Day 1096

I haven’t had a cannula in my hand for almost a year. The last time I had chemotherapy delivered through one was almost four years ago now. Its pinch and push and slow hotcold ache belong in memory, in a box held closed with elastic bands as narrow as dental floss.

In a box held closed with sellotape as narrow as my fingers is a lamp made from rock salt. The label says 9-12 kg, the weight shivering in my blood vessel skin bone gristle little hands. The next day, rising pink like light shone through salt, through eyelids, a slow hotcold ache slithers out of its box. My beehive heart vibrates.

***

In a shower in a bathroom in a three-bedroom terraced house in York I am washing my hair. I pull my fingers through its tangles, and two or three hairs come away on my palms, wrapped in a shampoo shroud. Spiders like this one have been known to hunt bees. I thrust my hands under the stream of water and wash the strands down the drain of an en-suite in a HEPA-filtered room in the Young Oncology Unit in the Christie in Manchester. I try to remember that shedding hairs is normal, but the bees are the prey in this relationship and a glimpse of the spider has got them scared. With face upturned I wait for the water to rinse the panic from my eyelashes.

***

My colleague flashes a rolled-up cigarette between her fingers. She shoots me a grin and jokes that she’s going out to ‘get some cancer’. My laugh comes out dripping pink. I clamp my mouth closed to stop the swarm escaping, and turn away with studied nonchalance. Minutes later, in the quiet of the stockroom, I count breaths, count my fingers, count lamps made from rock salt through closed eyelids, until my magenta pulse has faded to rose then to black. Elastic bands creak under a pressure they were never designed to hold. I retrieve my smile from the floor.

***

Three years, 1096 days ago, doctors tied mine and my sister’s DNAs together with a neat little bow and this second chance at life began. Second chance, like I failed first time, like I have to really make this one count, like these three years I’ve lived are undeserved, an exception to rules I’ve already broken once. A clean slate if it were not for the ghosts of old letters which won't be erased properly, chalk dust on my cuffs. 'Leave us behind,' they whisper, playground bullies with tendrils tugging me backwards. Pinch and push and slow hotcold ache. As if it was going to be that easy. 

They've pulled out each of my ribs and replaced them with pieces of honeycomb. The bees nesting here are vigilant. I do not know when they go to sleep. How can I choose to forget when this fear has made its home not in my mind but in my bones? 

I mark the years because the curved familiarity of the figure three is the only thing solid in this universe of vapour and fluid and dotted lines stretching away into nothing. Even in the cancer world I feel like a foreigner, fumbling for an answer to 'how long have you been off treatment?' because I faded off treatment like a child grows out of her dolls. Three years clean. Less than a year since I last had an infusion of donor blood cells. Two months since my last blood test. Four days since my body last reminded me, with pangs of unprovoked nausea like the compulsions of an addict, that this time is borrowed.

And don't misunderstand me, I am so happy. To be in this three-bedroom terraced house in York, to study a subject I love and am good at, to work a job I enjoy with funny, kind people, to live inside this strange renovated body and reach towards the future with arms of skin and smoke, these things are treasures. Even tinged pink and shivering, I hold these 1096 days to my chest like heirlooms. But make no mistake, the shimmering golden survival you see on the TV adverts and in books and films is a lie. Behind every beautifully seized day are two more spent beating angry swarms of bees back into their nests. I have begun each of these 1096 days rinsing the pink from my eyes, excavating the joy from my buried heart, remembering what it is to live, even when there are no guarantees. I will do the same tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and maybe someday the box in my memory will softly click locked. Until then, I am getting to be quite an accomplished apiarist.