any side effects, and I did, but I still didn’t last the full year.
For the first month on interferon I went into Beaumont day oncology three days a week. The day oncology unit has seen a major revamp recently. Now it’s spacious, bright, almost plush with individual cubicles. Two years ago, it wasn’t. Back then, it was suffocating, patients sat side by side in old easy boy chairs with chemotherapy drips back to back dispensing poison from early morning until late evening. It was high density cancer care. The waiting room was always full, everyone waiting for a reclining chair to be freed up. The nursing staff did all they could to make it comfortable but it was an impossible hill to climb. It was a soul destroying place, no privacy, no dignity, it didn’t exactly inspire hope. I didn’t want Mary to see the place or me getting interferon. I worried that she’d find it too difficult. It never arose though because Mary never gave any indication that she wanted to go.
The first day I was in early, around ten. A blood sample was taken and I waited until the results came back. Then I waited until a recliner chair was free. The nurses were great, they kept a conveyer belt of cancer patients moving through the tiny room. It took some where around an hour and a half for the interferon bag to empty through a tube into my arm. Once it was over, a saline bag was hooked up which took forty five minutes to empty.
My dad dropped me in every morning and then collected me when I called him to tell him I was finished. I had looked up the side effects for interferon on the internet. There were tons but the most common were flu like symptoms, fatigue and loss of apatite. Early on one of the nurses warned me about the fatigue, she was spot on.
The first day I felt ok until I was on my way home. I began to shiver, my teeth chattered. Dad turned up the heat in the car. When I got into the house I was tired and cold. I lay down on the couch and the shivering started again. It took blankets and duvets before I heated up. Later on I was ok, sort of back to normal, except for food. From the very start the smell of food changed for me. It wasn’t enticing, instead it was mildly nauseating. My mouth tasted of metal when I thought of food. Apart from that I was doing ok. I was still limping and some days I needed a crutch. The fatigue on the other hand was progressive, as the weeks went by I grew more and more tired. I wasn’t helpless, far from it. I still minded the kids, made lunch and did a little house work.
Iris was there every time I looked around. Iris was Mary’s mother. Small, lean and wound tighter than thread on a spool. She is the only true misandrist I ever came across. I didn’t like her, but in fourteen years I’d never said a bad word to her. She was Mary’s mother, Mary’s problem not mine. She was too austere and superstitiously religious for my taste.
I left home when I was nineteen. Lots of the lads I grew up with did the same. There was no work in Ireland, emigration was our only option. I went to London and lived there for a while. Apart from the odd stop over, I never lived at home again. I was fully independent, I sank or swam on my own merits. I get on well with my parents but I’m happy enough to see them for dinner maybe once a month and a couple of brief ‘how’s you’ telephone calls a week. If I want advice, I ask, but I consider myself mature enough to make my own decisions. My parents don’t interfere. They would be wasting their time.
Iris is not that type of parent. She has three adult children, Mary being the second eldest. She has something to say about every aspect of their lives from what they eat and how they dress to whom they see and how they spend their money. She is vain in the extreme and openly scolds her daughters for not being as self flagellatingly thin as she is. Her eldest daughter is her constant companion. They are practically joined at the hip. From the start Iris didn’t approve of me. She was angry that Mary had decided to have a baby without her approval and without being married. Iris is a product of a repressed Ireland, an older twisted Ireland of Magdalene laundries, industrial schools and Kerry babies. She is the twitching curtains brigade. ‘What the neighbours think’ is all important to her. If it had been twenty years earlier Iris would have locked Mary into a Magdalene prison and thrown away the key.
“I’m too young to be a grandmother” she had moaned at the time.
She ostracised Mary from her extended family for more than a year after Leah was born and only allowed Mary back in when her own mother died. She wouldn’t let Mary see her grandmother in the last months of her life.
“She’d be scandalised” Iris exclaimed “I don’t want my mother to think bad of me”. Iris never told her mother that Mary was pregnant or that Leah was born.
I thought it was terribly mean and selfish of Iris to exclude Mary. It hurt Mary a lot. Mary wouldn’t stand up for Leah or me with Iris, she wouldn’t even stand up for herself against the all mighty mammy. Iris is caught in some religious and moral time loop. Her religious fervour is matched only by her bigotry. Everyone knows the type, up licking the alter rail on Sunday, the rest of the week bad mouthing and belittling any one who doesn’t fit her obtuse perspective. One of her most used phrases is that so and so “has tickets on themselves”. It’s a nasty little put down which only serves to expose her own haughty attitude. On several occasions when we attended mass with her, Iris would keep us all late for mass waiting on her and then push her way to the front of the crowded church. It took me a couple of years to figure out that she wasn’t doing it for the god in front of her, it was done for the benefit of the audience behind her.
Anyway she was there every time I looked around. Other family members helped out from time to time but they didn’t linger, once the kids were ok they were gone. Not so Iris, since I first went into hospital, Iris had become more and more of a permanent fixture. She was always in the background of our relationship. For years she was a source of friction between us. Now she was more than just a derogatory spectre, she was a daily physical presence. Mary insisted that Iris was just helping out. I should have known better but I was preoccupied with cancer. I didn’t mind too much at first. I actually thought that because her husband had had cancer, she would be a practical help for Mary. That was really stupid and naive of me.
Three months later I was totally isolated. Mary wouldn’t occupy the same space as me. Her indifference to me had turned to repressed anger. Occasionally it would break out in a tirade of eviscerating insults screamed through slammed doors, but mostly she spent her time in the back garden with her mother and when Iris went home Mary would stay alone in the back garden with her back turned to me and the children until darkness forced her indoors and she disappeared upstairs.
I was weak. Fatigue was wearing me down and I was losing weight. I was vomiting frequently. Cancer patients on chemotherapy often talk about ‘chemo brain’. Interferon is no different. By this time I was taking the treatment at home. I injected into the same fatty layer as the bee stings but the fatty layer was disappearing. I was too distracted by illness to see clearly what was going on. I did try a few times to talk to Mary about what was happening, how I felt. On one memorable occasion I asked her why did she walk out on me in Blanchardstown?
“How was I to know how serious it was” she dismissed me.
Somewhere in my illness fogged brain I knew I’d heard that one before, somewhere.
Chapter Five
A tale of two Dads
“I can’t, I can’t” Mary screeched as she flapped around the flat like a bird trapped in a cage.
“You have to, for gods sake he’s your dad” I repeated.
“Nooooo”.
Iris had telephoned earlier. She wanted Mary home for father’s day. Mary wouldn’t go. Eddie was near the end. His cancer had won the battle. I’d met him only once before. He reminded me of my own dad. I didn’t understand why Mary wouldn’t see him. She hadn’t seen him for five months. I began to realise that there was more to the story than Mary had told me.
***
“You didn’t care about dad”. I nearly dropped the cup of coffee I was holding.
“You didn’t care about dad” Kathleen screamed again in the