the purefinder - archives - Thu, 2004-06-24
« tenacious tree | Main | footwear newsflash! »June 24, 2004
4/4
This morning mrs padraig, Barbara, was injected with her final batch of chemotherapy drugs. It seems like a lifetime ago when I watched the first of the cartoon-esque red poison dribble into her arm and thought of how we would incrementally make our way through to the point where it was all done.
It hasn't been like that.
When our first child, Gabriel, was born, it quickly seemed as if he had always been in our lives - like a line had been drawn across our lives seperating the part before his birth and the part that we were now living in.
In some ways our immersion in, or submersion under, the onslaught that is chemotherapy has been similar. This wearing rhythm of treatment and sickness and recovery and blood-tests and deferral has been what our lives have become.
Today wasn't conclusive. We are too much in the groove with this rhythm and too aware of the difficulties waiting for us in the next few weeks, to allow ourselves to think that anything had really finished. I don't doubt that there is a point ahead where I'll be able to think that I'm almost the person that I was before - it isn't here yet.
In the early days of the chemo-era we were looking forward to radiotherapy - now we suspect that it will have its own individual ways of grinding bits of us away.
Anyway - enough.
I haven't taken a lot of care with this because I'm going to dash to the gym and move heavy objects around; one of the heavy objects is me.
Posted by padraig at June 24, 2004 01:41 PM