"I see life differently now. I can't ever go back to the well side, I've crossed over. And I'm glad. Now I have patience and compassion and I'm not scared of ill or dying people. People who haven't been to the other side, or aren't close to someone who has -- they seem a bit half-baked to me, lifeless.
At the end of the radio- and chemotherapy, I have one last treatment to go through. Brachytherapy. This involves the doctors shoving a stick of radioactive material inside my vagina (it looks like that glowing green bar that Homer Simpson gets caught in his shirt in the title sequence of The Simpsons), then they all scoot out of the room and lock the nuclear-attack-proof door behind them, peering through a triple-glazed window at me as I lie on a trolley, legs in the air, green thing up my whatsit. I spend most of the week after this treatment on the polished wooden floor of our bathroom, writhing in agony and vomiting bright green liquid as blood pours of of my arse, which feels like it has been slashed with a razor.
I write a long letter to Baby in case I don't make it. I've read that's a good thing to do. I'm so angry with myself; what kind of a mother are you, to bring a child into the world and then immediately go and die on her? I vacillate between damning myself for dying and thinking I'm a burden to Hubby and Baby and should top myself. Do them both a favour.
Night-time is the worst though. Death waiting patiently just outside the half-open bedroom door. I know he's out there, and he knows I'm in here. Even if I beat him and get through another night, he's not bothered, he knows his time will come. 'I'm scared,' I whisper to Hubby. 'I know,' he says. What else can he say?
When you're facing death, you have to walk that walk alone."
-- Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys
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