Our faithful former childminder, T, is coming round on Friday nights to play games with the boys and talk to them in French. They are moderately open to this and are still very fond of T who is a lovely man. Usually I leave them to it but last Friday they had a game that needed a fourth so I played too. In fairness to the boys, their comprehension is still pretty good and they both made a reasonable effort to speak some French as well. However, I noticed that Michael is getting a bit of interference from Irish. For him, it’s all about communicating and where his brother and sister would rather be silent than be wrong, he will always give it a lash and is usually broadly comprehensible. So he would say a sentence in French and often the noun would come to him in Irish so, for example, speaking about the other side of a card, instead of saying “l’autre côté” he said “l’autre taobh”. It took me a while to work out what he was getting at as he gave “taobh” the full welly in terms of French pronunciation. Poor T was, of course, utterly baffled. I trust it may all work itself out.
Mild Success
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks on trains and I am very susceptible to advertising. “Murder on the Orient Express” has been plugged pretty relentlessly on the big screen in Heuston station. It was, therefore, perhaps inevitable then that we should go en famille on Sunday.
There was some negotiation on the timing of this. This weekend herself was out with a friend Friday morning, out with other friends Friday afternoon, at a party next door Friday night – about 70 teenagers, I applaud my neighbours – over to a friend in Kildare for a sleepover on Saturday and back Sunday lunchtime; Daniel had a play off for second place in his division of the league, they won could well be looking at promotion to division 9, and choir on Sunday morning; Michael had drama on Saturday afternoon and hockey on Sunday morning, so finding an agreed time at all was difficult. I decided we would push on even when I saw a stinker of a review in the Irish Times. We cycled in and out very successfully (back in the dark as well) and the film itself was actually ideal Sunday afternoon family fare. None of the children had read the book so the dénouement was a surprise to them. The cinematography was truly beautiful (my sister says that this is always the kiss of death for a film) and it was all enjoyable in a mild way. Herself got great entertainment from Kenneth Branagh’s Belgian accent (poor, he pronounced the f in ouefs apparently, I didn’t notice) and it was all good stuff and it prepared us psychologically for the much-regretted end of mid-term.
Bad News – Good News
So, my sister got diagnosed with cancer in April. It was all a bit sudden. She went into hospital for a routine procedure and they said, “Do you know what; we found a tumour.”
It was stage 1 and that is the best stage; the prognosis was really good but, oh the shock and the fear. Work were very good and let me take unpaid leave to go down to Cork and sit in while she was doing some of the chemotherapy. The world of cancer was pretty much a closed book to me in advance. I knew that the chemo drugs made you lose your hair but I hadn’t realised that this meant the hairs in your inner ear that help balance, the hairs up your nose that stop stuff getting up your nose and your eyebrows and eyelashes which mean that you have to wear sunglasses a lot to keep everything out of your eyes and you look otherworldly. I knew fatigue was a side effect but not that your limbs would go numb and your sense of taste would go. Your immune system is compromised so she got shingles as well. So, all in all, chemotherapy is pretty brutal. When you see someone fully clad in plastic carefully insert a needle into your sister’s hand to give her intravenously drugs that burn, if splashed on the skin, it is quite unnerving. She was cheerful all things considered. For the first session, she wore a thing called a cold cap that is supposed to keep the chemicals away from your head and preserve your hair. It sometimes works. It didn’t work for her. All she got was icicles in her hair and then it fell out and she bought a wig. Seriously, the cost of wigs! Who knew? Happily her insurance covered it. In fact she has made a profit on her medical insurance this year. Not as satisfying as you might have thought.
So the pattern was week 1 chemo (the longest protocol, a whole day in hospital getting drugs intravenously) and steroids to get her through it. Week 2 she felt really terrible and week 3, she began to recover and then she started the cycle all over again. Being a person of extraordinary energy and fortitude, she spent much of her recovery time sorting out administration and medical visits and all sorts of other things for my elderly parents and aunt. If you do not have elderly infirm relatives, you have absolutely no idea how much time this takes. And she’s done all sorts of big logistical things too like reorganising my father’s office and filing cabinet (not for the faint-hearted) and arranging for many of his payments to come by EFT rather than cheques which have to be cashed. She is very kind-hearted and obliging and she did all of the weird and random tasks (I need india ink for my pen, I need to renew parking permits etc) efficiently and speedily. My father, in particular, was delighted. So was I, but I was guilt ridden as well (after her first session of chemo, she came to Dublin and took the boys to Taytopark, no really). She was amazing
Anyhow, she had her last chemotherapy session three weeks ago. She is still, of course, hairless and sick as a dog and she fell and sprained her ankle last weekend which didn’t add to her happiness. I am just delighted though. She has to go back for a check up in three months but the doctors have declared the treatment a success and her treatment is over. The relief. Although she is seven years younger than me, which is a big difference when you are children, we have become very close as grown-ups. I speak to her almost every day. There is no one else who understands me in quite the same way. I am so glad that soon she will be well again. I feel we were so lucky because, if she hadn’t had that routine procedure, that tumour would have quietly gone about its work and killed her. It feels like a miracle.
Hallowe’en
This year for Halloween, herself went to a friend’s house. At the last minute, Michael decided he was too old and sophisticated for trick or treating. Daniel, however, was still keen to go out and hadn’t arranged to meet friends because one of the advantages of being a twin is you always have someone to do things with. It turns out that one of the disadvantages of being a twin is that your brother will have no compunction about leaving you high and dry. So Daniel and I went out together. I felt we were a bit foolish as a mother and child group where the child was 12 and alone whereas all the other trick or treaters seemed to be tiny kids but thankfully Daniel didn’t seem to care. Then we caught up with a group of older children with whom he trotted around happily. I suppose it’s the end of an era though. Next year, he and Michael will go with their friends, if they go at all and certainly not with a parent in tow.
Antibiotics – One Lifetime
When my father was a medical student in Cork in the 1940s he saw the first antibiotics brought to Cork and he was suitably impressed by their miraculous qualities. He didn’t stop giving the odd lecture to students himself until he was 75 and by then he was able to tell his students that he had seen the whole arc of antibiotics from their first use to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant super bugs. To be frank, things haven’t improved in the 17 years since. In 2008, my uncle died of MRSA acquired when in hospital for another (successful) procedure. My father kept our family religiously away from antibiotics and no matter how ill we were, we never had them. I used to bitterly watch my classmates popping them like smarties. It looks like our sacrifice may have, however, been insufficient and the days of antibiotics are numbered. Isn’t that a rather depressing thought? Is everything going backwards at the moment?
Small World
Now that I have embraced middle age I listen a lot to radio 4. The fact that I tend to do it on headphones from a podcast does not, sadly make me down with the young people when what I am listening to is Desert Island Discs.
Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago, they had on the Scottish composer James McMillan. Unlike almost every other Irish person you will ever meet, I am not particularly interested in music. It is a shameful thing and one that causes me some difficulty when I try to select my own desert island discs, but there it is. The only composers I really know are the ones who are regularly answers on University Challenge – you start to recognise the style and Benjamin Britten is usually a pretty safe bet for one of the answers, as they are quite patriotic. Normally when I listen to Desert Island Discs, I am fascinated by the people but rather bored by the music which, happily “for copyright reasons” is shorter on the podcast but, for some reason, this time, I loved the music. McMillan chose a piece by Thomas Tallis (occasional UC answer and, also, the name of one of the cats living upstairs in Brussels, the other one was Byrd, of course he was – so not a completely unknown quantity) which was arranged for 40 (!) voice parts, it was so beautiful that it made me cry (low enough bar actually, I cry easily, but still). And then McMillan turned out to be a devout Catholic and quite sane which, sadly, seems to be an increasingly rare combination. It was a really beautiful programme.
For his last disc, McMillan chose a contemporary composer. I was pretty sure that I knew no contemporary composers so I was ready to fast forward. As he described how this composer’s music divided people and that he once had a French orchestra in revolt when he tried to get them to play it, I was pretty sure that I was likely to be on the side of the French orchestra. His choice turned out to be an Irish composer called Gerard Barry. Ladies and gentlemen, where is that composer from? Yes, he is from Cork. Who about 20 years ago shared a house with his partner? Yes, me, that’s who. I have to say we have lost touch over the years and it is a long time since I have met the eminent composer and longer still since I have had dinner in his house. Still, though, what are the odds? I suppose quite short, given that he is from Cork. I have to say, I listened to the piece and notwithstanding my tenuous link to greatness, I probably would side with the French orchestra.
