Fidelma Cook

I’M still reeling from the further level of care I’ve started to receive from this morning. Home, rather terrified again, as my walking is not good at all and I tremble and can’t breathe. My marvellous doctor at the SSR clinic arranged it all. I am now in a programme of hospitalisation at home.

France is genuinely dedicated to keeping patients in their own home as long as is humanly possible and then some.

To this end, I now have my own team. A doctor who will work with my useless GP and who I can call at all times. I will have a nurse morning and night augmenting the local one who does my injections.

I will have aides morning and night to help wash and dress and undress me, augmented by aides to do my meals and cleaning.

I have a dossier left on my table for other medics to see and tick which includes a 24-hour dedicated hotline to the service. And I have the blessed Miriam for all else.

She is beyond all friendship and neighbourliness. She sees nothing strange at all in what she’s doing for a neighbour and friend. Without her, I’d be lost.

I am also home because there is no further treatment. My feeble, wrecked body can take no more, so it is somewhat inevitable that the tumours will grow again. It is just a matter of how fast and how soon. No one can tell me that. When told, although of course intellectually I knew it already, I had a long night of the soul and will have many more.

You see, I really do believe in guardian angels, prayers and miracles, but even Pollyannas have to finally face facts. Truth is, I have and I haven’t.

Like all of us, I just can’t, in my arrogance I suppose, believe I’ll cease to exist on this plain. So I dwell too much on negatives trying hard to be positive to help the brain help me.

And then, of course, why should I be any different from any other soul in the world? We are all special and all deserve our extra shot at life. And, oh, God, I still lust for life even trapped as I am.

But I’ll have to strive for acceptance for what is to come and that is the hardest thing of all. I am still at the foothills of that.

I’m told I’ll just get weaker and weaker from now on – then there will be no comeback unless I get that miracle.

Profitez from good times now, they say.

Pierce still harbours hopes that the splendid Royal Marsden will come up with a solution that won’t wreck my body further. Still hopes I can get to London, although that window of opportunity will soon close with my feebleness.

All the doctors urge that I must go now before further deterioration and I have agreed. But when, where?

I am beyond my own organisation – everything is just too much. My information, locked inside wrecked computers, does not help. A month or more on, my Mac laptop heading for experts in a forlorn hope of hard-drive salvage is still in a UPS warehouse, not released by customs.

And the house is about to go on the market to fund any new life – however brief – in

England. Some days – everyday – I can’t believe all this is happening in a relatively short time, but I need to get my head around it and make, ugh, death plans: wills, power of attorney, responsible moves like that.

I thought I’d look these things straight in the eye but I’m not that brave and give in to the trembles instead.

For now, sitting in silence with no TV, no Netflix to take my mind off events, only books and silence more deep when the nurses have gone and l’heure bleue descends as the light changes to a melancholic hue from which there is no escape.

This first night back, which I face with trepidation, will colour the days to come. I have to somehow get power into my legs, confine the shaking, stop thinking of falling. You don’t know the half of it, and I’m not inclined to take you that far. You don’t need it.

I just know this unaccustomed loneliness is destroying me. I need to be with Pierce if at all possible and surmount the difficulties caused by me looking too far ahead. I need to deal in small bytes of information and believe I still have time.

I need, I need my son – that bond of blood and love, even as we can still fight like tired old boxers rehashing the same old arguments. I need the silence of this house broken; it weighs too heavily on me.

But above all, I really need to finally accept the truth that I’m dying and sooner, rather than later. That is the really hard bit.

And I need to face what’s coming with some form of courage, dignity and tranquillity.

But still hope against hope for a miracle.

Upwards and onwards.