So-called life

As much as I can, I have a schedule. I work hard, hard, hard throughout the week – staving off nausea in the day (and sometimes anxiety over a potential social engagement that will stretch this out unbearably) before enduring the aimless throng of tourists, the stifling, stinking tube journey home, where fatigue quickly and decisively encroaches on a necessarily short evening.

Weekends, I am utterly selfish, my needs few but specific: to lie prone for as many hours as one can deem reasonable, escaping into some work of fiction or other, most often set in contemporary London, which is more easily learned about through literature than actually being in it, I find (though the same could be said of all experience, if I'm honest).

There is no point at which I’m completely immersed in anything anymore - work or repose - as in any case I am unable to escape the heightened maintenance my metabolism now requires of me: scoffing some meal that isn’t completely off-putting, followed by constant bottles of water, followed by a snack, followed by water, followed by another snack, followed by more water, followed by another meal . . . &ct.

We are over the three month mark now, and I am looking forward to that impending period of reprieve, when this obsessive vigil over my complex physiology can cease and I will apparently begin to feel more like my ‘normal self’ again.

We’re having our first scan on Tuesday afternoon, all three of us: me, Bruce and this symptom I keep trying to humanise whenever I get a spare minute. We are like everyone else but this is like nothing I have ever experienced. It's a paradox for sure.