Everything's Coming Up Roses

Standing in the kitchen, staring at the dishes in the sink, I am overwhelmed by a novel feeling.

I’m free! Free of cancer. Free to live. Free to write my book. Free to travel. Free to fall in love. Free to do whatever I want.

On the one hand, I have been cancer free since the day I had the surgery, fourteen months and twenty-three days ago. On the other hand, the doctors don't give one the 'all clear' until five years have passed. For the whole of this year I have lived constantly with a barely submerged dread that it might return. In reality, nothing has changed since the day before yesterday. But somehow in my mind this feels like a major turning point in my recovery.

Today’s outing to Harley Street is to see my psychiatrist. “Fill this in,” he hands me the standard depression multiple-choice questionnaire:

Do you have thoughts of killing yourself?

1. Yes
2. No
3. Goodbye!

Do you sleep more than usual?

1. Yes
2. No
3. zzzzzz

Are you confused?

1. Yes
2. No
3. What?*

...and so on.

“This is remarkable,” he remarks, “Last time you scored 31. Now it’s 17. You’ve gone from severely depressed to only mildly depressed in a month.”

I beam at him.

“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. I don’t think I will need to see you again. Stay on the anti-depressants for another eight months. I will write to your GP.”

*Not the real answers.

Bribery and Corruption

“Lily? It’s Wanda. I’ve bought you some of that Jasmine tea that you love, as a present. But you can only have it if you get out of bed before ten o’clock.”

Trust

I apologise for my long absence. The difficulty I have been having is getting out of bed in the mornings. Left to my own devices I can sleep until lunchtime. I dread waking up and coming back to reality. My first waking thoughts are “How has my life gone so wrong?” followed closely by “What is going to go wrong next?”

Sheldon phones me at 9 a.m. every morning. “Lily, are you out of bed?” It’s a great help, not only because I sometimes actually get up but also because a quick conversation with a friend derails my negative train of thought.

Getting to sleep is equally problematic. To divert my attention from my own head I often listen to the radio. Last night, being Sunday, Radio 4 broadcast a quasi-spiritual-religious-philosophical programme called Something Understood. The topic was trust, or the lack of it. There was discussion of how, as a society, we have grown less trusting of one another. Yes, there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there and it is wise to take care. Only last week a friend of mine nearly fell victim to a rent deposit scam. But our own actions go a long way towards promoting this atmosphere of fear and suspicion. In our pursuit of a ‘me first’ life we seldom consider how our actions may be damaging those around us. Do we stop and think: is what I am about to do going to destroy another person’s trust? Yet trust is the cement that binds friends, families, couples, businesses and institutions together. Without it our society would disintegrate.

The presenter summarised: “Loss of trust is corrosive. It leads to despair.”

Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of explaining how I come to be teetering up the gangplank of a houseboat moored at Chelsea Reach on the river Thames. I have come to visit Suzanne Thomas, a highly recommended hypnotherapist and counsellor. I duck and enter her sanctum, minding not to hit my head on the ceiling. Once safely sitting down I tell Suzanne my story and the source of my despair. Having been so thoroughly let down, first by my body and then by the man I loved, I have lost trust in the world.

“This is not your fault Lily,” Suzanne reassures me, “You’ve experienced a huge shock and a terrible betrayal. Really cruel. Your ex-boyfriend sounds like a classic case of a man suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

I have heard these very words from many different lips yet I still need to hear them again. And again.

Anxiety, Suzanne says, is living in the future, constantly obsessing about “What if...?” Depression, on the other hand, is living in the past. “If only...” To be healthy and happy, we can only operate in the present moment. What Eckhart Tolle calls the now.

But how do I do that? “Wiggle your toes,” says Suzanne. “When you’re anxious, trying to live in the future, or depressed, trying to live in the past, actually you’ve lost touch with your body. So wiggle your toes. It immediately drags you back into the present. Then notice all your senses one by one. See what you see, hear what you hear, touch what you touch, smell what you smell, taste what you taste. It will root you in the present. It’s a much less scary place to be. I can see that lamp. It’s orange with green bits. I can hear the traffic. I can feel my elbows resting on the cool arms of the chair, my hand holding this coffee cup. I can smell that the air is warm and fresh today. I can taste the coffee in my mouth.”

“Another rule to remember,” says Suzanne, “is that the true opposite of fear is love. The two things are mutually exclusive. You can’t have love where there is fear and you can’t have fear where there is love. So surrounding yourself with as much love as possible is a very good idea. Some people are in the middle of a circle of loving friends and family. That is fantastic though it’s got its definite drawbacks as well. But for many of us that is not the case. You may be doing this more or less by yourself but that doesn’t mean that you can’t receive love equally.”

Suzanne’s exercise to bring love into your life.

Sit in a chair. Imagine drawing around you at arm’s length a golden circle. Trace around and around that golden circle. Know that this is no ordinary golden circle. It’s a golden circle of love and protection. You’re in the centre of it.

As you trace around and around you notice that, high above the centre of your golden circle is the source of whatever you think of as your higher power. From that point golden light is pouring down on you. You are bathed in love and protection.

As you trace around and around your golden circle you see that there is a stream of blue, travelling in a clockwise direction, just inside your golden circle. Going around like a stream. Make any adjustments to the colour or the speed until you’re happy with it. That blue is drawing strength to you.

You remain in your golden circle, with golden light pouring down on you. You notice that if you look a little wider around you, you can see for miles, to the horizon, all the way around.

From every point on the horizon, figures are approaching. People. Animals. Maybe too far away to recognise at first. But as they get closer you begin to see who they are. Friends, family, animals you may know or have known. And the more they come the more they come.

There are people here who you haven’t seen for years. People who may have died. People who you’ve had serious and deep relationships with, other people, maybe an old lady at a bus stop who you once had a chat with or your best friend at primary school. And the more they come, the more they come.

They’re forming a circle around you. Not too close but close enough. And that circle is added to and added to. Now you are in the centre of your golden circle. You don’t need to do a thing. Your heart receives love all by itself. And love flows back to them. There’s nothing you need to do. Just let that happen.

Once you do this exercise from time to time, you can start to recall it when you’re just chatting to people or waiting for the train. “Yes, I’m in my golden circle.” You can’t possibly feel stressed when you’re in it. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you’re always in your golden circle. And that’s wonderful. You can just enjoy it.

Some Days Are Harder Than Others

Today I’m seeing Suzy Cleator. Remember her? My oncologist. She went off to have a baby. Well she had a little girl and now she’s back.

In the waiting room is a woman who is obviously having chemotherapy. She’s wearing a wig and her eyebrows are pencilled on. Her partner is with her: husband, boyfriend, whatever. I can’t tell if they are married or not but what I can see is that he is being so tender and kind to her. I start to cry. I dash to the loo and splash water on my face but I can’t stop. When Suzy calls my name the tears are still coursing down my face.

How or when will I ever cross this ocean of grief? I feel I've been adrift here for so long.

I think it’s time to give the anti-depressants a go.

...and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks...

The more I sleep and sleep the more I never want to get out of bed again. “Just another half an hour,” I think and sink back amongst the pillows. The pull of oblivion gets stronger.

So it’s good that there has been someone every day to disengage me from the arms of Morpheus. On Friday Ben brought a curry and stayed the night. On Saturday Sheldon came over. We went for a walk and then had dinner. On Sunday Iris and I went to the movies. On Monday Anton came over and we went down the road to the Persian Café for lunch. Today Tom is coming to take me to Sainsbury’s. Tomorrow I have an appointment with Mr Hadjiminas so I have to get out of bed for that. Justin is going to drive me to Harley Street and back.


But afterwards I suspect I will be longing for my bed.

Lily’s Stress Reduction Programme: Day 1

Singing: Daisy knocks on the door. It seems like ages since we sang together. That’s because it has been ages. I flick the kettle on, load the cd and pretty soon we are leaping around the living room warbling scales and arpeggios like a couple of nightingales.

Food: For lunch I visit the Rainforest Café. It opened at Urban Bliss, Portobello Road, whilst I was out of the country and sells fresh, home made raw food.

Friends: Sheldon called from the fishmonger’s. “Salmon or halibut, Lily?” He brings fresh halibut and I bake it with olive oil and lime juice. Ben, Sheldon and I watch Holland beat Uruguay (poetic justice).

Things I got for free today: A singing lesson. A sublime, bespoke scent.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

On the news: Depression increases the risk of dementia. The researchers are not sure why but think it may be linked to the amount of stress hormones released by the body when we are depressed.

On this blog I recently wrote a reply to a reader who spoke of committing suicide. I talked about how, for me, the loss of hope is more distressing than the fear of death. And that is what I have been grappling with. Even though the surgery was shocking, the chemotherapy was hideously debilitating and the radiotherapy was weirdly frightening, throughout all of that time I maintained a fundamentally optimistic position. Deep down I believed that I would get through this and put it all behind me. I was unshakeably convinced that breast cancer would be an episode in my life, that it would not be my life. When Nick betrayed and abandoned me that all changed. I felt that I could not trust my own judgement. “If I was so wrong about Nick, what else am I wrong about?” I ask myself. Everything that I had believed in has been undermined, including my belief that I will get well.

I’ve heard depression described as sadness and grief that goes on for a long time. If that is the cast then I am experiencing depression. The headshrinkers call it ‘reactive’ rather than ‘clinical’ but I wonder if the risks are the same?

This is a worry. If it ever came down to a straight choice between dying of cancer and living out my days with Alzheimer’s disease, I would take the cancer every day of the week.

So, enough of this depression. Starting from today I will institute Lily's personal stress-reduction programme and report the results right here on this blog.

In Treatment

I’ve got so much to tell you. First of all I have to ‘fess up. When I said that I was going to a ‘retreat’ I wasn’t being one hundred percent frank with you. The retreat was a rehab.

I have been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for the many years, so I’ve had experience of rehab in the past. This one was very different though.

I booked myself in to a wonderful place called South Pacific Private (a.k.a S.P.P.) As rehabs go, it is on the swanky side. Set on Curl Curl, one of Sydney’s more beautiful Northern beaches, it has ocean views and good food. The programme there is based on the model developed by Pia Mellody at The Meadows in Arizona. It focuses very much on co-dependency.

Eighteen months ago, my life was on cruise control. I worked. I spent a lot of time with my wonderful friends and family. I enjoyed my home life. I travelled. Then my beautiful cousin Gaby was diagnosed with a cruel and aggressive cancer. She died very quickly. I met Nick. Then my work began to collapse. I lost three major projects in quick succession and with those, all of my income disappeared. Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had major surgery, followed by chemotherapy and then radiotherapy. I lost my hair. I became very sick indeed. But I always had hope. Throughout my cancer treatment I looked forward to a blissful time of regeneration with my gorgeous boyfriend. In the midst of so much trauma I had grown to love Nick very much. He was always utterly kind and supportive. He came to every medical appointment with me. He held me as I walked to the operating theatre. He was waiting with flowers and kisses when I came out. He was at my bedside every day. When he had to return to Australia he called me on Skype every morning and evening. It seemed to me that at last I had met a man on whom I could rely absolutely. A man who knew what he wanted and would be by my side in the darkness and in the light.

And I was horribly duped.

When Nick left me, my world became like a mirror that had broken into a thousand shards. Everything that I had trusted and believed now seemed horribly distorted, upside-down and back-to-front.

Nick told me that when I got cancer he felt that he was no longer the centre of my attention. He was compelled to seek solace in another woman’s arms. When Nick cheated and lied to feed his love addiction he degraded himself. In order to justify and redeem his behaviour it was essential for him to convince himself, and anyone else who would listen, that he had never loved me in the first place.

Once Nick had taken up that position it became impossible for our relationship to heal or grow. I do believe that it in times of doubt and crisis we can reach inside ourselves to find the courage, honesty and love that will ultimately create a deeper bond and understanding between two people. But for Nick to admit that he did love me would have shattered his fragile ego.

And I blamed myself. In my head I went back in time and tried to re-shape the past. I became trapped in obsessive thoughts about how I could have done things differently. Could I have focused more on Nick and his needs when I was going through the terror of chemotherapy? Whilst my hair fell out? Whilst I felt sick all the time? Could I have been a stronger person? A better girlfriend? Could I have just loved him a little bit more?

I tortured myself with these questions. I tried to make Nick see that his new ‘love’ - for a woman he had met only three times and who was, by the way, also already in a relationship herself - was in fact textbook romance addiction. I covered up for Nick in many subtle ways. I did not reveal the full extent of his cheating and lying to people who knew him. To others I spoke honestly about what had happened but I concealed Nick’s identity from them. I allowed his shame to become my shame.

For three months I tore myself apart, desperately trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I thought that if only I could find the faulty gene, the broken fibre, the original fatal flaw, I could fix myself. I wanted to fix myself so that I could be sure that this would never happen to me again. Instead, my self-doubt brought me to the brink of despair.


That is co-dependency.

Trying to stand up to it all was in itself a kind of madness. In the end the only sane thing to do was to put myself into the nuthouse.

In a state of high anxiety I arrived at S.P.P. I sat on my dormitory bed surrounded by a blue hospital curtain and burst into tears. I continued to cry for three days. It was a busy time though. Up at 6.30 a.m. A walk on the beach. Breakfast. A community meeting. A lecture. Morning tea. Group therapy. Lunch. Group therapy again. A workshop. Dinner. A 12-step meeting. Supper. Bed. Up at 6.30... In amongst this hectic schedule there were appointments with a GP, a nurse, a therapist and a psychiatrist.

Bella, my therapist, was a truly wonderful person. She had the compassion of Mother Theresa combined with the insight of an MRI scanner.

I had diagnosed myself as being severely depressed. To my surprise the psychiatrist did not offer me anti-depressants. Bella explained: “You are suffering from an enormous amount of grief. The only way to deal with that is to feel your feelings and go through it. It will take as long as it takes. Anti-depressants would only put a lid on your grief and store up trouble for the future.” So much for Dr Lily’s diagnosis. “You need to cry a lot,” she added, “I have never known anybody who has experienced so much loss in such a short space of time.” That helped to put things into perspective for me. I had assumed that I was just being melodramatic and hysterical.

We had lectures about co-dependency; lectures about boundaries; lectures about feelings; lectures about addiction; lectures about open communication; lectures about recovery and therapy, therapy, therapy.

During the second week I went through an intensive programme-within-the-programme called ‘Changes’. This involved being shut up in a room for a week with four other changelings. We all did a lot of screaming at chairs.

After the cathartic shouting I felt more settled and relaxed with the whole thing. Next, I presented my ‘trauma egg’. This is an illustration of all the major traumatic experiences of one’s life from babyhood to now. Mine took quite a long time. As my presentation concluded I looked around at the group. Everybody’s jaws were hanging open.  Bella turned to me with her marshmallow x-ray eyes. “Are you going to write a book?”


Despite the intensive work I still hated myself. I still felt that it was all somehow my fault. In despair I did the only thing left to me. I prayed for a miracle.

Halfway through the third week I was sitting in a workshop listening to a very beautiful young woman named Cecila tell how her older, divorced boyfriend had asked her to marry him. Cecilia accepted. The boyfriend then went abroad. That was three months ago. He had not returned. “What is wrong with me?” she wailed. “I need to fix myself so that I can fix our relationship.” The therapist gave her a kindly look and held out the palm of her left hand. “Here is the evidence that this man has run off and abandoned you,” she held out her right palm, “and here is what you are making up about yourself.” Bam! I leapt to my feet. “I get it! At last!” I cried, “What Nick did was an arsehole thing to do. He is a man who would cheat on his girlfriend when she had cancer and then abandon her. That is simply the kind of arsehole Nick is. His behaviour has nothing to do with me.” The whole room burst into wild applause.

So here is what I learned at S.P.P, in a nutshell: the only thing wrong with me is that I keep thinking that there is something wrong with me.

Could I have done anything differently? Could I have been younger? Could I have been kinder? Meaner? Could I have been more beautiful? Smarter? Less smart? Warmer? Colder? A better cook? Could I have not got cancer? Could I have loved Nick more than I did? NO. And no matter how good I might have tried to be, our relationship would always have ended the same way. Nick’s love addiction is a gaping hole in his soul that cannot be filled. It means that he will endlessly search for the perfect woman in the belief that when he finds her he will be complete. And he will never find her. Because that woman does not exist. The only person who can ever heal Nick is Nick. Until he is prepared to do the painful and courageous work that is required, his addictive patterns will not change. And he will continue to damage every woman that he comes into contact with.

Now I am grateful that I got out of it when I did. I still feel pain at the loss of my dreams. I still feel loneliness when I wake up in the morning. I still love Nick. Love is not something that I am prepared to deny. But I am no longer prepared to be in the orbit of a man who is predestined to hurt me again and again. And in a strange way I feel great sadness for Nick. He has demonstrated to the world and to everybody he knows that - no matter how dire the circumstances, no matter how close the relationship, Nick will always put Nick fist. People pull away from that. It is not his fault. He is an addict. But he is truly alone.

***

Here is a therapist’s definition of romance addiction, in case you were wondering:

 Romance Addiction

A romance addict may suffer from a long streak of serial short-term relationships, marital infidelity, bingeing and purging in dating, or compulsively seeking an idealized romantic partner. Romance addicts are very skilled at intrigue and fantasy but struggle with commitment to a long-term relationship. The romance addict gets high on the early stages of courtship and usually abandons the other person once they begin to deepen the intimacy of the relationship. Like the sex addict, they are using romance as a way to avoid bonding and intimacy. The romance addict who is married or in a long-term relationship may struggle with intriguing with people other than their partner. They also usually have a hard time adjusting to the loss of the romantic high in their committed relationship. - Paul Ginocchio, M.A

Screaming in the Car

I am still wading, swimming, drowning in the pain of breaking up with Nick.

Throughout all the ghastly cancer treatments I held fast to love and to my dreams. I anticipated the day that Nick and I would be together in Australia, putting the past horrible months behind us: camping, lying on the beach, laughing, swimming, eating and getting stronger together. I invested all my hope in our holiday. Then, the day I landed in Sydney I discovered Nick deleting texts from his mobile phone. When I challenged him about it he told me that he had been seeing someone else. He told me that he was not in love with me. He told me that he had never been in love with me.

“I have never loved you Lily” Those were the cruellest words I have ever heard uttered.

So now, instead of eating in nice restaurants I am forking out $150 an hour for therapy. Instead of touring Tasmania in a camper van I am being driven slowly insane with grief. I am very far away from my friends. I feel so alone. Nick is icy cold and distant. The more I have tried to salvage our relationship, the more he has rejected me. Repetitive questions circle in my head, as monotonous as scratched cds: "Why did you tell me that you loved me? Why did you fly half way across the world to be with me? Why did you burst into tears when Mr H told you that I was safely out of surgery? Why did you beg me for a second chance? Why did you insist that my family go to visit you in Queensland when you were already seeing someone else and planning to break up with me? Why did you book flights and a camper van and make all those plans with me? Why did you tell me how excited your children were to meet me? Why did you lie to me from the very beginning? Why did you abandon me when I needed you so much? Why did you think it was ok to hurt me like that? why? why? why? why? why?"

And then I found a lump under my arm.

I made an appointment to see Dr Hargreaves, Sydney’s answer to Mr Hadjiminas. I spent a week waiting, barely able to eat or sleep. I didn’t tell anybody.

“How are you?” Dr Hargreaves enquired, beaming at me. Well he did ask. So I told him: about the lump, about Nick, about crying all the time. “Oh dear,” he frowned, “well the Tamoxifen will definitely be contributing to depression. Let’s have a look at you.” He examined my neck, chest, breasts and armpits. I have always maintained that Mr Hadjiminas’ hands are better than any mammogram. I get the impression that Dr Hargreaves has the same kind of magic fingers. After all, these top breast surgeons feel women up all day every day.

“It’s just scar tissue,” Dr Hargreaves proclaimed. I expelled a breath that I seemed to have been holding since the beginning of time. “After surgery and radiotherapy you will get these lumps and you are bound to freak out. You just have to get them checked up.”

This morning I am driving to see my therapist. It is rush hour and I’m in a slow crawl along Old South Head Road. I divert into a side-road to take a short cut. Ten minutes later I’m lost and hopelessly snarled in a gridlock situation. Then I begin to scream. It’s weird. I have never screamed in my life before, not even as a child. I feel as if I have grown two heads. One head is observing: “What is that extraordinary noise? Where is it coming from? How are you capable of producing it?” The other head is simply screaming: deep, loud and vibrating with horror, the sound fills the car. And it will not stop. It screams and it screams. The first head remembers a song, by an American folk singer, titled “Screaming in the Car”. She sings about being pulled over by the cops for “screaming in the car in a twenty-mile zone.” My screams convulse and bend into sobs of laughter.

Does anyone know that song or the name of the singer? I would love to get hold of a copy.

Sunshine and Rainclouds

I meet May for yet another delicious lunch at Providores. Apart from being a budding Shaman, May is a wonderful artist as well as incredibly stylish and loads of fun. We feast on exotic Tapas then stroll on down to Harley Street for a drop of post-prandial Taxol (me) and reading of Harper’s Bazaar (May).

“Hello sexy lady” shouts Cara as I enter the chemo suite. “Hello sexy lady yourself” I reply. And well I might. This lady is the bomb. She’s tall and large with silky black skin and hair sleeked back in a high ponytail. Cara always wears fabulous metallic eye shadows in vivid colours. Later on, as she’s leaving for the day, I catch her dressed in a stunning emerald green ruched dress over black leggings, her neck and ears adorned with peacock blue and sea green gemstones.

“I love, love, love that wig” says nurse Lottie. I’m wearing the red one today.

I love, love, love the nurses’ ability to live their lives to the full. They are a terrific counterpoint to some of the uptight skeletons I see wandering about this locality, their plumped-up lips walking three paces ahead of them, looking so angry and miserable you’d think they’d just had a Louis Vuitton poker rammed up their fundaments. Harley Street is home to numerous aesthetic surgeons. Not that I’d say no to a little ‘anti-ageing therapy’ myself if it was offered, but I just think if you’re going to spend all that money on making yourself look good, you may as well use the new visage to crack open a smile. What’s the point of going about looking like you’ve just found dog excrement in your wheat free organic rocket and carrot sandwich?

Apologies for the rant, back to business.

Chemotherapy today is uneventful. That’s a good thing. It seems that Suzy Cleator’s new, weekly regime is working a treat. I mean working not in the sense of killing the cancer that I don’t have. One hopes it is doing that. I mean working in the sense of having fewer and less severe side effects. As I’ve said, I don’t feel sick. My sense of taste has returned to normal. I’m very tired but so what? I sleep a lot.

What’s cheering me up is that it’s another one off the list. Yea! Only five more to go. The future seems all sunshine and rosy.

Which brings me to Tuesday’s little raincloud. I sincerely apologise to any reader who may have been distressed by my outburst. I have received a deluge of emails and phone calls and I thank you for your concern. Obviously, I’ve apologised to Nick already. He said, “That’s what I’m here for darling.” I adore him more than ever.

I’m so used to going to (name cannot be mentioned) self-help groups where we talk about that stuff all the time. We just get it off our chests, laugh at ourselves and move on. I forget that other people may be shocked or worried by what goes on inside my head.

This chemo lark has its ups and downs but ultimately, I’ve found that acceptance truly is the key to freedom. As long as I tell myself “nooooo, it’s not fair, why me” etc, I will have days like Tuesday. And as long as I just accept what is and get on with each day as it comes then my life will be as good as it can be, right now, today.

People often remark, “You’re so brave.” I don’t see it like that at all. To my mind, true courage is choosing to do what's right, despite one's fear of loss or humiliation. Believe me, if I had any say in the matter I wouldn’t be doing any of this. But the only choice I have now is to do it with good grace or to do it with fear and self-pity. I hope that most of the time I choose the former.

Please don’t be put off reading Chemo Chic in the future. It is not meant to be a misery journal. I promise that normal flippancy will resume immediately.

H.A.L.T.

I know that I probably come across in this blog as all confident and full of myself but that is sometimes far from the truth.

Over the last few days I’ve been spending more and more time in bed. I know from experience that too much time alone can push me into some very weird and warped ways of thinking. Add a few reversals of fortune and situations where things don’t go my way and suddenly I’m spiralling into negativity, self-pity and depression.

Last week’s blood test showed my haemoglobin to be low. “You may need a blood transfusion. Phone us if you start feeling breathless,” they said. Sure enough, the very next day I began to feel breathless. I phoned the hospital and spoke to the doctor on duty. “Come in right away” he said. They got the transfusion on standby and did another blood test. We all waited for an hour for the results. My haemoglobin level had gone up! The steak and cabbage must have done the trick. Then I felt stupid. I had created an unnecessary drama. The nurses had to stay late on a Friday night because of me. The doctor said, “Go home and call us again if it gets any worse” but I know he wouldn’t have sent me home if he seriously though it was going to get any worse. I suspect that he suspected what I now suspect myself: that I had a panic attack.

When Nick went home to Sydney it was with the hope that he would come back to London in the Autumn. The weather has turned yet Nick and I have not spoken about it. I haven’t wanted to put pressure on him. I’d rather leave him to make his own decisions about his life. But I’m longing to see him again, I mean I’m longing to touch him and hold him and make love with him and have time with him. As technologically advanced as Skype is, it is not a substitute for a real live boyfriend.

The fact is, Nick’s mother is ill. Nick went to visit her last week and was shocked at how much she had deteriorated in the few weeks since he had last seen her. Now he’s made his decision. He needs to spend as much time with his mother as he can, while he still can. So he won’t be returning to see me. It’s the right decision. It’s the only decision he could make and I know it. Or at least the adult part of me knows it. There’s another part of me, though, that is having a tantrum, stamping her foot, throwing her laptop on the floor and screaming “IT’S NOT FAIR.”

On Sunday morning I went to one of my groups, the name of which I cannot mention. I arrived late, wearing my ‘cappucino’ bob and dark glasses, Anna Wintour style. As I walked in and groped for a seat I felt painfully aware that everyone was looking at me. And why wouldn’t they? The last time they saw me I was a redhead. After the meeting finished I slunk off, wrapped in a suffocating blanket of self-consciousness. I felt like an object of pity. I felt that some would be making fun of me as soon as I was out of earshot. To be honest, I felt ashamed to be me.

The phone has not rung today. I imagine that all my friends have stopped calling me. Probably because I keep writing about them in this blog.

I Skype Nick. “Hey darling, how are you?” he asks. I do not count to ten. I just let him have it: “I’m tired I’m so tired, you have no idea how tired I am I’m all on my own I’ve got no-one to help me I look awful my hair has fallen out I'm having panic attacks and all I do is worry about money I’m tired all the time and I have to cook and shop and do the laundry and go to the hospital and I just can’t do it all and then when I ask people for help they just let me down like they’ve let me down all my life and I always have to look after myself and earn money and make sure the bills are paid because if I don’t do it no-one will you don’t know what it’s like and now I’m sick and I’m too tired and everyone’s abandoned me just like my father did and I always end up on my own and now I’ve gone and got a boyfriend who lives on the OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD and can’t be there for me when I need him why oh why does this always happen to ME?” By this time I’m hysterical. Tears and snot are pouring out of my face. I don’t dare look at Nick because then I will have to see myself on the little screen in the corner. So I bury my face in my hands and avoid his eye.

Nick does not terminate the call in disgust. Instead he says, “Can I ask you a question?” “Ok” I snuffle. “How old are you right now?” “Oh don’t start!” I spit back.

Nick tries a different tack. “Darling, I think you’re beautiful and sexy. You’re doing so well. You have so many friends and people who love you." Now that’s more like it. " I’m so proud of you. You’re an inspiration to all of us,” he adds, trowelling it on.

I lift my head and give Nick a tearful blink. “Now sweetheart,” he says soothingly, “you know what they say?” “What?” I ask. “You mustn’t get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired.” I nod. “So why don’t you get something to eat and then have a little lie-down hmmm? Then when you wake up you can phone Iris and have a chat with her.” “Mmmm, I do feel quite sleepy now” I say. “That’s it darling, you get some rest...”

I awake three hours later and look at my phone. Five missed calls, two texts. It seems that my friends have not abandoned me after all.