Please welcome to the stage my imaginary chemo friend. Before you dismiss me as a total nutjob who should, by all accounts, have grown out of imaginary friends by now, I would like to make it abundantly clear that this particular friend doesn't actually accompany me everywhere I go. I do not share imaginary afternoon tea with him, nor do I engage in any kind of conversation with him, imaginary or otherwise. No, what you need to understand about this imaginary friend is that he is more of an analogy, a metaphor if you will (if you listen carefully you might be able to hear Augustus Waters cackling from his fictional afterlife), and his imaginary presence merely forces me to consider chemo in a rather more balanced way than I might otherwise. He gives me a sharp prod in the ribs and reminds me that, at the end of the day, this protracted inconvenience is for my own good.
Let me tell you a little bit about him. In my mind he looks something like this:
(On a little bit of a tangent, this image is taken from this blog, specifically this post. Franzi, the artist, is both extremely hilarious and incredibly kind, and this little fellow is actually her version of John Watson from BBC Sherlock, known affectionately throughout her comics as Potato John. I simply find this rendering of the character hopelessly endearing, and I suppose he must have wormed his way into my consciousness somehow, such that my chemo friend has accidentally adopted his form.)
He is sweet and kind and generally adorable, but he is also blundering and clumsy. I like to imagine that he turns up on my doorstep once a fortnight with a duster and an enormous grin, and confidently proclaims that he is going to clean my house for me. He is so devastatingly eager that, despite my misgivings, I step aside to let him in. To my surprise, even taking into account his generous circumference, his small stature grants him access to certain spots I can't reach by myself, and he blasts the grime with unexpected efficiency. Less helpfully, he also completely rearranges the living room, knocks a lot of stuff over, breaks a few irreplaceable family heirlooms, and then falls asleep on the sofa, surrounded by debris. On his way out, when he finally wakes up, he raids my kitchen and inexplicably pinches half my spoons by way of payment, and I am left alone to restore order to my now sparkling dwelling. Two weeks later he comes back, so full of the joys of life that I let him in to repeat the process, if only because I can't bear to break his adorable little heart.
I would imagine you can piece together most of the chemo parallels in there, but I should probably explain the spoon thing, right? Right.
Spoon Theory is an oddly charming way of describing the effect chronic/long-term/mental illness has on one's everyday life. It was originated by blogger Christine Miserandino, who found she was struggling to convey the experience of living with lupus to her best friend. The conversation took place in a diner, where spoons were present in their abundance, and so spoons became the vehicle of her explanation. She gave her friend a handful of spoons and told her to imagine that these spoons represent the resources and stamina she has to make it through the day - each spoon being a unit of physical, mental or emotional energy. An entirely healthy person is, in their day-to-day life, possessed of so many spoons that they can afford to fling them haphazardly into the breeze, perhaps singing merrily to the percussive accompaniment of pockets full of jangling metal. Illness dramatically reduces the number of spoons with which one begins the day, and every task undertaken (from getting dressed to walking to the shops to writing this very piece of blogular nonsense) costs you some of your precious stash. You find yourself assessing every situation, calculating the number of spoons you have to spare. On bad days you have to be especially miserly, saving your spoons for the simplest things like feeding and washing yourself. You become a chronic spoon hoarder, longing for the days when your pockets will once again jangle with sweet, sweet spoon music.
I appreciate that I might have expressed that a little weirdly, but take a moment to consider its elegance. To those in the know, simply uttering the words 'I'm running low on spoons' is enough to explain that I have woken with particularly low energy, and that I may need a helping hand if I'm going to make it to the end of the day without collapsing and/or having a total emotional breakdown. It says something a bit more nuanced and complex than 'I've not got enough energy for that', but it doesn't take any more energy (or spoons!) to say, which makes it a really helpful analogy for people to understand. Since its inception, it has become almost universal in its usage among those who live with illness long-term (so much so that many of them refer to themselves as 'spoonies'). I explained it to my dad a while ago, and he appeared totally delighted by the mode of expression. Since then, it has cropped up a little in our vocabularies, simply because it lets us talk about my continued experience with illness much more casually than we might be able to otherwise. Anyone who has lived with anything from cancer to chronic pain to depression will know just how valuable that is. It helps me feel a bit more normal.
Maybe it's because of the English student in me, but my imaginary-friend-analogy-metaphor-thing is something of which I repeatedly try to remind myself when frustration begins to creep up, perhaps because metaphor and imagery are some of the tools I'm wont to use to understand the bizarre and wonderful mess that makes up all of our existences. Equating the nastiness of chemo with an irritating but well-meaning friend helps me to keep the positives of the experience firmly in view. After all, he does help in his unique little way, even if he remains intent on making off with my precious silverware in the process...
Abi xxx
