Saturday 21 May 2005.
        Yesterday I was discharged from hospital at the end of my sixth and final chemotherapy cycle. At this stage my cancer is in remission, meaning that the disease has disappeared, at least for the moment, and the next step is going to be radiotherapy, the theory of the current moment (come back in a few years and there may be a new theory) being that following chemotherapy with radiotherapy is the best way to achieve a permanent cure.
        I suppose that in theory I should feel happy. The chemotherapy is over and the score at this stage seems to be Cancer 0, Oncologists 1. A good outcome. My energy levels are a bit low, probably as a consequence of the chemotherapy, but apart from that I've got off lightly. I have one very small mouth ulcer which I don't usually notice and I still have most of my hair. (A certain amount of my hair combed out in the early weeks of chemotherapy but then the thinning process inexplicably stopped.)
        However, what I feel in practice is a bit hung over. A bit disconnected. The five days I've just spent in hospital had a disjointing effect on the rhythms of my life, and I feel not just low on energy but also at a loose end.
        Still. Chemotherapy is over. Six cycles, five of five days and one of seven days. Thirty-two days in a hospital bed. Maybe two or three needle stabs a day, on average (on occasion it took five tries to get a cannula in) so let's say between sixty-four and ninety-six needle stabs all up. An estimated eight-four confrontations with hospital food.
        Actually, more, because to get complete totals I'd have to add in the two short hospital stays which resulted in me being sent home early because of bloodcount problems.
        Anyway, I started chemotherapy back in February and it's now May, so I've been having chemo for what feels like quite a big chunk of my life. In terms of physical distress, it was nothing like the possible ordeal I had anticipated: I got off lightly. The hard part was the imprisonment factor: being marooned in bed for so many hours at a stretch, physically tethered to a drip stand by a couple of IV lines.
        On the positive side, two things stand out.
        First, I learnt that I had it easy compared to what a lot of people have to go through. One guy, for example, showed up in my ward (which, technically, was part of the hematology department) for treatment for his leukaemia, which has been a factor in his life now for twenty years, sometimes in remission (absent for the moment) and then back again.
        One of the nurses said to him, "I remember you when you used to be in school."
        And that made me conscious of how lucky I was by comparison.
        Then there was another guy who had been hit hard by his cancer and had been assailed by some mystery organism which had taken advantage of his weakened state to launch an invasion. The doctors weren't sure what this mystery organism was but suspected that it might be a certain kind of fungus. They named the organism which was under suspicion.
        Because the guy was a bit weak, the doctors didn't want to dump a broad spectrum antibiotic into the guy's system. Rather, they wanted to tailor the treatment to the disease as closely as possible, which meant determining exactly what the invading fungus was, which meant doing a bronchoscopy. This, as best I could follow the explanation, involved sticking a tube down into the lungs then performing some kind of washing procedure to extract samples which could be analyzed.
        Listening in to the explanation of what was going to happen I felt, again, that I had things pretty easy.
        The second thing that happened in hospital was that I made good progress on my poetry, writing a bunch of stuff. And, during my last cycle, I finished off two longish poems, one called SURVIVORHOOD and the other called CELEBRATION. So, okay, one positive outcome of the chemotherapy experience is that it's been poetically productive.
        Here are the poems:-