Kelly isn't getting better. And she isn't getting another dose of chemo as she isn't well enough to take that sort of systematic poisoning. She's moved now onto palliative care. Every thing is changing, it's dizzying, but yesterday I was taken aside and given a prognostic timeline for the first time. The first sighting of a black sail on the horizon. My poor, poor girl.

She's being amazing, of course. She's trying to make sure that she tells everyone that she loves them. That's her primary concern. I suspect this does mean everyone. She's such an incredible person.

Spent the last two nights at 90 North Road; first for Paul's birthday and then drinking and watching TV with the sound turned down with Stephen. I was talking wild and woolly bollocks for most of the time but it was good to be around people. And Mullans (and associated Mullans) are good people to be around. Hairy though.

A crack in the clouds

Kelly was better today. Still beyond knackered but when myself and Mo arrived there today with a big bag of womanly requisites she was up and dressed and even wearing a bit of slap! Unthinkable even yesterday. She suffered the weight of a huge amount of visitors and even extracted some enjoyment from my readings of Mervyn Peake's Nonsense Verse. The distension in her stomach seems to be going down and her eyes were bright and alive again.

A good day.

Back in the jug

Kelly's oncology meeting doesn't go exactly to plan. I have another sleepless night, the third on the trot and when Kate lets herself in at 7 o' clock I have had an hours sleep. They wake me as they leave and I leap like a gibbon from the bed, throwing clothes at myself in vain, they leave without me. I skulk around the house unable to properly wake and equally unable to go back to bed. I let caffeine take the strain and imbibe a kettle full of teeth staining tannins.It hits me like a live current, jangling me into life. A reluctant Frankenstein's monster I want to pull the electrodes out and get another five minutes's.

Deirdre rings me. Following the oncology meeting Kelly has been admitted for tests and further observation, could I pack her some pyjamas, her drugs and over night things. I'm mostly worried about her drugs - there have been so many changes and different ideas about drug combinations (sounds like Keith Richards' underwear) that I'm not entirely sure which ones are still "in". I pack them all, realising that in doing so Kelly's overnight bag is going to be an overnight suitcase. I add pants and a dressing-gown to the mix to make it seem less ludicrous.

Deirdre and I speed across town, pausing only for me to stand in a long and listless Post office queue, as I attempt to post back by outsize Dr. Martens. when we arrive Mo and Kate are already in attendance and Kelly is waiting on her new bed. She is tired and slightly glassy-eyed but she is smiling. Her voice, when it comes, is a hesitant whisper, breathless, but her cheeks and hands are warm and she is on funny, charming form. It takes her a little longer to get to the punchline but it's worth the wait.

We move up to the hospital room. It's a single room on the third floor so there is an excellent view of Black Hill and the protean Belfast skies as fat clouds tumble across the skies like sheep with bruised arses. The room is en suite, spacious and clean! You wouldn't get that in that London. Nurses come in and ask a lot of questions, upsetting Kelly briefly, clod-hopping around the question of her never-born children. A junior doctor does the same, prodding in the same places. Kelly gets a laugh by claiming her religious faith is "Catholic agnostic" and asking the doctor to send in the nuns!

Now we are sat alone in the hospital room. "Open Book" is playing on Radio Four and Kelly is drifting in and out of sleep; wading back into consciousness occasionally to deliver an enormous grin. She has been hallucinating fuzzy insects (though she isn't scared of them - reasoning that they are hallucinations) - I hope she recognises me.

Well the doctor has been and gone, a nice man called Millar. He prodded Kelly and asked a few questions and ...well...what? He asked about her belly, suggested a number of things; she might have a virus, it could be an ongoing problem with her liver or it could be her new medication or any combination of her old medications. He didn't seem to know and didn't seem to think that at this stage it was all that worrying. That was the case with the oncologist and the other doctors at the hospital as well - while they were concerned and interested and they phoned and kept in contact none of them seem to think that there was anything much to worry about! At least at this stage. It's oddly heartening. I know it's not normal for somebody to sleep 18 hours out of twenty four but their unflappability has convinced me that its not too bad either, however counter intuitively. I may even sleep tonight.

Am I misreading the enviable sang froid of the medical profession or are Kelly's doctor's all socio-paths? And is socio-path really hyphenated as spell-check suggests?

The Visitors

We're halfway through (more than halfway through) the visiting season and all has gone well thus far. Visits from D & G and M & R went swimmingly but the news that my mother was preparing to visit and stay for a week came with some trepidation...I needn't have worried. She was a joy from start to finish.

Kelly is bearing up well. She has lost a lot of weight because of stomach pains and is surviving mainly on a diet of compliments and energy drinks. Unfortunately the cough that she developed over Christmas is back again and this time the Codeine Linctus seems less effective; the coughing fits are sometimes so severe that she throws up the food that she struggles so hard to keep down. It is heart-breaking.

She says that her panic, her terminal dread, has left her now. And certainly since we moved back there had been a panicked, haunted look in her eyes. She seems less despairing now and says as much. But then again most of her time is taken up with a choking cough, anxiety and bone-deep fatigue: I'm not sure she has time to despair.

One thing that does lend creedence to her statement that the dread has lifted (and I do believe her, but this is corrobarative)is that she has started writing again! This pleases me more than anything as she is a fabulous, lucid and human writer. A new computer arrives tomorrow ( unbelievably kindly donated by beyond-the-call-of-duty friends D & G) - I can't wait to see what she does with it.

We're off to Scotland on the weekend, visiting my sister and brother-in-law and their delightful children. I hope she's well.

Party fears, too

We are behind with the Willow Foundation. The Willow Foundation is a charity that provides "special days for seriously ill 16 to 40 year olds" and Kelly wants a party before she goes back to Ireland. Admittedly given my rather unstructured life-style and the continued fug of depression, days do tend to bleed weakly into one another, but I think it was well over a week ago that Kelly's breast care nurse agreed to fax her application form to them as "she knew someone". Well she evidently knows no one as they were posted and arrived only yesterday and, from what I can gather, without the notes that she was supposed to write alongside the application.

I'm terrified (read: worried) that we won't be able to get a venue for the 19th of March now (I had also completely forgotten about St Patrick's Day, which is a factor in North London).So I'm going to scour the neighbourhood and put my name down on anywhere I can find, as you would if you were hedging your bets with a wedding reception; praying that they don't ask for a deposit. Again flagrant hyperbolic language that I really must rein in: if they ask for a deposit I'll obviously just walk away. I won't be praying to anybody, especially "not you-know-who"*.

I would like to actually pull this off and not have everything go as woefully tits-up as everything else I do. I really am the King Midas of Bizarro-world. Which is a place in the D.C. universe, okay? Bizarro, a sort of rock faced anti-Superman, lives there. The planet is a cube because a cube is the exact mathematical opposite of a sphere. That's just science!


*He hasn't done us any favours. And is incorpreal anyway, so you couldn't call him "anybody" anyhow.

The cancer has now moved to Kelly's spine. The tumours on her liver have increased in size and she has a new one on her hip, which may require surgery in order for her to remain mobile (hip cancer? Who gets hip cancer? I never heard of hip cancer). This was her last appointment at The Royal Free and I for one am well rid of it. Nothing good ever happened there; just the slow erosion of health, her trust and belief in people. The cancer is tearing through her and nothing seems to be able to stop it. It is a horde; a host. I have no idea how long she has left, how long I have with her.

I wasn't with her when she found out; her mum was. I had a psychologists appointment. I tried to cancel but Kelly wouldn't let me, reasoning that the best person to talk to would be a psychologist,under the circumstances. I could think of a better person right off the top of my head but she was busy, comforting her mother.

Walking to the appointment at Manor House in Islington I walk past a church. It has an Alpha Church banner draped over its venerable exterior, like forgotten bunting. The poster promises an examination of "The Meaning of Life" and I realise that I don't really understand what it is advertising. Why would life have a meaning? What would it possibly be for? I'm sure they offer a more or less arbitrary framemework of non-empirical interpretation of life and a quite literal deus ex machina. But life? Why should it have meaning? Red in tooth and claw isn't fucking half of it.

My psychologist got an earful today. As per usual she looked worried throughout and wanted me to have a lot more sessions. I'm having them weekly now when initially there was nothing for about a month available. I must give good madness. It's probably a mixture of the lack of eye contact and the occasional mirthless guffaw, like a frightened chimp. I look like I could start hurling dung at the smallest provocation. I did actually cry this time. I've been weeping spontaneously in the street, watching adverts and in the library (which got me out of a fine). But never in the psychologists were I usually just deliver a stuttered speech in staccato barks.

I'm growing as a person.

More bad news. More cancer. More medication that doesn't work. Less time left together. Another round of phone-calls. More tears, endless tears. I can't understand why nothing is working. She was fit strong and healthy and this thing is eating her up from the inside and nothing even slows it down. I'm so sorry. My poor beautiful girl.

The Cure

Some of Kelly's cure and what the various side-effects are:

Capecitabine - nausea, loss of appetite, tiredness, weakness, back/joint/muscle pain,headache, dizziness, trouble sleeping, temporary hair-loss, diarrhea,

Lapatinib - Back pain, diarrhea, dry skin, indigestion, mouth sores, nausea, redness and tingling in hands and feet, tiredness, trouble sleeping(!),severe or persistent cough, tiredness, shortness of breath, yellowing of the eyes or skin, unusual bruising,

Zopiclone - drowsiness, dizziness, dry mouth, headache, irregular heartbeat, changes in vision, slurred speech, loss of memory, incordination, confusion, depression,

Clonazapam - clumsiness, dizziness, slurred speech, blurred vision, diarrhea, increased thirst, trembling and shaking,

Depakote - back pain, blurred vision, diarrhea, drowsiness, nausea, headaches, weight gain, emotional problems


I particularly like "emotional problems"! There's a shocker.

This doesn't even represent the full amount of her medications, or the full list of side-effects and doesn't mention the radiotherapy or the various other intrusive procedures she's been subject to.

It's no exaggeration to say that my wife is a fucking hero!

If it's not brain damage then it means that the cancer is still there, squeezing her brain and ultimately sure to trigger new seizures. If that happens it means two things:another course of mania inducing steroids and that the radio-therapy has done NOTHING. And, in fact, it could mean another thing too; that Kelly refuses further treatment because she was right all along and that her quality of life would have been much better without all the "treatments" she's received over the last 18 months. She would not have been harrowed, her soul destroyed, her mind scrambled and she could have enjoyed her life without encountering the failings of the world: the mendacity of the law, the inequality,cruelty and institutionalised ineptitude of of British health care and my own failure as husband, lover, protector and human being. I had hoped she would never find out. But a crisis has no secrets.

Desperate Living

This has been the worst week of my life. Real misery is shopping for lipstck in Wood Green shopping centre two days before Christmas and seeing the woman you love more than anything in the world, now almost totally bald and the few remaining hairs glued flat to her scalp with Aloe Vera paste, burst into tears because shes too tired to go on and too confused to use an escalator.

They didn't have the bastard lipstick either.

Medical School taught yer torture

The cancer is in her brain. Kelly is back to localised radiotherapy, this time directly to her head. She will lose her hair again and there will undoubtably be burning to the scalp. She is terrified of brain damage; of not being the person she was.

The cancer being in her brain precludes her from taking part in the bespoke drug trials we had been anticipating and because of the "blood brain barrier" (blood treatments don't work in the brain as there is too little blood for it to be effecacious)so we're back to the bludgeoning burning radiotherapy again. Its for five solid days, ten minutes at a time; her head bolted to the gurney by a moulded mesh mask to stop her head from moving. It's medieval.If there's a fine line between medicine and torture, I think medicine just edges it, mainly because the onus is rarely on the torture victim to remember why they are being tortured and which instruments would probably get the job done.

It's a French farce complete with slamming doors, medical misunderstandings and cheek chewing character actors. Hospital is the only place where you still hear cockney accents that would shame bit part players in Carry On movies.

The Prisoner of Guantanamo Orange

We had our own room behind a paper curtain and we waited as you do in hospitals. They are centres of excellence for waiting and I've put in a lot of hours waiting in hospitals at one point clocking up a 12 hour stint in A & E that was so boring and frightening as I worked my way from five in the evening to five in the morning that I became spaced-out and hysterical, laughing like a nervous jackal as the doctor showed me my own femur through the green hole in my leg. So we waited. Gradually doctors arrived, did various stroke tests, banged Kelly with wooden mallets and went away again. Then an oncologist arrived and did the same thing with slightly more authority.

A begged egg sandwich and a cup of tea arrived, stolen by a friendly Dub nurse who looked and sounded like he could have roadied for The Boomtown Rats. He then took us to the ward on the 11th floor. And then I had to leave Kelly for another night in hospital in her Guantanamo orange pyjamas.

It was hard to leave. Not least because the Royal Free locks all but one of it's exits at night- I wandered the corridors for the next twenty minutes, clattering up and down the corridors, like "The Prisoner" without the fanfaring bongotastic theme tune, angrily shouting and laughing hysterically at the shit art on the walls, somewhere between imperial period MacGoohan and a helium filled Alexis Kanner. There was nobody about, every exit was closed to me - it was a ghost hospital!

Eventually, desperately, I span around a corner and almost crashed into a man ferrying a corpse on a trolley. I have never been so please to see a man with a dead body in my life.

"Please," I said, "please, is there a way out of here?"

"Over there," he said, gesturing over his shoulder. And he was right. I followed the thumbs rule, headed out through the double-door and into the icy night. Belsize Park on a freezing Sunday evening, with no taxis, trains or buses in sight. It was a long walk home.

Back in the Jug agane!

A sunday afternoon. Kelly and I attempt to watch the Ewan McGregor/Pierce Brosnan film "The Ghost". McGregor's accent is ludicrous, the script is a doddering exposition and when Kim Cattrall turned up I knew that something was wrong. And not just with the film. Kelly had already told me she was having difficulty dealing with her depth perception watching film, as cameras tripped in and out of focus it was hurting her eyes. The clincher came when she asked me to change the volume for her. Now this was extremely odd. Kelly is very nuch the practical hands-on one in our marriage. For her to ask me to do something vaguely technical, and pressing a button on the remote is about the limit of my technical sophistication, should have been a warning sign. A more obvious warning sign was when she started saying "erm" repeatedly, the sort of noise you make when someone makes an off colour remark in a social situation or when you're trying desperately to remember a word. And in fact it was the latter - though Kelly wasn't trying to remember a word but ANY word - nothing would come. Suddenly she let out a low gutteral moan and threw herself against the back of the sofa, her eyes rolling back in her skull, her teeth clamped shut, her body rigid as a table. I jumped up and grabbed her by the shoulders begging her to look at me, to acknowledge me. Slowly her body relaxed, curling like a passion fish onto her side. At last only her teeth remained solid, gritted. I thought for a moment. I could only think for a moment, from moment to moment. I thought about her tongue, how she might have bitten it in two or how it could have curled back in her mouth, choking her. But she wasn't choking and there was no blood in her saliva. I ran off once I was certain she was still breathing and phoned an ambulance. When I came back, jittery and sick with sweat, she was still lying on her side, but her eyes were open. I lifted her up and she smiled, her eyes were slipping in and out of focus, her recognition fading, the pupils expanding and contracting as her face seemed to cloud over in confusion.

"Do you know me, darlin'? Do you recognise me?" I said grabbing her arms.

"Love you" she slurred, grinning like a happy drunk.

"But do you know me? What's my name?

A levee broke inside her head. Words tumbled out: phrases, sounds, strings of disordered language patted out. "Bronagh and the bird-bag" was mentioned as were "the tablet, the tables of the tablets". It was language loosed from its moorings, a scatter-shot of attempted speech.

"love you," she kept saying. "love you" She had no idea who I was but she knew she loved me.

How do you make sense of this? My beautiful wife is dying.

She's 35 and onto a second, incurable cancer. The lymphnodes were the least of it: it's in her sternum, whittling out the bones in her chest, and it's in her liver: two lumps, one the size of a ten pee piece, the other the size of a penny. The surgeon pointed out that they didnt think there was any in her lungs or brain as though it were a bonus. That "didn't think" vagueness is the watch-word of all our interactions with hospital staff. I don't know how a surgeon wealds a scalpel when he's covering his arse with both hands.

It had been a nice morning and if I believed in signs and portents or you-know-who I would have believed that nothing could have been allowed to spoil a beautiful bright autumnal morning. Trees carpeted the pavements with red and their black naked branches saluted the blue sky. I should have realised this was the path to the spider's nest. In the waiting room, where we waited the customary hour after our appointment, which had been torture only a week before, we had fun, nervousness making us giddily chatty. Kelly's mum and sister werw over and the chat of Irish women cannot be stemmed, quelled or quashed. Except by the nodded instruction of an oncologist to come and join her.

The surgeon wasn't wearing a black cap but he may as well have been. His summing up was curt; spare: This is cancer. It's in the bone and the liver. It had grown under the battery of chemotherapy, effectively meaning that that particular protracted torture was pointless. The cancer is incurable and they didn't really know if it was treatable either. There was no point in surgery but there were other chemotherapies and drug treatments available. They might prove effecacious but he didnt know. He used the words "random" and "tossing a coin" several times to surely sever the last bonds of trust. And trust fell away like an unpopular mountaineer with a twisted ankle.

Kelly, bright eyed with unspilled tears, managed to ask a series of questions, her voice tremulous and high, her usual lilt straining horribly as if some terrible pressure was resting on her vocal cords. I sat there mute and glaring, clutching her perfect hand as if I were that unpopular mountaineer staring into the face of the abyss.

She's at a driving lesson now. A driving lesson! It's fucking heartbreaking.

Hospital porters are like unlicensed cabbies. They have no idea where they're going and theyre not afraid to ask random passers by or even the people theyre supposed to be moving. In hospital the onus would appear to be on the patient to know what should be happening to them at any given point. Any failure on the patients part to know exactly what's going on will result in irritability and bafflement from staff.

However once you have completed specific tests for a mappable and recignisable illness then you are magicked away to a far more rarified land. There is more room. There are less people and those that are there are genuinely unwell and seem a lot more focussed. Nobody here is shouting drunken abuse at the nurses or remonstrating with the reception staff about their parking. It is quieter and more condusive to reflection. I prefer this as I hate all of humanity and being near them in extremis, hearing their expressed thoughts, seeing their horrible faces, makes me want to bludgeon them to death.

It's a baffling regime for Kelly: she has been handed non-functioning beepers, injected with stuff, told to fast and then been given special drinks to drink. The promised drink will make her feel as if she has wet herself! Every week is rag week for doctors!

She's in a gown now, feeling ridiculous in the mixed waiting room where she is the youngest person by at least thirty years (not counting myself, though I do rather fit in). There are three elderly Irish women who never stop talking, all of them at once, the hubbub a continual stream of hissing plosives, like simmering soup. It sounds quite nice actually - you could drift off to it. They smell of lavender too - it's almost relaxing. There are two silent, hatted men. One of them wears a plush fisherman's cap and has wrapped a silvery rosary around his knuckles. I am reminded briefly of Scott Walker. The other man wears a neat moustache and breathes like he's already on a ventilator. He reads the Sun. We are waiting on a bone scan.

Lunch is in the local creche. It appears to be a cafe at first glance and I admit I was fooled by all the clever trappings at first: the food, the table service, the ubiquitous apple lap-top (lapple - top? apptop?)users taking advantage of the free wi-fi and going through the motions of flirting with the severe and unattainably attractive staff. But I was wrong. This is a creche. Just like everywhere else in London - any museum or library, any cinema or theatre. Even certain Trappist monasteries. Any where, in fact, that braying and entitled yummy mummies feel like parking their 4 by 4 off-road prams and allowing their colourful brood to scream for an hour while they flap on endlessly on about their lives. Today they are joined by a tall camp wally called Gideon ( the kids are called Zack and Oscar - of course!) who is getting his own back on one "Josh" who mocked him for missing the Arsenal one time because he was playing guitar in Cambridge with "Dave". This time it's Josh who is going to miss the football as he has to go to his girlfriend's grandfather's birthday party. In your face Josh! Gideon's going to tear you a new one with this little tit-bit. They're all in from swimming and the kids are grizzling with water in their ears but Gideon and his gilet wearing companions continue to quack on over the screams. Why arent they at work? Why is no one in London at work?

Why do I care?

We're still waiting on bone scan results.

So cancer it is then. The swollen lymph-node behind Kelly's collar-bone is cancerous. What does this mean? Well the best case scenario is surgery and radiotherapy. Radio is far preferable to chemo as, while it leaves the patient tired and burned, it doesnt specifically poison the system. And while it is intrusive, you have it everyday for three weeks (every week day - cancer doesnt work weekends apparently)you can factor it into your life. Chemo takes over completely; your hair goes, your teeth rattle in their gums, you're exhausted night and day with no respite. There is nausea and of course the psychological horror of a shattered body image and the constant awareness of other people's discomfort at your changed appearance. It is truly, truly awful. So as I say the best case scenario is surgery and radiotherapy.

Trouble is that my wife and I arent that good on best case scenarios.

I find myself bubbling with barely contained fury at the moment. The sort of anger that can find no release and leaks out into other unrelated areas of my life. Interactions with my uniquely irritating family for instance who are taking a right kicking at the moment. It's just that there is no one to blame! I could have blamed God if the fucker had bothered to exist. I could have thrown my fist at the sky and denounced him for the coward, the liar, the bully that he is. But I dont believe in god. So who is there? Do I call Richard Dawkins a cunt? Do I desecrate Douglas Adams'grave? Do I sent Stephen Fry a turd in some tupperware. Well I've done all that and I don't feel a bit better for it.

There is nowhere for this rage to go. I need a "Fantastic Voyage". I need to shrink right down and take on cancer, mano a mano. Queensbury rules be bollocksed. I want to hurt you.I want to fucking hurt you cancer.

Wild Duck Chase

I left work to be with my wife and we went from the "Imaging Room" at The Whittington, up the hill to Waterlow Park. It was a beautiful day but unfortunately renovations to the Waterlow Cafe ruined our tranquility and we trudged off for a glass of wine and some onion soup in the Cafe Rouge. Then we took a long stroll through the whispering trees and wheezing joggers of The Parkland Walk; an abandoned train line left over from Dr Beechings cuts, now overgrown and full of bats and monkjack deer (never seen either). We alighted at Crouch End and I continued my search for ducks.

There were none in Waitrose, Budgens, Tescos or Marks and Spencers. I bought a couple of bottles of South African red and we continued our search. We made it to Finsbury Park. No duck in the Sainsburys. Tescos offered something called a "duck crown" and sold "duck legs" separately; a self assembley duck, if you will. I won't. We weighed up the pros and cons and finally trudged over to Green Lanes where the Sainsburys is so big that they have to have two everything; it's a noahs ark of rotting pumpkins and scowling, indifferent staff.

They had a duck! With giblets! Success. By this point we had been walking for about four hours and had been talking constantly. We had been through shell-shocked, to weeping anger, to stiff lipped denial and were now in a good place - chatting and joking. By the time we got home and I opened a bottle of white ( a cheap but rather nice vouvray) we were almost happy.

The duck was a success (though the giblet stock wasnt really worth the hour and a half it took to make) and our cotton wedding anniversary was memorable - if only for being one we woould rather forget.

We get the results of the biopsy back tomorrow. That may take more than a duck-walk to fix