Buddies!

Hello there, and best wishes for the festive season, I hope you’re having a good time! I know I keep coming up with reasons excuses as to why there are such gaps between my writing at the moment, but it does feel that this is a good time to post this section of that time. I’m a lucky lady, I’ve got a good crowd of friends, and they are a crowd as well, they do different things in my life, there are those who I can have a great time with, those I can share fears and worries with, those who will help me out of a jam, when I inevitably get into one, those for


music, and those who I can call up any time of day and night if I need to. As I say, I know I’m very lucky.
All of that made meeting my “chemo buddy” a bittersweet event. It was of course great to have someone who was there at all my sessions, we were in step with our treatment, and having the same treatment, so we could chat about side effects (which were sometimes bizarre, and always plentiful) and look forward to the next meeting as it helped us count down. I still don’t know whether the nurses engineered it this way, for as I’ve said, I was very young; my chemo buddy was young too. We were having similar, yet different experiences, which is worth remembering when you meet someone who is having treatment. It’s different for everyone. I was on the lookout for new fun things I could do with my bald head, henna etc, and she was having ice cap treatment to save her hair. It looked awful, made her session miles longer than mine, and I couldn’t understand. Until we spoke about it, and she described both the hourlong ice-cream headache, and also her young daughter, for whom the keeping of hair meant that there were fewer things different about mummy. It was good for me to see the reasons that we do things, to appreciate a little better that we all have our reasons, and that ultimately, they are all our own way of getting through.  My buddy had a similar, irreverent attitude to cancer, and our treatment, and we could chat about young persons’ things while the drugs dripped into our veins. We would be open and frank, and being sat together we could give our relatives a little respite, as they could sit and be force fed biscuits in the waiting rooms, with the TV, while we chatted in our medical armchairs.  How wonderful, yes? Yes, of course it was. But when that last session came around, I was uneasy. It had made things much lighter, much more fun, and easier, for me to have my buddy sat on that other chair, but this time was over. In my mind, this boxed her off and removed her from my life. We were chemo buddies, not buddies. Harsh? Maybe, but in my desperation to finish being ill and move on to being Michelle again, I wasn’t sure that there was a place for someone from this recent past in my hopefully long future. At that last session, she said “we must keep in touch, I’ll add you on Facebook” and my heart sank. My face smiled and I said “yes, cool, type Michelle Holding in and you’ll find me.” And that was it. She joined the (fairly long) list of pals, acquaintances, gig venues, festivals that I know on Facebook, and I thought no more of it.  Things stayed this way, you’re possibly thinking that this isn’t my most interesting post. Until… Eighteen months later, at Christmastime I was wandering around a local shop, searching for bargains, and I saw someone who I thought was my chemo buddy. But I wasn’t sure. She looked much the same as I recalled, but I realised that I would look very different. I couldn’t remember her name (I’m hopeless) and so did my best Inspector Clouseau as I peered round the ends of aisles whilst frantically scrolling through my friends on Facebook, trying to find her name. Why on earth do I have so many “friends” I cursed, as I saw her wander to the till. Finally I found it. I wasn’t entirely sure that this was her though, so I went for the time honoured system of gently calling her name. It was too gentle, I tried again, fairly loudly calling her name with a classic, questioning, rising intonation. If she ignored me, it wasn’t her and my memory was going. If she did, we’d said hi.  She turned round, and was surprised to see me, I was after all, a lot hairier than the last time she’d seen me. We hugged and went for coffee, chatted about what had been going on in our lives. I’d had my second mastectomy, we’d both done a poor job of being less busy, which was our promise to our newly recovering selves. It was wonderful to see her, to catch up, to celebrate the vitality we both glowed with now. To hear plans for the future, and feel that there was a future to plan for, what a beautiful thing.  We promised that we’d do it again, and we have, meeting up for our now annual “not dead yet” coffee! Next year we’ll both be 5 years since diagnosis, and I wouldn’t change having her in my life at all. Maybe we should celebrate that in some way?