Easter 2009. Mild sunny days with little traffic or agitation in the street. People have left the city and are having their Easter dinners in various country homes. I feel distressed and deserted, although there is great warmth and love around me. A dear friend has come all the way from London to be with me for a few weeks. She’s a generous and caring soul. It’s a new experience to have another human being physically close to you – next to you at night and waking with you in the morning. As Vincent van Gogh wrote, ‘When you wake up in the morning and find yourself not alone, but see there a fellow creature beside you, it makes the world look so much more friendly. Much more friendly than religious deities and whitewashed church walls’.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing myself for the next chemo treatment. Tomorrow is my sixty-ninth birthday. Can’t help thinking, ‘Will there be a seventieth birthday?’ Every day is a lifetime; every hour is a lifetime and every minute and second is a lifetime. To live another ten years would be good, but one must have the strength to give and create, to prepare some gifts. If not, there’s little point in prolonging life on this Earth. Tomorrow also, a new digital print of an earlier film, My First Wife, will be screened. I’m looking forward to seeing it on the big screen. The film was made under much pressure at a time in my life when dramatic changes were imminent.
16 April. Sixty-nine today. When you’re young, this age seems ancient. But I haven’t aged the way I probably should have. Still feel about forty and behave accordingly. So far, age has never troubled me. I’d like to live a few more years because I haven’t come to the end of the road yet. So many pathways still to be explored. What to do with so many possibilities? I am back staring at the whitewashed walls of my cancer ward. I’m ready for my second chemo treatment. Waiting to be wheeled into the operating theatre. Everybody wants to know what I’m writing. Nothing earth shattering, I say, just trying to keep an account of events.
This is a three-hour operation with much more care and respect than the first shot of chemo. Through the various tubes I see a screen with my main artery exposed like the origins of a riverbed. Inside our bodies we have the same organic shapes as those we find in nature or in the universe. Everything is connected; everything belongs to one large organism. A long tube is pushed through the artery towards the liver. I can’t follow it any further because the picture disappears behind some obstacles, and a strong nausea makes it difficult to keep my eyes open. But I see part of the universe within my own body. Sleep a few hours in the ward until the so-called evening meal appears. Chemo also affects the memory bank, and a degree of delayed vision is certainly affecting me. I always remember my dreams, but usually let them go if there’s nothing of interest that lingers. Now I know that I had a dream, but there’s nothing left of it in my conscious or subconscious mind when I wake.
22 April. After two days in hospital, I come home and now look at the world from my own bed. My point of view counts again. I am a person! It’s very early in the morning. In the distance the threatening sounds of the city. I’ve always been lucky and never ‘travelled to work’. Either I lived above my office or lived in so many different places or countries that needed to be explored and understood before there was any routine established. This ominous sound can only be stopped by closing the window. And I feel it should be stopped. With the sound comes a threat, a reminder of useless duties. Our society has made a mockery of what it means to be an individual. We’re not end products of our society. We’re used, manipulated and abused as so-called individuals. It celebrates the exterior without acknowledging the interior, and thus a healthy interaction between the inner and outer is totally ignored and not possible. Some people spend a lifetime in a job they don’t like, living a life they don’t want, and the money they earn is spent on things they don’t need. Usually more money than they earn.
The chemo clouds have allowed me a little breathing time, even though they are hiding me away from the world of reason. If I ever were to conquer my imminent demise and find myself with a few more years, I would live in the country in France. I would spend my time staring at the Cévennes Mountains from my kitchen window and live a life of peace and quiet with the right rhythm and simple fresh food every day. I will go there soon, to this ancient old farm that I stumbled across a long time ago.
There’re so many things I want to write about but the mind wanders, leading to little concentration and hardly any words. Tomorrow I’ll be put through some scanning device to see if the chemo has worked any better than last time. Feel sick, lost and deserted. A hopeless day of too many mixed emotions and thoughts of self-pity. As I say to others who tend to cry over me – your tears are of no use to me. So I must tell myself, ‘Your emotional upheavals and self-indulgences are of no use to me.’ We can’t be on top of it all the time and be strong. Of course it’s good to let go for a moment and flow with that last fear – that fear of losing your very life.
The days have flown past … not much to report … not much to write. I try to live a pure life, eat the right food and do all the right things. The chemo nausea still hasn’t settled. We’ve been told that the chemo hit its target and this time it worked. I have no way of judging this.
I’m now being treated in two hospitals. Liver transplants are being performed in the second hospital, and the doctor and nurses explain to me what’s required. A tiny bit of light shines in the dark. I’m still being considered for liver transplantation, if I pass all the other tests. It’s not much but after some four months where things grew darker all the time, and never a glimmer of light appeared from anywhere, it’s something to almost celebrate. Wendy Hughes offers to drive me to the new hospital for an appointment. We get a bit lost on the way to the other side of town and then get lost again in the labyrinth of corridors at the hospital.
We finally find the doctor, a kind man, who has a sense of humour. Wendy observes the proceedings quietly and listens carefully to our conversation. Then she suddenly interrupts and asks the doctor how much time I’ve got left. She looks surprised about her own question. The doctor says it is hard to assess, but wants to be frank and honest and thinks probably some six months. It is longer than I suspected and I feel quite pleased, but dear Wendy is shocked and remains touched and tearful as we make our way back to the other side of town.
Now a lot of the tests have to be repeated because the new hospital will probably take over. All that blood moving from one tube to the next. How much blood? Where did it come from? How long has it been with me? Are they going to throw it out after the tests have been completed? Is this blood contaminated? Who has my blood?