Sleepwalker?

An occasional cancer blog from Robert Minton-Taylor on how he is coming to terms with a diagnosis of terminal Stage 4 prostate cancer.

Exhaustion is something I have got used to after my stroke in September 2019. That constant feeling of lethargy is something I have come to accept as the norm, but this tiredness is different.

It’s all the more invasive,. It gets into every joint and every muscle. I feel like I’ve been constructed by someone who has been on an alcohol fuelled bender who hasn’t quite got to grips with the instruction leaflet.

Twenty-four hours after my first chemotherapy treatment leaves me wondering what all the warnings are all about.

I feel pretty much normal save for the delicate work of art on my inside upper arm where an intravenous thin and flexible tube runs from my elbow to the top of my heart. The tube is finished off with a bit of tubing curled round and strapped to my arm with tape. It looks very neat.

I’ve covered it with a fetching band of material so I don’t look like some cyborg out of an episode of Star Trek ‘Voyager’. I don’t want to frighten anyone.

Then all hell breaks loose. At 5 am in the morning – I’ve been up all night – I’m still wide awake wondering when my brain is going to say: “Look mate you’re tired just put your head down and go to sleep.”

But the steroids I’m taking to prevent infection because of my low blood cell count are making me hyper active.

I can’t focus on anything, so I switch on the TV. I’m captivated watching some guy demonstrating that you can soak-up a bucket full of water with a shammy leather without spilling a drop. But why would you want to do that? Who watches these programmes in the early hours of the morning, save for saddos like me?

I suddenly feel sick. I check the list of side effects on the leaflet I’ve been given, and yes its normal to feel sick, that’s why I have been given two different types of anti-sickness pill to combat the feeling.

But in ticking the sheet I’ve been given to record the after-effects of the chemotherapy and hormone drugs I can’t figure out whether I should be ticking the mild, moderate or severe box.

Then I start getting tingling sensation in my toes and fingers, cramp in my legs and hot and cold flushes in quick succession. I feel like my body is being taken over by an alien being. All in all I feel pretty grungy, probably best lie down on the sofa in the living room.

I’m well aware that blokes don’t have the same pain threshold of women. As my wife’s moth Patricia used to say, “if men had to give birth that would be the end of the human race”. Let’s be frank we are wusses. But I don’t want to appear to be completely pathetic. I mean an ex-public school boy like me should be man enough to present a stiff upper lip to the world, except that I’ve never believed in that crap.

I’m now greeting the dawn with sense of having been on a long night shift somewhere. Except I haven’t. It’s beautiful watching dawn break and the first arrival of a family of squabbling starlings descend on our bird feeder for breakfast, but unlike them I’ve just been wandering aimlessly around my home in the dead of night.

??Sleepwalker?is the sixteenth studio album by The Kinks released in 1977. It marked a return to straight-ahead, self-contained rock songs after several years of concept albums.