south rd

The trip to Tennyson Cancer Centre takes about 20 mins from our place, maybe less if there's not much traffic to speak of. The bleak grey of South Rd stretches forward without much fuss. It's symbolically drab, depressingly familiar. I'm carving out a more elaborate, inconvenient route to chemo so I don't have to look at its ugly face so often.

The white lines can blur as silence fills our car when conversation won't come.

Huz and I have travelled it's path after devastating appointments with Dr K. Sometimes following scans, often times after blood work or chemotherapy have been completed. Many times travelling back home knowing I had to head back the very next morning for more chemo or another blood transfusion.

I'm getting sick of South Rd.

The morning of our appointment with Dr K this week I blurted out to Huz the secret thought I'd mulled over and over in the dark before the sun crept into our bedroom. 

'All this chemo, and I am so wiped out from it that I'm not really living anyway. I don't want to keep doing it'.

And it had hung there, my honesty air drying (feeling more like dirty laundry).

And it couldn't be answered, this secret thought of mine, for all at once there was (aren't there always) three littles to attend to. Littles to help find school uniforms for, pour cornflakes out into bowls and find lost socks.

And my words were left to hang out. Words for later - you know the 'later' that real grown-ups speak of; a civilised time in which mature adults pour a glass of wine once the littles are in bed, taking a moment to consider and talk through the aforementioned feelings one declared so rashly earlier on.

oh yeah. That later.

And the appointment came and went, chemo came and went.

And then there was South Rd.

Huz drove. Bit the bullet and dove in. Slow words coming. Gently. He's so gentle with me. How does he know my heart so well when the pain of this sickness skews my words so often, skews my perspective. And he calls it: I'm doing this chemo for the boys. My side effects are manageable. The cancer hasn't shrunk much, but it hasn't grown either. It has been worth walking the long dark trench of the last six months. It has been worth it. 

But we're only halfway down South Rd and the grey drabness clings to me. The skewed thoughts cling to me too. And I'm making a mental list of all the drab, all the grey hard moments that have worn my heart down to this. The mental list that includes the isolation of long lonely days at home without Soul when this would have been our year together, just us. Eyelash-less eyes. A hoarse voice that won't let me sing. Waking up early to take tablets for that clinical trial. Not fitting into my clothes anymore. Being a tired mama all. the. time. Aching for more more more of my loves. Knowing I will leave Huz, leave True, Brave and Soul, leave all our family and my sweet friends. Being perpetually in the middle of the longest goodbye of my life.

But I digress.

I think I let silent (maybe) tears roll, and I pushed past the words themselves because he always does that for me, and I listened for the heart in it. It wasn't hard to hear the heart of love beating out those words for me.

He wants me here as long as he can have me. And if the roles were reversed, oh my I would want that very same thing.

And I want to give that gift. It's just that I'm tired and I'd kinda like to rest from this disease. Plus, I'm not very brave.

But I will keep swallowing pills, keep doing chemo as long as I'm allowed, and keep driving down South Rd.

Because I love my loves.