Long hair

Part Two

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PART TWO

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One thing I've learnt about chemo? It sucks.

Christmas 2018.

Christmas was an interesting one this year. I got to spend a lot of time with family, which was nice. I tried my best to devour the meal without being impolite and made sure to decline any other meal for the rest of the day because I knew that over Christmas I'd gain a lot of weight. And I did.

I also knew that my mum was trying her best to enjoy herself.. but struggled to do so. We'd talked about how neither of us could really enjoy ourselves anymore because of the news about the tumor. At this point we weren't sure of the stage. But knew the chance of having to have chemo was going to be around 99-1. Trying to distract ourselves was relatively easy, but for me it was the only thing in my mind.

20/2/19, The appointment where they put my mum through manual tests. What's your height? What's your weight? how's your week been? My week has been horrible. Even though I saw a few close family members, celebrated the fact that we haven't kicked the bucket yet, I felt like shit. My mental health was spiraling and I knew it was apparent to others. They didn't say much. I don't think they really knew what to say. A lot of people have been like that lately. No one knows what to say, they probably think it's too intrusive and so they don't bother saying anything at all.

We're in the hospital getting my mums picc line put in for chemotherapy on Friday. It's a 45cm line that is put through the basilic vein on her right arm used to transfer chemotherapy and medications in a safe and discrete way. I'm sat in a chair smushed in the corner of the room listening to the boring conversations and the music from an old fashioned radio that's meant to distract my mum from what was going on. My mum looks nervous, I think she's nervous. She looks bored but she might just be scared. I don't think she was in pain but I'll ask her later.

Once they finished the nurses made sure my mum was alright, giving her some coffee at her request and a biscuit because she looked even more discoloured than normal and she'd gone light headed. After a small 5 minute break we were told to move into a different room, as we walked down the corridors we glanced at the women sitting in chairs. They looked tired, bored, and weak. They had all lost their hair and i knew it was a sad place. I tried not to cry in front of my mum so I glanced round further, looking at the documents of patients information spread out on the desk and a list of patients that were due in on the particular day. There were a lot of them.

Everyone had different lives and different stories, the women looked beautiful, they looked brave and strong but they all had the same face on them, they were in noticeable discomfort. So I smiled at the ones that made eye contact with me, and sure enough they smiled back.

My mum sat down in what would be her chair and we were both given a large presentation by one of the nurses about the chemotherapy, the side effects and the sort of things to look out for.
It was a lot of information to take on board and I knew my mum wouldn't be able to remember it all. I told her to take notes when she needed to so that in the future she'd be able to refer back if necessary.

After an hour and a half of note taking and nodding we were told to have a good rest of our day and we left.

I've noticed that by now many of the friends I had 3 months ago aren't my friends anymore. Friends ask how you are, how you feel. Those ones didn't. So I walked away. People are fake when they want to be real and they tend not to live in reality. I'm glad I have the friends I have and not the friends I did. Although I have my own issues going on, people seemed to think that there's weren't important and wouldn't tell me things because they thought that I had enough going on.