Radiotherapy #2

By the middle of week three, the boredom has really peaked, not just with the treatment, but with the lifestyle. I'll describe it: for you. Get up at 8.00. Try to eat breakfast but feel the urge to vomit as soon as the dry toast touches the tongue. Sit in the car, watch the ex-wife valiantly try to remove 2 inches of ice from the windscreen. Ten minutes later the car starts and the little compass that sits somewhere in the undamaged part of my  brain, picks up the map coordinates, and repeats to itself,' Radiotherapy Queen Elizabeth Hospital.'  The Citroen starts up and off we go. We travel the same route every single day, to the point where I can close my eyes for ten minutes and open them again, and know exactly where I will be. For example, we are sitting at the traffic lights opposite the Skoda garage. Close my eyes and I think of The Bear Hotel which is about 10 minutes away. I make allowance for traffic congestion. Open the peepers and there we are, next to the Hotel. And so it goes on and on, my own 'Groundhog Day.'

Back on the Radiotherapy table, my carefully made headshell has come apart and is now being held together by bulldog paper-clips, the idea of  having a new mould made and drawing out the process further than six weeks is unimaginable. The Radio takes about three minutes to apply. We leave. We return. We leave. We return. It's tedious but it must be doing some good.

However, something terrible is about to occur. The ex-wife goes shopping. I cannot bear to watch another episode of Frasier or a another repeat of Ironside. So, I decide to clean the insides of the windows and take the curtains down.  A kid, of say fourteen or fifteen, gawps at me and laughs. I check to see if my flies are down. I'm okay I am covered. A pensioner I know walks by, I knock the window and wave, and she just crumbles when she looks at me. I think she is having a stroke and I begin to scuttle across the room to see if she is okay, I glimpse sideways at the mirror and take in the shock that the man in the mirror has lost most of his hair.

I phone the Radio people and a woman answers in a sleepy and bored voice, 'it's normal, don't worry.See you tomorrow.'

We leave. We return. We leave. We return. It's tedious but it must be doing some good.