138. In the hair and now

My Hairy Situation has happily stopped us from having to talk about the weather for roughly a year and a half. 

That glamorous I-wouldn't-dare-to-go-that-short look, but doesn't it suit you!

Those curls that have, quite literally, come out of nowhere.

The hair loss has made me cry (once or twice) and laugh (countless times), and has provided all of us with plenty of entertainment.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow.

Wish You Were Hair.

But this is the end of that era. My friends, I have paid a visit to Andrew the hairdresser. (Remember him?)

About, oh, once a month or so, I would look in the mirror and decide that something had to be done at last. Too wild! Too strange!

But I never dialled Andrew's number, because I was too intrigued. What would happen to the curls? Would it suit me to wear it a bit longer? I decided to leave it uncut for exactly one year after it started growing.

This was quite a safe thing to do. I have discovered that no-one, but NO-ONE, will dare to criticise the hairdo of a recovering cancer patient. However outrageous it might look, I could safely predict that people would fall over themselves to compliment me on it. With relief in their eyes, because frankly, they couldn't really compliment me on the bald look. They tried, and many of you sounded reasonably convincing, but really: looking at the photo gallery below, you will have to admit that you wouldn't pick the first one out of Andrew's catalogue of options.

But now the year is over. I finished my treatment at the end of January 2015 and stopped shaving the miserly stubble there and then. A year on, it had grown exactly 12 centimetres.

This is what 12 centimetres looks like.

The wild hair, untamed

Welcome back to the 1980s. It's not an era you'd like to recommend to your stylist.

Andrew was booked in.

Cries of protests erupted from friends and even from daughters.
NOOOO!!! It looks lovely, so thick and luscious and amazing etc etc.
Don't cut it, was the consensus instruction.

I sort of agreed and almost cancelled Andrew, but not having seen him for so long, I thought I'd go anyway and ask his opinion. He cheered me into the salon, took one look and said, "It doesn't need cutting."

He sat me down and ran his fingers through the curls, marvelling. We stared in the mirror.

The wild hair, tamed

"Why change it?" he asked. "You like it. It suits you. It's not offending me in any way. Not the back, not the longer bits on the top. I can tidy it up, but you'll walk out of here looking pretty much the same."

So whilst catching up on a year and a half of news, he made me look less like Wild Woman of Cancerland, more like someone with a choice. For good measure, and on the spur of the moment, I went straight from the hair chair to an eyebrow chair. I have never, ever had my eyebrows plucked (I confess that until fairly recently, I didn't even know that eyebrow chairs existed).

I discovered the effect of organised eyebrows when I had none and occasionally painted them on - and on those fake-brow-days, I would miraculously get multiple comments on how well and glamorous I looked.

(Don't be fooled by people looking well and glamorous. It's war paint, mostly.)

Nobody has noticed either the hair cut or the tidy brows.

The only person in our household who usually does notice such things is in bed with a fever. But who cares?

Having gone through a wide range of diverse looks, I now know with great clarity and certainty that your looks truly don't matter beyond fleeting first impressions (which your friends don't need, as they are impressed already). But strangely, simultaneously, looks DO matter.

Because you might not notice my tamed locks, but I notice. That's what matters. 

So here I am, in the Hair And Now.

I leave you with a gallery of the past year.

These selfies were taken at monthly intervals. And that is the final word on my hair. I'm afraid we'll now have to go back to discussing the weather. Did you hear about the havoc caused by storm Gertrude?

January 2015 (0 cm)

February 2015 (1 cm)

March 2015 (2 cm)

April 2015 (3 cm)

May 2015 (4 cm)

June 2015 (5 cm)

July 2015 (6 cm)

August 2015 (7 cm)

September 2015 (8 cm)

October 2015 (9 cm)

November 2015 (10 cm)

December 2015 (11 cm)

January 2016.  (12 cm. The end)

134. Celebrating my aunt = celebrating life

There is a general consensus that my newly sprouted curls are a Good Thing.

They are invariably welcomed with cheerful delight.

"Elk nadeel heeft zijn voordeel!" my Dutch friend observed, which amounts to Every cloud has a silver lining.

Silver lining? It's a veritable silver Halo-of-Hair, expanding week by week. At this rate, I'll be sanctified by Christmas.

Going round with HoH is like having a companion with me at all times, someone rather separate from myself, living a life that's entirely her own.

Goodness me! I see what you mean! How marvellous! say those of you who've kept up with my blog posts, especially the hairy ones.

Is she yours?! Not adopted or anything, or ordered from the hairdresser? ask those who haven't.

HoH and I went to Holland last week.

It was our third visit together, but this time was different. This was not just visiting two sisters and the odd friend, who have been well up to date not only with my own progress but also with HoH's birth and growth.

This was a proper family gathering, teeming with assorted cousins and cousins-once-removed. I hadn't quite anticipated how poignant that would be. Years (even decades) could go by without meeting some of these relatives, but then we suddenly kept seeing each other. There were three funerals in the space of a year: my uncle, my aunt, my mother.

How wonderful, therefore, to gather in celebration of my mother's last remaining sibling, my wonderful aunt.

It was 60 years since she entered a Franciscan convent. There we all were, in our cheerful outfits and not a handkerchief in sight except to wipe away tears of joy at the beauty of life.

Perhaps it was not surprising that I got so much attention, with everyone asking the How are you question and exclaiming over HoH.

Yes, I'm fine now. (Let's not dwell on the ongoing tiredness.)
Yes, I'm back into the swing of things.
No, I've never had curls before; no, it's not a perm; and yes, isn't it amazing?

It startles me to think that it's only been 15 months since I last met these lovely relatives, at my mother's funeral. I still had my old hair then, it was less than a fortnight after my mastectomy, and I still had all the chemotherapy and hair loss and radiotherapy and hair growth to come.

Blimey. No wonder HoH got such happy attention.

With my aunt at her celebration last week

15 months ago, at my mother's funeral

But the real attention should not got to my hair.

This blog post's title should go to my aunt.

She has had such a difficult year mourning the loss of three of her siblings. My sisters and I were not alone in having lost our mother. Almost all my cousins lost a parent in the same year. Aunt helped us all with the wisdom of the prayers she wrote in thanksgiving for her life, parts of which I've translated freely:

Let this be a day of meeting each other truly
With the tides of life in the background,
where happiness and sadness, fortune and misfortune colour our lives
constantly, like ebbing and flooding.

Life is giving and receiving.
It does not pass without pain and sadness.
I believe that everything that happens has a place and a meaning in the wholeness of my life.
I believe that life is:
To be and to become who you are
Letting others be and become who they are.
Trusting, whatever happens.

God's love is given through people, a gift as constant as the tides.
I have learnt that love is the only thing that counts.

Dear Lord, let us hear Your voice in the rustling waters of all our doings.
And teach us to accommodate the ebbing and the flooding.
Let us be formed and ripened by the grooves and channels that have shaped our lives.

My aunt as a novice in 1955

Amen to that.

131. HAIR!!!

Spot the difference.

June 2012

May 2015

There were, of course, various in-between looks. Like these ones, for example.

July 2014 (too long,
but is it worth going to the hairdresser
if it's all going to fall out anyway?)

July 2014 (yes, it is worth going...
The pixie cut, just before it all fell out)

But you can see why my hair has become a talking point.

Or, rather, an exclaiming point. People don't talk in normal Times Roman font when they see my hair. They talk in CAPITAL LETTERS WITH EXCLAMATION MARKS AT THE END OF IT!!!

Because it looks nothing, nothing like it has ever looked before. I mean, seriously, quite apart from the rather startling greyness: THERE ARE CURLS!!!!!!

That needs at least - at least - six exclamation marks. I have never had a single curl in my life. This is how my career in coiffures started...

1970

...and it was ever thus. If fashion dictated a more voluminous look (1980s, I'm looking at you), then a shelf full of hair raising products was needed to prevent the cat-that's-been-out-in-the-rain look, the one where your hair faithfully follows the contours of your head, clinging to it for dear life. (That June 2012 photo? Seems a natural look? Let me tell you, it kept the hair gel-and-blow-dryer businesses in comfortable profits.)

Nowadays, when you put me out in the rain, the curls just go curlier.

So here's the scenario.

You haven't seen me for a couple of weeks/months/years. This can go any of the following ways.

Option 1

I LOVE YOUR HAIR!

Yes, that's right. LOVE, not just in capitals but in bold, and underlined.

ISN'T IT LOVELY! you say. You turn to others, all equally keen to comment.
LOOK AT HER!
DOESN'T HER HAIR LOOK WONDERFUL?!
I'M JEALOUS!
I'VE ALWAYS WANTED CURLS!

Don't get me wrong, I'm joining in with gusto. I'm happy to have this conversation several times a week. (And I do.) Wouldn't you much rather discuss hairdos than chemotherapy regimes?

Plus, I genuinely want people's opinion. I'm all for Dutch honesty, which can, to the polite English person, seem to border on rudeness. But I now find that if you've had chemo-induced hair loss, even the English are finally unafraid of speaking their minds. Opinions abound, and I'll hear about them.

"Hm, I'm just wondering whether this is getting ridiculous," I'd say. "Perhaps I should ring my hairdresser?"

And they'd go, "NO!! LEAVE IT LIKE THIS! I LOVE IT!"

Or they go...

Option 2

ACTUALLY, I LIKED IT WHEN IT WAS SHORT!

I have some sympathy. I also rather liked it when it was short. More than liked: I loved the ultra-short look. (Hence my hairdresser suggestion. Wasn't the shorter-than-short look somewhat better than this poodle-like arrangement?)

The drawback: very short hair was (and still is) more high-maintenance than it seems. Not the hair itself, but the rest of me. Without the make-up and the earrings, the funky look (I'm using the most-heard vocabulary here) quickly turns into the old-man-look. And the trouble with make-up is that all too often I just can't be bothered.

More than once, supermarket checkout youngsters (it's usually youngsters) have squirmed with embarrassment at their mistake after I returned their greeting of "Good morning sir" in a voice that clearly didn't match my appearance.

One person went one step further, and said ACTUALLY, I LIKED IT WHEN YOU WERE BALD.

Too bad. I'm not going back there. Let me say that again: I! AM! NOT! GOING! BACK! THERE!!

Option 3

GOODNESS, WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOUR HAIR?!

You may well ask. I am as startled by my new look as you are. This doesn't sound like a compliment (and it usually isn't - it's often followed by Option 2).

Option 4

I LIKE WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO YOUR HAIR!

This came from someone I hadn't seen since 2012, and who was unaware of last year's trials and tribulations. She clearly thought I'd been busy with the scissors and curlers.

The dilemma: What to do with it?

Keep it ultra-short? It's quite possible that I suddenly lose heart and call Andrew the lovely hairdresser in a moment of despair.

Let it grow? And grow, and grow, and see what happens? I'm intrigued. How will this end? When will gravity take hold of my curls?

"You looked more like yourself when you had no hair at all," a friend commented recently, and whilst this sounds bizarre, she has a point. I look in the mirror and I think, Hm, who does that remind me of? I definitely don't remind me of myself.

Shape it? Whilst it grows and grows? Because frankly, my current state of affairs feels like a carefully rounded hat.

Dye it? I'm not the dyeing kind, I tried it for a year or so but it was too much like painting the Forth Bridge. Having said that, my current shade of grey is rather startling and only this much removed from the Blue Rinse.

Whilst I am pondering these matters, it suddenly occurs to me who I am reminded of when I look in the mirror. No, it's not me.

Reader, I believe I have finally turned into Denise.

Me as Denise, August 2014

118. A week off from everything

It was most welcome, this week in Majorca with my husband and one of our daughters.

Not as sunny and warm as we'd hoped, perhaps, but certainly as restful as I could have wished for.

Nothing to do, nothing to worry about except which book to read next, which food to choose from the sumptuous buffets, whether to swim in the pool or walk to the beach.

We've never done this before. It's not my kind of holiday, being catered for in a place with pools and beaches and sunshine. OK for a couple of days perhaps, but then I'd start twitching and wondering where the action is. Walks! Bike rides!

But now, it was just what I needed. Tiredness still overwhelms me. Yes, we did the walk and the bike ride (leaving daughter behind, mind: this kind of holiday was her choice and walks/bikes didn't feature on her wish list) but only for a few hours at a stretch, and that was me done for. Back to the book, the glass of wine, the food all nicely cooked with someone else doing the washing up.

I am intrigued by the person emerging from this illness.

I'm not the woman I was before. Not physically, not emotionally. One day I may be able to reflect on that properly, but for now, let's just reflect on the hair. After all, that is what most people comment on when they see me.

New look...

It's growing back very thick, very grey and rather curly, although it is a bit early to tell whether the waves are here to stay.

It is now at a stage where I can pretend that it's meant to be like this, and the image-conscious daughter no longer needs to worry whether I'll whip off my hat.

I can't stop running my hands through it, because it feels so unusual and luscious after all that baldness. Small milestones: first shampoo, first drip-drip after a shower. First time I had to do something to it because it was sticking up the wrong way.

Some friends urge me to keep it like this. Trendy! Sassy! Glamorous! and words to that effect.

Perhaps. I'm not sure. It's not bad - and it's a whole lot better than no hair at all - but I'm not sure it is me.

Problem is, I don't know what me is anymore. As I said, I'm not the woman I was, but neither am I sure who I have become... which is both exciting and alarming, depending on the mood.

Relaxing in Majorca

98. The stubbly hair-do

"Is your hair growing back yet?"

People have been asking me this for months, ever since that last chemotherapy session at the end of November.

If only. It takes ages for the poison to work its way out of the system. Three to five months, the VIP nurse reckoned when I asked her how long it would be before I'd have a bit of hair back.

The problem was, how would I know that I could safely stop shaving my head without looking like an autumn tree after a storm, rather bare but for a few hairs here and there? I've had a bit of stubble all through the treatment.

So I've kept a close eye on other regions, for clues. Almost overnight, right on the dot of my final radiotherapy treatment, I found that whilst my two remaining eyebrow hairs had finally given up the ghost, a new fuzziness was appearing underneath.

Not just eyebrows. Areas never seen in public have also started to fuzz over. Areas always seen in public, which I'd hoped the chemotherapy had stripped for good, are beginning to sprout. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to re-join the army of women fighting a battle with beards and moustaches.

Time, therefore, to see what my post-chemo hair is going to look like.

I had my last headshave two weeks ago and am now sporting an unflattering covering of grey stubble.

Let me tell  you, this is not a good look. I've looked it up on the internet and found quite a few women who have posted a blow-by-blow pictorial account of their hair re-growth, so I was vaguely prepared. Apparently, it takes quite a long time for your hair to stop looking thin on top. I've heard that I might expect a different colour, or a different curliness. 

It's rather disappointing that my stubble is as salt-and-pepper grey as ever. Not the lovely silver or pure white I'd hoped for.

Combine this with the thinning-on-top, and my current style is one rarely seen on women but more suited to the mature gentleman. It's worse than being bald, as far as I can see. At least baldness could (just could) be a fashion statement.

Let's hope that soon there will be enough of a covering to be able to pretend that I like it like this. Better still, enough for people to stop thinking I wonder if she's got cancer? and start thinking Lovely hairdo, it suits her. Or better still, passing me by and thinking nothing at all.

Just as well it's winter, and cold, so I can wear hats and more hats, even inside.

Which has the added advantage of keeping my hands off my head. Having a rather enticingly soft stubble is as bad as having a new gap in your mouth which you can't stop searching for with your tongue, just to check it's still there.

Yep. Just checked. Stubble, short on the sides, shorter on top. Still there. Still as short as it was this morning. And this lunch time. And this afternoon. Where's the magic wand when you need it?

The Mature Gentleman look

72. Hair everywhere

Now that we are on the subject of hair, here's a conundrum.

There is hair everywhere. 

There has always been hair everywhere, but now that it's not on my head, I sort of feel that it ought not to be anywhere else either. Not on my towel or on my jacket. Not on my desk or in the shower. Certainly not in my hat or my soup. Yet I find hair in all these places.

There has always been hair in all these places, but ignoring the long blonde ones (daughter) and the short multicoloured ones (cat), I always assumed that they were mine. It seems, however, that I have in fact been completely innocent of shedding. Clearly, other people's hair is capable of travelling through space and attach itself to me.

So now you know. You heard it here first.

That hair on your coat/plate/pillow? It's not yours.

71. Neither hair nor there

FaceBook has been trying to persuade me that I will look good with a Very nice short hairstyle, repeatedly sending me hopeful suggestions and exhorting me to be brave with the scissors. To me, these coiffures look positively bushy, quite apart from the fact that they will take me a year or two to grow.

Why do they keep sending me these posts? One of my friends knew. "They think you are Denise," she wrote in response to my baffled question.

This week, FaceBook (or should that be Big Brother?) has finally figured out why Denise is not responding, and has moved on to the next suggestion. Here it is:

Better be careful - before I know it, I'll be swamped with ideas for helpful facilities ranging from the Bigger Breast Clinic to the Wailing Women Support Group.

The hair loss thing has been rather intriguing. 

I have got to the point where I really, really don't mind it. I tried on Denise again the other day. Looking in the mirror, it just seemed utterly ridiculous. How could I ever think that she looked inconspicuously normal?

But then I look ridiculous in all my old photos, except perhaps the ones with the pixie cut. Too much hair everywhere. The thing is, I've got used to the status quo and no longer notice it or think it strange.

So, not wasting any energy on worrying about looks, I can turn my attention to the scientific process of chemotherapy-induced hair loss. It is not at all how I had imagined it. I thought that you lose all your hair within a matter of weeks: head, toe and everything in-between.

Not so. You may have spotted it on yesterday's picture of my arm. No? Have another look.

That's right. It's not all gone, my hair.

It has just been thinning and thinning. My leg hair has almost, but not quite, gone. If I'd been paying for my brazilian, I'd want my money back - it is, as yet, incomplete. (Almost there, but with only one more round of chemo to go, I'm beginning to doubt I'll get the full monty.) I still have one half-decent eye brow; on the other side there are so few hairs left that I could count them. (Let me do that now... ehm... it's 34. Actually, no, 33. There goes another one.) 

Only my head hair came out in vast quantities, that eventful day just before my second round of chemo, when I pulled it out in handfuls. I shaved the rest, because as you may remember, it wasn't really a good look, and no amount of comb-overs could rescue it.

I thought that would be that, the stubble would gradually disappear. No such luck. It is still growing at an apparently normal rate. I've been shaving my head twice a week, to stop the above non-look reappearing.

Looking around the chemo ward (especially at night when scarves and wigs come off), I note that people don't go bald completely. They are left with wispy tufts here and there, a style that has not, so far, made it onto the suggested FaceBook pages.

They are literally clinging on, the remaining hairs. They stay firmly attached. Occasionally, there is a day when they seem to be yielding easily to my experimental plucking, but mostly, they survive against the odds. You have to cheer them on, really.

This is all, of course, neither hair nor there. It really doesn't matter, except perhaps for one niggling thought.

If the chemo hasn't managed to kill off all my hair, how can I be sure that it has managed to kill off all my cancer cells...?

62. Hot chocolate on the cancer ward

My fellow patients on the cancer ward are a seasoned lot.

As I am wheeled into the four-bedded bay, they welcome me warmly into the sisterly fold. They nod and smile with knowing resignation, yes, we're all in this together.

"Hello, I'm Jenny*," says Jenny from across the room as she passes my bed with an empty cup. "We usually have hot chocolate before bed. Would you like some?"

Actually, I would. I haven't eaten since lunchtime. I can just about sit up to drink it before collapsing again. 

The relief of arriving here, into the relative calm with a soft and pillowed bed and competent nurses, is enormous.

All I want to do is sink into the mattress and not get up for several days (which, as it happens, is exactly what I did). I am happy for my husband to go home. There is a family to sort out. I think of my mother who, in her dying moments, didn't want me to stay because she worried about my children being without me.

"Did you have to wait long downstairs?" asks Jenny, ready to settle in for a good old chat around the hot chocolate. I can just about gather enough energy to form the words "No... sorry, but I'm really tired," feeling a bit rude, but what can you do? She understands.

In my feverish fog, I wonder about the strange uniforms nurses are wearing these days, but then I realise it's Tabiq*, the patient next to me, pressing the buttons on my drip stand to stop it beeping.

The drip stand is pressed into serious action. There are medicines and bag after bag of fluids - I stop counting at seven litres. I don't sleep much, kept awake by beeps and snores and fever and the hourly run to the toilet (courtesy of the 7+ litres of fluids) and the discomfort of having to keep my arm straight because they've put the line just in the crook of my elbow, and nurses turning the light on when someone needs them at 2am.

And by the newly arrived and quite severe bone pains. It feels like having a very bad flu, what with the aching hips and muscle pains. Except that now the bones in my feet are especially painful, which is very strange.

There's also Geraldine* opposite, who has someone ringing and ringing her mobile at 5.30am (why on earth??), just an hour or so before she sleeps through the annoying ring of her mobile phone alarm clock (nobody else does). Every morning, as it turns out.

The fevers last about two days, spiking up and down. The bone pains, too, last a couple of days.

On Sunday, I am again given the option of going home (despite temperatures still approaching 39 degrees), and again I choose to stay. I can hardly sit up (too exhausting) and am quite content to just lie here, making an Irene-shaped dent in the bed whilst things happen around me, without me.

The nurses, I notice, are kind.

On my post-lumpectomy/mastectomy ward, there were quite a few nurses who would come and do things to me without even looking at me. Here, I've met only one or two of those. They are usually the ones who move about in a resigned and bored-looking manner, taking blood pressures and temperatures without a word or a smile.

(Same in the Resus Room. All nurses and doctors there were excellent, introducing themselves clearly, explaining what they were doing and why - but you still get that one nurse who just comes in, looks at my notes, writes in them, fiddles with syringes, and leaves several minutes later without having said a word to us. Why become a nurse if you don't want to look at patients?)

Most nurses here, though, seem to enjoy their job and like being with patients.

Having said that, there is a quiet efficiency and competence running through looking after us that has just a touch of the conveyor belt about it. This strikes me when, during the bedside handover on my first morning, one of the day nurses turns to me with compassionate eyes and says, "It will get better, you know. It will."

I realise that this is the first time any of the endless doctors or nurses has acknowledged that this episode must have left me feeling miserable, frightened or despondent (in my case, all three). It almost makes me cry. For the first time, I feel acknowledged as a human being with a story.

Most nurses, kind and competent thought they are, have no idea who the patient in bed 16 is. Perhaps it doesn't matter... at least they're saving me from collapse, and that's the main thing.

She is right, though. It does get better.

By Monday, my temperature has dropped sufficiently for me to be able to read a book (although not enough to make me want to sit upright). Again, I am offered the chance to go home, and this time I take it. Even though my white blood count has dropped from absolutely fine on Saturday to well below normal today.

But then, with my drugs and discharge letter ready and my husband on his way, the doctor returns. "Sorry," she says, "but actually, we want you to stay in another night. Your own consultant is coming in tomorrow and we think you should see her."

Oh no. Can't I go home and come back in tomorrow to see her? No, it doesn't work like that, apparently. So I resign myself to spending another night among the snores and singing mobile phones, pondering the irony. First they want to send me home but I refuse; then I want to go home but they refuse.

By now, I am feeling much better and am even wandering about a little. When 80 year old Gladys* arrives in the bed vacated by Tabiq, looking tired and ill and puzzled about being admitted to hospital (but sporting a lovely haircut), I am the seasoned patient welcoming her warmly into the sisterly fold.

"Hello!" I say, reaching across the curtain. "I am Irene. Welcome to this room."

It is a bit like being very young again, travelling around, joining groups and communities where you sit around at midnight, getting to know people from all walks of life thrown together by a common desire to spend a few weeks marching for world peace. We stand around with our hot chocolate, chatting, Jenny and I.

"Never tried hot chocolate," says Gladys. "Perhaps I will."

She emerges from behind her curtain, looking at us with a mixture of fear and bravery in her face.

"I have taken off my wig!" she says.

So she has. This, apparently, is a big thing for her. She does not want people to know about her cancer ("they don't stop asking about it then, and I don't want that").This lovely retired school teacher, who lives on her own, had her first course of chemotherapy for cancer eight years ago. She was so insecure about her changed looks that she only went out after dark. And that was with her wig on.

"But now I saw you, and you look beautiful, and I thought, why not? You are so wonderful and smiling all the time!" (She clearly hasn't seen me when I came in here. And she hasn't seen my quiet and exhausted weep behind the curtains, in my husband's arms once he'd hopped onto the bed. No-one has seen that.)

But wow, Gladys. I have been puzzled before, and am puzzled again, about why I have seen no-one else with a bald head in either the VIP lounge or the cancer ward. I can't even imagine what it must be like to wear a wig in this place. My head is sweating so much, I have to keep wiping it dry. Even a scarf is bad news. But people seem to wear their wigs even when they sleep.

"I thought that too!" says Jenny, who is around my age. "I have been looking and looking at you. You are just beautiful. Isn't it wonderful that you can be so confident."

(There it is again, the You are beautiful thing. She must be joking. Have you seen that picture of me in the Resus Room?)

Jenny has only recently been diagnosed (she is in here for various procedures involving tubes and stents in unusual places). She has amazed me with her ability to keep going and chatting all day, receiving endless visitors and nurses teaching her how to manage her new tubing systems, and paying proper attention to her hair and make-up. Despite the new cancer diagnosis, recent surgery and rather a lot of pain. She is dreading the hair loss that awaits her when she starts her chemo.

I am deeply touched that my baldness has inspired gentle Gladys to free her own head. She, too, looks beautiful, but she doesn't believe me when I tell her this. And strangely, she looks much less ill without her hair. Wigs, good as they are, can just look too healthy and voluminous, highlighting your wan face.

By Tuesday morning, I am still exhausted but no longer incapacitated.

I have sourced the linen trolley and am making my bed. Then I give the nurse a hand with all the other beds in the room as well. I can't just sit there and watch her do it slowly by herself.

The rate this is going, they'd better let me go very soon. It won't be long before I'll be handing out pills and answering call bells. You need the toilet? No problem, let me help you. During my feverish nights, hearing that oh-so-familiar sound of the patient's bells was like being a sleep-deprived parent and hearing someone else's baby cry.  You don't think: I wish that baby would stop crying. You think: Poor parent, but ha! it's not mine to deal with.

But by now, I am remembering why I chose to be a nurse; and of all the hospital wards, this is probably the one where I'd want to work. The patients and families are interesting. So many stories I'd want to listen to.

It does make it hard to be a patient myself, unless (like those recent feverish days or the days following my surgery) I feel very ill. I can't help noting what happens to my fellow patients. I hear the nurse tell Geraldine what pills she needs to take, and it tells me what's wrong with her.

I hear the doctor explain things to Tabiq, and it is clear to me that she doesn't understand a word of it.

More difficult: when my consultant finally comes to see me, and then moves on to Gladys, I understand from the brief explanations behind the curtains that Gladys is really rather ill indeed. I know exactly what is wrong with her, and what her outlook is, but I don't think Gladys does. She doesn't speak Consultant Language, however clear and easy the consultant tries to make her words. I also rather suspect she is blocking out the truth about her cancer.

It's not only people with intellectual disabilities who need help in processing bad news. Perhaps I should re-write my book for the general population?

But that's enough for now.

My consultant doesn't seem overly concerned about my weekend collapse and sends me home.

Will this change the chemo plan? She doesn't know yet, not without looking at all my notes properly. They might decide to change it to weekly chemotherapy, which isn't quite such a large wack in one go. Wait and see until we meet in clinic, pre-chemo, as planned.

In the meantime, Tuesday's blood results have come back. There are now so very few white blood cells left that I should probably start giving them names and introduce them to each other with the suggestion to go forth and multiply. Otherwise, nothing stands between me and even the friendliest of bugs. In fact, those friendly bugs that live in your mouth are already taking advantage, celebrating with a throat full of thrush.

Never mind: just be careful, phone us straight away when you have a temperature again, etc etc.

I hug my fellow patients goodbye, exchange email addressed with Jenny, thank the nurses and leave. I am so, so very grateful to the NHS for coming to my rescue.

Lovely to be home. Wonderful to see the children and talk about school days. Bliss to sink into a hot bath. It wouldn't surprise me if you've heard it, my loud Meg Ryan-esque groans of satisfaction as I sank into my own warm bed underneath my own fluffy duvet. 

Who needs a five star hotel? Home, that's what we need.


*Not their real names

Ready to go home...

...and finally, resting where it's cosy and comfy