to for years. If I spent any time away from her I was sure to get a tirade. Even when I was at work I had to check in with her regularly, if I didn’t, the accusations were fired at me. It was a way of life I’d become accustomed to.

Getting the dressing changed was my first priority. I rang the number I had been given for the local health nurse. It took a few times to catch her.

“You have to come to the clinic” she told me. She was far too busy to make a house call. I arranged to be there early the following morning. She also told me that she wasn’t available at the weekends. I telephoned Blanchardstown. The nurses on the ward I had been in agreed to take care of the dressing at the week ends.

The description of the building as a ‘clinic’ was a joke. It was the modern version of a parish hall. All types of non-medical events took place there. When I got there the place was full of people waiting to see the welfare officer. I sat with them and waited for the nurse. When she arrived she led me into a tiny room with a dentist type chair planted in the middle of it. I had brought the special dressing myself. There was nowhere to lie down and have the dressing changed properly as the registrar had done in Blanchardstown, only the goddamned chair. She changed the dressing as best she could in the cramped, stooped over conditions. I had no doubt that if this was the best available I was in serious trouble. The wound was meant to heal from the inside out, it could take months, maybe longer. There would be lots of painful dressings. How the hell could I avoid infection here? Fifty people or more were on the other side of that door. Fifty people down on their luck, fifty people who had no idea that complicated medical treatment was happening inches away. Food parcels were packed up and handed out from the room next to us. Clinic my arse, every cough I heard made me wince, the shitty toilets in Beaumont were more sterile than this. Third world healthcare is often referred to in this country. For those non believers more used to the Beacon, I advise that you take a look at the primary health care set up in clinics like this. Third world care would be a big step up on what we’ve got.

Twice more that week the dressing was changed, once in the clinic and then thankfully in Blanchardstown at the week end. The other added bonus with Blanchardstown was having someone else administer the bee sting. In the grand scheme of things, a little injection in the belly doesn’t sound like much and lots of diabetics will agree, but trying to inject yourself through already bruised flesh every day has a way of wearing you down.

By the end of the following week I’d had enough of the clinic. I rang my GP. His nurse would change the dressings for me. It was a world of difference, clean and professional. I never again went back to the clinic and never will. You get what you pay for and at fifty bucks a dressing it was worth it for peace of mind.

Thirteen days to the Interferon deadline and I eventually got to oncology out patients. My appointment was for two but so it seemed was everyone else’s. The waiting room was jammed full of people and so was the corridor outside. I was lucky enough to get a seat or at least I thought I was. For two and a half hours I sat on that hard wooden chair. I was in real pain. Having been in the surgeons clinic, I couldn’t understand the kind of mentality that would allow the same basic chair in both but on the private side the chairs were covered and comfortable. Here, in the public outpatients there were no coverings just hard wooden seats. Think about it, some pen pusher somewhere is the HSE decided that the same basic chair be used in private and public but in private it was covered and cushioned. It’s indicative of all that’s wrong in the health service. After two hours I’d reached my limit. I had to stay in the waiting room. If I went for a coffee or just stretched my legs in a walk up the corridor I could lose my place in the waiting hoard. Everyone there had cancer or was with someone who did. Oncology had let me down in Blanchardstown and now, the long wait in a stiflingly hot room on hard unyielding chairs.

A half hour later I was sitting in front of one of the oncology team. It took her two minutes to relay the information. That was it, I was done with oncology, there was nothing more they could do at this stage. I’d have a scan in six months. Two and a half hours to hear this, they could have telephoned me at home and saved me the distress.

“What about interferon?” I asked.

“We can’t give it to you with an open wound”.

I wasn’t expecting that. Interferon was the only pro active course of action at that stage. I didn’t want to cross my fingers and hope for the best. ‘Fighting cancer’ was a something I’d heard many times, how could I fight it by standing still in the headlights. I related in detail the utter disappointment that I felt oncology had been to this point. It took a good ten minutes. I told it all including the shitty toilets.

She ran for cover. I was taken into an office to another oncologist where I gave him an abridged version of what I’d just said. He was unfazed, I could have danced a jig naked on his table and it would have made no difference. I’m sure as far as he was concerned I was in the ‘anger phase’ of cancer. I was but I also had a valid point. The pulmonary embolism kicked all the patience out of me, now I just wanted to be better. The waiting room was as hot, crowded and uncomfortable as a cattle truck. Interferon was an outside chance but it was better than no chance at all. He explained the limited if any effects of interferon. I already knew, with the advent of google there are no mysteries. He told me that some oncologists don’t use it at all. I was sure that I didn’t want that kind of oncologist, I wanted someone who would throw everything, including the kitchen sink, at it. I believe that’s a reasonable expectation not just for me but for everyone with cancer. I gave up with him. An open wound meant no Interferon. I found it hard to accept that nothing could be done to make interferon possible. I left the clinic and decided to call the only person I thought could do something, the surgeon. He agreed to see me the following day.

Twelve days left.

Back in his waiting room, soft chairs, fifteen minute wait and all for one hundred and fifty bucks.

“I can close it with a skin graft” he was talking more to himself than me “you’ll need a vacuum pump, but you don’t have to worry about that”.

Forty eight hours later I was admitted for a day surgery. Recovery would mean that there was no going home that night, but once the surgery was done, they’d have no choice but to find me a bed. I was prepped and ready to go. Wheeled once again into the anaesthetist’s room I thought I knew what was to come and then the shock. I wasn’t going to have a general aesthetic. It was too risky considering the blood clot. I had to sit on the edge of the trolley.

“Stay perfectly still or you could be paralysed” the anaesthetist told me.

It was the wrong thing to say to me at the worst possible time. I immediately began shaking like a leaf. An injection was pushed into my spine in the small of my back. I had just enough time to lie back on the trolley before my legs went dead. I was wheeled into the operating room where everyone else was gowned, gloved and masked. I started shivering, I was so cold. My teeth were chattering. Someone wrapped my torso in a survival type blanket with a blow heater attached. I was light headed, confused. The same someone then injected something into the line in my arm. Instant headache, then not much else. I wasn’t unconscious but neither was I conscious. The job was done in my mental absence.

When it was over I was brought back to the day surgery ward. Skin grafts are an amazing thing. Skin was taken from my left thigh and spread out over the open wound in my left groin. A vacuum pump, a portable one, was placed over the graft to hold it in place and the whole lot was bandaged up airtight. I’d been warned that the area where the skin graft was taken from would be painful but it wasn’t. The nerve damage in the area was so extensive that I felt nothing. I couldn’t believe how quickly the area healed. Now there is only the faintest pink outline to show that a graft had ever been taken. The open wound was sealed. It was still a big hole, but a skin covered big hole, the risk of infection drastically reduced. Two days later I was home. The portable pump is about eighteen inches high and the same in width. I carried it like a satchel for five days.

The noise of the pump irritated Mary. She didn’t want to be around it or so she told me, the real truth was that she didn’t want to be around me, sick and vulnerable. Her body language was her only real communication. She kept her back turned to me almost all the time and that was only if she found herself in the same room. Most of the time she made damn sure she wasn’t. On the fifth day the pump was removed. It only took two minutes. I was ready for interferon, no excuses, no obstacles. Four days to deadline.

Oncology agreed to start me on interferon. It had to be ordered in by my chemist. It’s tricky stuff, it has a short shelf life and has to be kept refrigerated. The other thing is the cost, some where around twenty grand. The course of treatment lasts for a year, but only if the side effects don’t get you first. I was determined to finish the course, I’d come this far, I could take any side effects, and I did, but I still didn’t last the full year.

For the first month on interferon I went into Beaumont day oncology three days a week. The day oncology unit has seen a major revamp recently. Now it’s spacious, bright, almost plush with individual cubicles. Two years ago, it wasn’t. Back then, it was suffocating, patients sat side by side in old easy boy chairs with chemotherapy drips back to back dispensing poison from early morning until late evening. It was high density cancer care. The waiting room was always full, everyone waiting for a reclining chair to be freed up. The nursing staff did all they could to make it comfortable but it was an impossible hill to climb. It was a soul destroying place, no privacy, no dignity, it didn’t exactly inspire hope. I didn’t want Mary to see the place or me getting interferon. I worried that she’d find it too difficult. It never arose though because Mary never gave any indication that she wanted to go.

The first day I was in early, around ten. A blood sample was taken and I waited until the results came back. Then I waited until a recliner chair was free. The nurses were great, they kept a conveyer belt of cancer patients moving through the tiny room. It took some where around an hour and a half for the interferon bag to empty through a tube into my arm. Once it was over, a saline bag was hooked up which took forty five minutes to empty.

My dad dropped me in every morning and then collected me when I called him to tell him I was finished. I had looked up the side effects for interferon on the internet. There were tons but the most common were flu like symptoms, fatigue and loss of apatite. Early on one of the nurses warned me about the fatigue, she was spot on.

The first day I felt ok until I was on my way home. I began to shiver, my teeth chattered. Dad turned up the heat in the car. When I got into the house I was tired and cold. I lay down on the couch and the shivering started again. It took blankets and duvets before I heated up. Later on I was ok, sort of back to normal, except for food. From the very start the smell of food changed for me. It wasn’t enticing, instead it was mildly nauseating. My mouth tasted of metal when I thought of food. Apart from that I was doing ok. I was still limping and some days I needed a crutch. The fatigue on the other hand was progressive, as the weeks went by I grew more and more tired. I wasn’t helpless, far from it. I still minded the kids, made lunch and did a little house work.

Iris was there every time I looked around. Iris was Mary’s mother. Small, lean and wound tighter than thread on a spool. She is the only true misandrist I ever came across. I didn’t like her, but in fourteen years I’d never said a bad word to her. She was Mary’s mother, Mary’s problem not mine. She was too austere and superstitiously religious for my taste.

I left home when I was nineteen. Lots of the lads I grew up with did the same. There was no work in Ireland, emigration was our only option. I went to London and lived there for a while. Apart from the odd stop over, I never lived at home again. I was fully independent, I sank or swam on my own merits. I get on well with my parents but I’m happy enough to see them for dinner maybe once a month and a couple of brief ‘how’s you’ telephone calls a week. If I want advice, I ask, but I consider myself mature enough to make my own decisions. My parents don’t interfere. They would be wasting their time.

Iris is not that type of parent. She has three adult children, Mary being the second eldest. She has something to say about every aspect of their lives from what they eat and how they dress to whom they see and how they spend their money. She is vain in the extreme and openly scolds her daughters for not being as self flagellatingly thin as she is. Her eldest daughter is her constant companion. They are practically joined at the hip. From the start Iris didn’t approve of me. She was angry that Mary had decided to have a baby without her approval and without being married. Iris is a product of a repressed Ireland, an older twisted Ireland of Magdalene laundries, industrial schools and Kerry babies. She is the twitching curtains brigade. ‘What the neighbours think’ is all important to her. If it had been twenty years earlier Iris would have locked Mary into a Magdalene prison and thrown away the key.

“I’m too young to be a grandmother” she had moaned at the time.

She ostracised Mary from her extended family for more than a year after Leah was born and only allowed Mary back in when her own mother died. She wouldn’t let Mary see her grandmother in the last months of her life.

“She’d be scandalised” Iris exclaimed “I don’t want my mother to think bad of me”. Iris never told her mother that Mary was pregnant or that Leah was born.

I thought it was terribly mean and selfish of Iris to exclude Mary. It hurt Mary a lot. Mary wouldn’t stand up for Leah or me with Iris, she wouldn’t even stand up for herself against the all mighty mammy. Iris is caught in some religious and moral time loop. Her religious fervour is matched only by her bigotry. Everyone knows the type, up licking the alter rail on Sunday, the rest of the week bad mouthing and belittling any one who doesn’t fit her obtuse perspective. One of her most used phrases is that so and so “has tickets on themselves”. It’s a nasty little put down which only serves to expose her own haughty attitude. On several occasions when we attended mass with her, Iris would keep us all late for mass waiting on her and then push her way to the front of the crowded church. It took me a couple of years to figure out that she wasn’t doing it for the god in front of her, it was done for the benefit of the audience behind her.

Anyway she was there every time I looked around. Other family members helped out from time to time but they didn’t linger, once the kids were ok they were gone. Not so Iris, since I first went into hospital, Iris had become more and more of a permanent fixture. She was always in the background of our relationship. For years she was a source of friction between us. Now she was more than just a derogatory spectre, she was a daily physical presence. Mary insisted that Iris was just helping out. I should have known better but I was preoccupied with cancer. I didn’t mind too much at first. I actually thought that because her husband had had cancer, she would be a practical help for Mary. That was really stupid and naive of me.

Three months later I was totally isolated. Mary wouldn’t occupy the same space as me. Her indifference to me had turned to repressed anger. Occasionally it would break out in a tirade of eviscerating insults screamed through slammed doors, but mostly she spent her time in the back garden with her mother and when Iris went home Mary would stay alone in the back garden with her back turned to me and the children until darkness forced her indoors and she disappeared upstairs.

I was weak. Fatigue was wearing me down and I was losing weight. I was vomiting frequently. Cancer patients on chemotherapy often talk about ‘chemo brain’. Interferon is no different. By this time I was taking the treatment at home. I injected into the same fatty layer as the bee stings but the fatty layer was disappearing. I was too distracted by illness to see clearly what was going on. I did try a few times to talk to Mary about what was happening, how I felt. On one memorable occasion I asked her why did she walk out on me in Blanchardstown?

“How was I to know how serious it was” she dismissed me.

Somewhere in my illness fogged brain I knew I’d heard that one before, somewhere.