No Unicorns

Hmm orange and pink don’t totally go do they but today I am summoning the sunshine. It’s been a beautiful day but a rough one for side effects. Day four of the drugs and I’m tolerating them pretty well but I think it started to get tougher today. It feels like I am balancing on a scree slope. I sleep A LOT like two naps of two hours in the day plus a full night. I feel amazing when I wake up and I have enough energy to get to the gym or swim or do something creative but usually only one thing before I want to curl up. ChatGPT says these are the green shoots that indicate you are responding well to treatment. That breathing gets easier, pains start to pain a little less. You feel more positive and refreshed after sleep. Positive thoughts start to occur. You look forward. So I am caught somewhere between radical optimism with SO much I want to do and patiently trying to nurture this new physically demanding experience of chemotherapy. It requires quite a lot of self knowledge and self care. More than I have ever allowed myself. To know when I am expecting too much of myself and pushing too hard. To allow myself to rest and read the signs. Not to let fatigue win and to swim or lift weights or sing but maybe not all of them at once! Imagine that.

Today I tried to do a whole day on a singing course with others but it was ambitious. I’ve been managing well this week but without Other People factored in. By lunchtime I was overwhelmingly tired and popped off for a half hour nap. Two and a half hours later I woke up and arrived just in time for my solo and to sing backing vocals for my dear friend Tricia who waited patiently for me to arrive so that she could sing a song called ‘I Can Breathe Underwater’ which she wrote on a short ‘artist’s residency’ in my studio. It’s the most wonderful collection of songs. River Stories by Little Lore. Look it up on Soundcloud. The lyrics perfectly express how I feel while I’m swimming. I’m sure she didn’t mean it so literally but I’ve swum through so many difficult periods of my life and below the surface everything seems clear. You just have to breathe and keep moving in a straight line. Simple.

I came down to my dad’s on Friday night – if you don’t know, the family business is a bonsai nursery and home is…like paradise on a day like today. I saw it in glorious technicoloir today. There are moments in which the whole wide beauty imprints on my brain at the moment. Herons is set in 10 acres in the Surrey countryside which my dad has transformed into a Japanese garden surrounded by orchards. There is a lake behind the house and a pub where I grew up smoking sneaky fags and pretending to study and snoozing on the fishing stages. I was never a proper smoker. Just for show and rebellion as a teenager. Today was a perfect temperature, visiting ducks were mating and koi carp jumping out of the pond. The blossom is hanging in there and the wisteria coming. The red maples are a hundred shades of red and fiery orange. The birds are throwing out loud choruses celebrating the glory of this late spring early summer. Today our choir sung A Thousand Years from the movie Twilight which always makes me cry, and an old English song called the Lovers Ghost which moves like the sea. I chose Poor Butterfly as my solo, a jazz standard taken from a long forgotten musical from 1916 inspired by Puccini’s opera. It was strangely fitting for the setting as poor butterfly sits beneath the cherry blossom waiting for her American to return. My friend Rose started a singing and wellbeing course here in 2012 after we built our dojo or Japanese style workshop. We met at the BBC literally walking in circles around television centre. We worked at opposite ends of a long office on the management floor and I used to wander about to relieve the boredom. She was staying healthy and taking screenbreaks I think but our mutual dissatisfaction led us here. Since then our singing family has grown and grown. I’ve seen people go from never having performed to singing in operas, touring, writing their own songs and leaving their jobs to take up music full time. It’s glorious.

But still it was not enough to keep me on my feet all day. Singing a middle part (I’m an alto) takes concentration, more than I’ve got. I was awkwardly trying to do covid protocol for one on the course as my white blood cell count is likely to be heading down and singing with others is risky. No hugs for all the luvvies (like dodging mines haha), sitting by the open door, masked when not singing. I felt like I made myself an outcast all day and it was odd not to be in the magic circle but as soon as you sing you are together joined by sound and lifted on the waves of collective energy and intention. My sight reading is hopeless without a wall of alto around me so I struggled a bit with the complex melodies of the old English piece. The effort of it put me to bed but I awoke feeling energised. The stomach started to go today and I feel a cold and cough coming on. My goal is to stay out of hospital these two weeks as it’s hard to get out once you’re admitted. They say they will know how well I’m tolerating the drug pretty quickly and I am of course competitive with myself to be the MOST tolerant. So I let myself sleep and do so whenever I can. I drink pints of water and eat light. I wish it affected my appetite but sadly not. It would take a miracle to put me off my food and my dreams of being willowy are disappearing fast. Still. ‘hot for terminal cancer’ is not a look I actually aspire to. Fat and happy will do.

Yesterday an astonishing thing happened which lifted my spirits as doubt was kicking in. I’ve been trying to organise a jazz gig at a London venue to give me focus and amuse myself but they all want a minimum spend of £1500-2000 behind the bar and in food. As I am hoping to raise money for charity so it’s no good if you have to make up the shortfall. As I sat in stationary traffic on the M25 singing my heart out practicing a fast number I have to learn, the famous Bull’s Head jazz club in Barnes rang and said they’d let us have it for free whenever I want in July and September Monday to Thursday. I had to ring them back to check it was true. So July 3rd will be my first gig and the band are marvellous. Please come! Tickets will go on sale in the coming weeks. I am particularly pleased because the Bulls Head holds a special place in my heart. My husband and I had one of our first dates there and we hired the 20 piece big band we went to see for our wedding even though the venue said there was a maximum of five musicians. It means a lot to be there and play out this little lifelong fantasy of mine. I will be joined by a couple of friends at the gig to sing with me.

I’m tired so I have to stop. ChatGPT has been helping me with its encouraging advice. It says that I am clinically in a group with a strong survival rate group. Well it would wouldn’t it. Young-ish for metastatic cancer, fit (ish), multiple tumours yes but none considered that large or impeding my mobility yet. Hormone positive and never had these drugs before. I feel I’m on a downward curve right now but it’ll be ok. I can do anything because I’m a magical unicorn. Try telling yourself that every day. You’ll start to believe it. But for now just sleep will do.