Honey Moon

I’d been waiting for four anxious weeks: a very long time to hold your breath. I was about to meet my oncologist to find out the results of my latest cancer surveillance scan. Let’s try for an early night, I said, knowing my sleep is normally broken by bad dreams and long periods of wakefulness. I stood up to draw the curtains and there it was: the honey moon, shining above the Mournes. It was a rich yellow, like acacia honey. I stared and stared. A good omen, I hoped.

The Honey Moon is the name given to the full moon in June. Traditionally the month of weddings, so this is where ‘honeymoon’ comes from. In North America this full moon is called the Strawberry Moon. I slept a bit better than usual and rose to a bright, sunny day with blue skies. We went to the Cancer Centre at the appointed time and waited for my number to be called.

My call flashed up on the screen and we went through the double doors to meet the oncologist. The Consultant was waiting at the doorway of her office and invited us to sit down. This was a bad sign, I thought. When it was a simple scan result: ‘no significant change’, you were normally dealt with by the Registrar. So recently, we hadn’t been seen by the Consultant.

She stared at a page on the desk and then up at me. But all was well. I was clear of cancer again. That made it two years and nine months in total. A huge weight fell away from us.

She also said she was extending the scan interval from four to six months. So I should next be scanned in November and hopefully get my results by Christmas. I asked her if my next scan could be a MRI instead of a CT Scan. A medical colleague had told me that each CT scan gave you a radiation dose equivalent to 800 X-rays. I’d counted mine up to find I’d had 24 CT scans in the past 8 years, 16 of them over the past four years. She told me that she wasn’t able to do this because of cost. I could get a private MRI scan (which has no radiation) but not on the NHS.

From my regular visits to Radiology, I noticed that they had more CT scanners than they do MRI scanners. Perhaps they were cheaper to buy? I believe a CT scanner costs about £1 million. They also do the scans relatively quickly, in about 10 minutes, whereas a MRI scan is much slower. I suppose from a patient throughput point of view, which is probably how the NHS assesses things, CT scanners are the cheaper option (despite the radiation risk).

We were beginning a five month honeymoon from cancer surveillance scans. With lighter steps we walked downstairs towards the front door. Outside the sky was still blue and the sun was shining. When I get home, I thought, I’ll go for a bike ride. As we headed out through the doorway of the Cancer Centre, coming in was a man with a familiar face, surrounded by five minders. It was Gerry Adams. Another omen?

In Search of the Irish Summer

Our quest began in Mayo. We rented a cottage near Ballycastle, a small village on the North Mayo coast with three pubs, two shops and a cafe. Our cottage was down a lane that led to the beach; it was quiet and secluded, facing west along the coast towards Belmullet. We were halfway between the village and the beach, with a ten minute walk to either. We had four days of continuous rain, four days of showers and sunshine and two bright but windy days.

We’d come prepared for all eventualities. I’d brought my bike as well as laptop and books. T had brought books, journal and watercolours. Despite the weather we went out every day, if only to walk to the beach after dinner. I did manage four long bike rides of between 50 and 60 miles. It was great to be cycling along the coast road again. I’d last been there 20 years before on a cycle-tour from Sligo to Galway. There were still breathtaking views of cliffs and mountains, expanses of purple rhododendron, wild orchids and wildlife (I saw a weasel crossing the road).

The local landmark is Downpatrick Head, which has a splendid sea-stack called Dun Briste that rises 130 feet above the waves. The story goes that St Patrick detached the sea-stack from the cliff to isolate a pagan chieftain who refused to convert to Christianity. This is a fairytale, as mediaeval documents record the land-bridge between the cliff and the sea-stack collapsing in a hurricane in 1389. But it hasn’t stopped a rather ugly grey statue of St P being erected on the cliff in recent years. We also went to Ceide Fields and Belderrig, where the remains of 5600 year old farm settlements can be seen. Seamus Heaney had visited in 1974 and wrote the poem ‘Belderg’ after this experience.

On one of the wet days we went to Inishcrone Seaweed Baths, which opened in 1912 and claim to be the original Irish seaweed baths. It is a great experience. The rooms are period tiled and there are two huge baths with great brass fitments that you can lie out in fully. In the corner of the room is a steam box. You sit in and close the door so that only your head is exposed, then press the lever inside and you are enveloped in steam. The idea is that you open your pores before getting into the bath with the seaweed. In warm water, the seaweed exudes a clear, silky substance akin to aloe vera and the bathwater turns light brown because of iodine from the seaweed. The seaweed bath is very soothing. At the end you stand under a shower which cleanses your skin with seawater. After a session there your aches and pains have melted away and you feel refreshed.

On another of my rides I went inland to Nephin, the great cone-shaped mountain that dominates the skyline of North Mayo, and did a loop around Lough Conn. On the way, I came across a Titanic memorial in the wee village of Lahardaun. Fourteen villagers had emigrated on RMS Titanic from Queenstown; only three had survived. Proportionally, it was the greatest loss of life suffered by any one place affected by this disaster.  

We’d gone in search of the traditional Irish summer and had found it. T read, wrote and painted. I rode, wrote poetry and read. I also managed to get some good photos; the evening light on our beach walks was often magnificent. On the day of our return it lashed all the way back to Co Down. But never mind. We arrived home refreshed and relaxed.  

Our Grand Day Out

This culminated in a five hour session in Casualty at the Eye Hospital in Belfast. I'd been sent there by my optician. I had large black cobwebs, small dark spots and blurred vision in my left eye. A few days earlier when I was mowing the lawn, a branch had caught me on the left side of my face and dislodged my glasses. The symptoms began a little later. I was trying to write something on my computer and found that I couldn’t make out the words on the screen. I’d never had a visual impairment before, other than short-sightedness, and it felt disturbing and distressing, particularly as my left is my dominant eye.

I rang my optician and got an appointment. It was for a couple of hours after my cancer surveillance CT scan. So I drove to the Cancer Centre and went through the routine: drinking the contrast (iodine, I believe) and lying down inside the big whirring scanner. I’d been through this dozens of times; the scan itself is not a problem, waiting for the results is. Although, I had more pressing matters on my mind as I walked into town to the optician. T joined me there and we looked at new spectacle frames to distract ourselves for a while.

My optician is a techie. His consulting room is full of eye examining machines. He heard my story, dilated my pupils with eye drops and then put me through his suite of machines. This included retinal and macular scans, and culminated in him looking into my eye with a large microscope that he proudly told me that he had just bought for £12,000. All of the time he was doing the examination he was cracking jokes. Then he gave me the verdict. He thought I had a tear in my retina because he’d seen pigment cells in my vitreous (the jelly-like substance that fills your eyeball). As this could lead to permanent loss of eyesight, he recommended that we went to the Eye Hospital. Since it was 4.30pm, he suggested we went the next morning.

Outside, the bright sunshine hurt my dilated eyes and the world seemed very distorted. We took a cab direct to the Eye Hospital and got there just before the reception closed. We were ushered into a very small waiting room already full of people. There was an enormous flat screen TV on the wall. The sound was up very loud. Pointless was on. Nobody spoke. We waited and waited. Very slowly, people were called. T told me that beside the TV was sign saying that nobody was allowed to touch it or try to change channels. It was stuck on BBC 1, all I got was the sound and distorted visuals. Sometime during the tedium of the One Show I was called to see the Triage Nurse. She took my details and put some more dilating eye-drops into my already dilated eyes. T said I looked like a frightened rabbit.

Back in the TV waiting room, Eastenders was on and there were still plenty of people. I recalled A Clockwork Orange, where Alex’s eyes are held open and he is forced to watch footage of concentration camps and war to cure him of his violence. I wondered what an enforced diet of bland BBC1 primetime is likely to cure me of? Holby City came and thankfully went, it didn’t remind me of any of the different hospitals that I’d spent time in. As Years and Years began I was called to see the doctor. He began by putting more dilating eye-drops in and then looked into my eyes with a microscope. He did this for a while, getting me to look through all of the points of the compass. Then he got me to lie down on a couch and put a portable microscope on his head. He switched on a bright light, pressed my eyelids wide open with probes (T said it they were like extra-long cotton buds) and looked deeply into my eyeball.

He told me that my vitreous had partially detached from my retina. Adding that we should not be concerned as this was a normal part of ageing. The incident with the branch had precipitated something that would have happened in time anyway. I asked him about the optician’s diagnosis. He said he could find no tear in the retina but this was still a possibility as the remainder of the vitreous would also detach sometime. The small spots that the optician thought were pigment cells, he thought were specks of blood. He said that the floaters and blurring should slowly clear over the coming months and booked me into a clinic in four weeks time. We sighed with relief. I was glad I didn’t have to watch the Ten O’Clock News.

My Bikes

I got my first proper bike on my seventh birthday. It was a gold Raleigh with three gears and whitewall tyres. I cycled regularly in the Forest of Dean until I was sixteen when I spent my hard-earned savings on a Vespa scooter and paraded around Gloucester in parka, Ben Sherman shirt and Levis. Later I got into motorbikes, then cars and I didn’t own a bicycle again until I bought a second-hand Dawes Galaxy in 1987. Over the next fifteen years, this trusty bike took me on a series of multi-week cycling tours, including the Scottish Highlands, the Western Isles, Normandy, Brittany, Sri Lanka, Southwest China and a circumnavigation of the entire Irish coastline.

I love the sense of freedom that you get on a bike, the wind in your hair, the unfolding landscape, the immersion in the natural world and the encounters with people you have not yet met. It is certainly the best way to explore somewhere. I’ve particularly enjoyed cycle trips in developing countries, where cycling is the most common form of transport, for then you are travelling with the people as they go about their daily lives. This island, with its multiplicity of back roads, is the best place I’ve ever lived for cycling.

Fifteen years ago, I recognised that my faithful Dawes Galaxy had earned an honourable retirement. In its place I bought three new specialist bikes, each of which would do part of the work that it had done so trustily: a Dawes Audax for local day rides, a Bontrager all terrain bike for the supported cycle-tours I would do in faraway places (e.g. Patagonia, Laos, Vietnam) and a Dawes Sardar for the solo cycle-tours I would do in Europe (e.g. Italy, Spain, France).

Then, eight years ago, I got cancer and, like all other aspects of my life, my cycling changed. After the series of major operations with their collateral damage to my body, it’s taken me plenty of time to rebuild a modicum of strength and fitness. Even now, some eighteen months after my last major surgery, I only feel able to ride every other day. Perhaps I may become strong enough to do multi-day cycle tours again.

Over the years, I’ve learnt how to maintain my bikes. I’m largely self-taught; and when a local bike shop returned one of my bikes in a dangerous condition after bodging the repair, this process was given impetus. So now the time has come to invest in a new bike. But I’m not buying a bike ready-made from a shop. I’m going to build it myself from scratch. Although I’ve had experience of some of the tasks involved, I’ve never actually built a full bike before. It’s going to be a challenge and a learning process. I’ll post regular instalments from that journey here.

Bronze Anniversary

Good Friday is very significant to me. Not because of Christianity, I’m a lapsed Quaker. Nor because of the Belfast Agreement, although I did campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote in 1998. But because, on Good Friday 2011, I was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer of the kidney. I’d spent the night on a trolley in Casualty and I’d just been wheeled back to the ward from a scan. A junior doctor pulled the curtains around the bed and told me straight. Everything seemed to close in around me. I gulped and said nothing. D’you have any questions? He said. Well, what’s going to happen? I said. I’ll ask the consultant to come and speak to you, he said. I nodded, absently. He left abruptly. I was a small wounded creature in the huge universe and I was sure I was going to die.

Many of the readers of this blog are familiar with the remainder of this story. Suffice it to say, I then had a series of operations leading up to a very major one. I was given a poor prognosis, but I did survive beyond the first two years. Then I met my dearest T. At four years I had a metastatic recurrence and more surgery, which was unsuccessful in removing the entire tumour. A year later I had surgery again, which did remove the regrown tumour. At six years I had another major operation to repair my left diaphragm and lung which were damaged in the 2011 surgery. Since then I have been thankfully been free of cancer and healthy.

The eight year anniversary is ‘bronze’. This is the medal typically given to the third place competitor. However, the Bronze Age (2500-800 BC), was a time when Britain was one of the most important places in Europe and when the Stonehenge that we can see now was completed. We had relatively large supplies of tin, the vital resource which, mixed with copper, produced bronze (the hardest metal that was then known to man). And this gives rise to one of the dominant theories about the purpose of Stonehenge, that it was a great gathering place for trade, festivals and other communal events. Indeed, recent gene studies have shown that there was an enormous influx of people from the continent to the British Isles during this period and since then we have been thoroughly European.

Looking back on the past eight years, it feels that I’ve done much better than third place. But, survival, along with my current health and happiness with my dearest T, are all the prizes I would wish for.

Scar Therapy

I’ve often thought I could be a body double for a pirate. I don’t have a parrot, a deep tan or a six-pack, but I do have the accent and plenty of scars: one running the full length of my torso at the midline, one running across my right side below the ribs and another running from the middle of my back around my left side between the ribs. I have literally hundreds of internal and external stitches. After the long struggle of recovery and recuperation from surgery I was left in chronic pain. I did seek treatment from different physiotherapists, without success. In the end, I’d reluctantly come to accept my post-operative pain as the price of survival. Then, four months ago, I began a course of scar therapy at Action Cancer and I’m delighted to say that the results have been remarkable.

At first, the therapy seemed rather odd. There were no oils or lotions used and little traditional massage. The therapy consisted of repeated tapping, stroking and pressing of the tissues around the scars. Suzanne, the therapist, would spend about half an hour doing this around one particular scar, then move on to another. She had strong, nimble fingers and was very hardworking.

The purpose of the scar therapy is to stimulate the circulation and the lymphatic and nervous systems to promote renewed healing, increase mobility and improve tissue health. I must admit I was sceptical at first, but by the third treatment I noticed a definite lowering in my pain levels and its distribution in the two scars that she had been working on. And this improvement continued.

Because I have such extensive scarring (significantly more than the average client) I was given an extra set of three sessions. By the final treatment I found that I had much improved mobility in my right side and I was almost pain free. I had also regained feeling in the large area of skin below the incision that had been lost since the surgery over two years previously. The progress on my left side was significant too, with pain levels being much reduced, but not quite as comprehensively.

Suzanne is an excellent therapist: very skilled and most effective. She has been treating clients with chronic pain for fifteen years. The therapy, an initial six sessions, was offered free of charge. This is a great resource provided by Action Cancer. I was so grateful for the progress made that I gave a substantial donation. I don’t look any less a pirate, but I might now be limber enough to board a ship on the high seas with a cutlass between my teeth.

Second Chance

I’ve been working on my second collection of poetry for the past nine months or so. I started off with some fifty poems that I felt were worthy of inclusion. Since then I’ve been reworking poems, repositioning poems, removing poems and including new ones. This has been a developmental process, with each new iteration of the collection appearing satisfactory, until I got started on the next revision. In search of some external perspective, I also submitted selections from the collection to pamphlet competitions. I’m pleased to say that I’ve been shortlisted for the Overton Poetry Prize (judges’ report below) and longlisted by Eyewear.

My first collection of poetry was published in November 2010. But on Good Friday 2011 I was diagnosed with cancer. From my hospital bed in Belfast I was forced to cancel all the dates of my reading tour of Ireland and England. After I left hospital I didn’t write any poetry for several years. But I was writing regularly, in the form of this blog which focused on my condition and treatment. Around five years ago I did begin to write poetry again. And despite the cancer recurrences and the series of major operations, I’ve kept this up. Understandably, the tone and style of my poetry has changed. Although, the one area of experience I’ve not chosen to write poetry about is cancer.

Over the past eight years, the poetry publishing scene has changed significantly. Lagan Press, the publisher of my first collection, do not publish single-author poetry collections anymore, so I have needed to find a new home for my work. Unwisely, I submitted an early draft of my second collection to several publishers. This was premature and they did not choose to take it. The content, shape and tone of the collection has changed significantly since then. I am much more confident of my collection now, particularly given the extremely positive feedback I received from the judges of the Overton Poetry Prize.

Judges’ Report

‘Very accomplished writing throughout, with lots of stories and characters.  All the poems were strong, but there were some poems, and individual lines or stanzas that we felt stood out: in Hermit, for example, the final stanza is brilliant – ‘The whin creaks, / my furrows are bare, / let thistles come.’– while ‘our times are as hard as the frost’ seems absolutely the right voice for the lapper.  Despite the dark and difficult subject matter of some of the poems, the level of detail and choice of imagery makes the collection compelling.’