Starting up again

We’ve been home for just a calendar month, after Dónall’s ten-week stay in Southampton General Hospital and my own corresponding displacement to a nearby guest house. My sense of duration has simultaneously shrunk and stretched — as subjective time is of course prone to do.

I feel that everything about our life in Guildford has been jolted out of gear. Familiar places and actions have slid out of synch as if we’re in a machine. I’m seeing our surroundings as if with new lenses that alter perspectives. There’s a feeling that familiar actions may result in unexpected outcomes.

And of course I know that this sense of alienation is a result of the stress we’ve been under, and are under, as a result of Dónall’s illness. The first two weeks after leaving the hospital in Southampton presented us daily with the need to learn new ways of dealing with Dónall’s extreme physical weakness, and adapting the medical routines that had sustained him in hospital, to life at home. It was a frightening time for me and a time of intense suffering for Dónall. His weight, about 14 stone in November, had reduced to 10 stone when he left hospital on the 9th of April.

I responded, typically, with lists, registers, and tick-boxes recording every detail of the new routines that would enable Dónall’s healing and nourishment to the point where the next stage of his treatment could begin. And was back on the telephone, making sure that the mediacl support services of our GP and the Royal Surrey County Hospital were aware of us and of our needs.

That first fortnight is behind us now, and in the past two weeks we’ve gained great confidence in the support offered by our GP and by the oncology department of the Royal Surrey, the dietician and diabetic nurses that we’ve talked to.

Reality hit us hard last week, though, when the oncologist asked Dónall if he’d been enjoying rambling across the downs near our house. Dónall had to admit that he’d been able to walk only the few steps from our car into shops — but no, said the doctor, you must be fit enough to walk confidently up and down the hilly streets of Guildford, and scramble along the muddy pathways of Pilgrim’s Way. Or no chemotherapy, for it will ‘wipe you out’ if you’re not fully fit.

So now Dónall is on a mission, to return to his old habit of walking two or three miles most days. He’s working up to it in stages, with a longer walk each day. Today it was the two and a half mile return walk into town, with a gruelling hill on the way home. He made it. He earned the afternoon’s sunbathing in the garden.

Dónall is writing again, as you may have noticed if you follow him on Facebook or read my restacks of his posts on here.

And I’m gardening, though I’ve missed the moment when I should have planted this summer’s tomatoes. Only four of the twenty cherry tomato seeds I planted at the beginning of May have sprouted so far. Everything else is growing luxuriantly, including the clematis that I hope will festoon my installation of kitsch and memorabilia (picture below).

The anthology I’ve edited for the recent Spring Competition is at the proof stage now, and Beth Brooke and Daphne Milne, the worthy winners of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition, have sent me their manuscripts this week. Those will be our final publications this year because the months when Dónall will be undergoing chemo will leave me little time or energy for publishing new collections. But perhaps our final publication as VOLE Books will be a sixth collection of Dónall’s poems, in a few months’ time.