Ep.33: Cheat

Tears pour down my face as David drives us to the shop.  I should be excited, elated and a small quiet corner of me is but right now, right at this very second, I’m broken hearted about what this trip and this purchase represents.

For 3 brief weeks I had a breakthrough.  Lockdown eased and the local gym opened so I nervously signed up for a pilates class.  The polish instructor had us stretching and working our muscles over giant inflatable balls and to my surprise, although I was braced for resistance, my body and back said ‘yes’.  The pull and push of the muscles round my scars felt good, more than good.  I held my breath for the inevitable fallout the next day, for my body to curl back in on itself and complain, but the complaints didn’t come.  Buoyed we went swimming and I managed 10 lengths of the pool before my back started to gurn.   ‘I think I’ve really turned a corner’ I grinned to my physio, ‘I’m finding me again’.  And I was, it felt like holding a black cloth up to the light and seeing chinks of light and colour starting to spill through holes and patterns in the fabric.  My body was being lit up by rays of activity, pockets of moments in each day where I thought ‘this will do, I can live like this’.  We pushed it further and I booked us a badminton court.  It seemed obscenely ambitious, could I really, seriously get my body to play badminton again?  

4 years ago, during a winter when the weather stopped us from putting in the cycle training we were needing for a seriously big challenge in the Spring, David and me ended up playing badminton together 2 or 3 times a week.  He never made it easy, never gave me any quarter and I always lost but we laughed and sweated and loved it.  So we dusted off the rackets and shuttlecocks and good memories and, both of us rusty, David stiff after a hundred mile cycle the day before and me stiff because even on a good day half my body feels encased in concrete, we stumbled and giggled our way round the court.   I hardly dared believe that this was all possible and it continued to be possible.  As 1 week turned into 2 into 3 I managed to get to more pilates and do more swims and we played more games on the court.  I delighted in the fact that we were back doing stuff together and that David still didn’t play me any easy shots, still never gave a single point in a single game if he could help it.

And I started to believe that I really was on some kind of home straight, that I’d served my time and now I could be rewarded with recovery.  With my departure from the BBC imminent I started to know I was going to be ok, that I was going to have the energy and physical capability to grasp the future.  No, life wasn’t ever going to be the same, my body was always going to be changed and compromised, but that was the price of being well.  And it was a high enough price.

Then, on the Sunday at the end of those three glorious weeks of activity and action, my body said ‘enough’.   Playing badminton with our friend Mike and his family my body tightened and twisted and refused to unlock.  I limped round the court getting slower and stiffer and more awkward.  Picking up the shuttlecock was an effort, hitting a return was an effort, Christ it felt like breathing was an effort.  By the following Tuesday I was exhausted by it.  I found it increasingly difficult to sit for any length of time at my computer, sciatica had joined in and nerve pain was dancing down my right leg.  Restless and miserable I climbed the hill above the house to see if a walk would help.  The bracken which had grown above head height in the summer months and made the badgerlands all but inaccessible was dying back to a rich rust.    It was lovely to be back on the hill, picking my way along the deer paths, finding myself astonished that 7 months had already passed since we moved to this astonishing place.   Then, as if I needed reason to love the place more, I saw a mass of deep yellow chanterelles pushing through the mossy woodland floor.    Later that afternoon I returned with David and a basket and we foraged for as much gold as we thought we could eat. 

But as much as I clung to the joys of collecting wild mushrooms and living here, my grief at the state of the muscles in my back and body lingered.  I cried when the physio tried to massage me back to something vaguely normal.  I dutifully obeyed everyone who keeps saying I should listen to my body and I stopped going to pilates and stopped swimming and continued quietly crying whenever David and B weren’t around.

Eventually after 10 days of feeling like I’d been buried alive my back started to ease again and my movements gradually became less stiff and forced so the process of scratching around for ‘me’ again in amongst the debris this disease has dumped on my life restarted.  Eating breakfast at my friends Bruce and Jo’s bar, Jo suggested I have a quick spin round the block on her electric bike.   It seemed a serendipitous suggestion.  Earlier in the week I’d caught up with Al who’d suggested I come and have a try of some e-bikes they got to help people recovering from cancer, then he said ‘I wish I’d got mine sooner, its changed everything’.   I wanted to say no.  I wanted to push away the idea of sitting on that bike, wanted to sink into my feeling that it would be cheating but with Al’s words so fresh in my head I gave in and gave Jo’s bike a go.

And so now, only hours later, here we were in the car driving to the bike shop to buy an electric bike.  I lean my head against the window and cry.  Why does this feel so much like defeat?  This bike will allow us to get back out cycling together, to share something we love, I can stop feeling so sad each Saturday when I watch David head off with the cycle club, now I’ll be able to join him.  With any luck, the e-bike will allow me to cycle fast enough to comfortably keep up, because I’ve been worrying that even when I can get on my bike without my body buckling, I’ll be so unfit and slow that riding with me will be torture.  And once I’m fit enough, well enough, I can turn off the power.  But every time I picture myself on an e-bike I flinch.  There’s no getting round it, it feels like I’ve failed, that I’m accepting that this is as good as I can get, that I’m stuck at this point.  It hurts so much and I feel so fucking angry again that this has happened to me.  I hate this disease so much I want to hit out at it, pummel it, show it how furious I am at it stealing great chunks of who I am.  Maybe it’s because I’m coming up against something I used to do so much of, that it feels more difficult.  I find it so hard to push away the memory of my being able to cycle many miles.  I know that by comparison now I come up so very short. This new bike will force me to confront what I was once capable of, force me to face myself in the mirror, but I also know that to sit around waiting to be well enough to cycle is also conceding some kind of defeat to my cancer. 

So I dry my face on my sleeve, take a breath and follow David into the shop to buy a way of moving forward.