When friends or family ask us how a clinic has gone nothing much comes out except for a weak 'fine thanks'. Too big an experience to postage stamp and so far removed from most other people's weekday afternoons it sits there in our past and future like a sleeping dragon we're terrified of rousing. Anyway it was 'fine thanks' this time too but there's nothing routine about clinic in the cancer world - nothing predictable, nothing reassuring, just a giant leap into a dark dark world of fear and anxiety.
The mad swinging pendulum of Rose's life was summed up really by her day on Thursday - starting out like any other little girl with an innocent morning at school. Even better than a morning at school actually as it was an own-clothes morning at school! Skimming over the fact that we didn't know about this until we got there - a decade of top parenting obliterated in the realisation that the whole school is dressed up as characters from Peter Pan apart from Rose aagghh - but we salvaged it with a breakneck trip home and a Mr Ben changing room moment to become a Lost Girl. A carefree morning for her and a nail-biting agonising wait for me. Rose's leg pain had gathered pace over two weeks, waking her at night, bothering her during school, during physio until finally, reluctantly, I reported it to Stanmore.
A hastily arranged appointment plus x-ray for Thursday afternoon but our twin good luck charms of Chris Henry our clinical nurse and Mr Briggs our surgical god were going to be engaged elsewhere and we would have to see one of Mr Briggs' elves instead. We went to Stanmore's London branch in Bolsover Street where the same stomach-churning 'routine' takes place - book in, take a ticket to x-ray, wait several thousand years (with old people who have got dodgy knees), try not to scream 'my daughter's seven and she's got cancer GET OUT OF MY WAY' to the packed waiting room, luckily for all succeed at this, try not to pin radiographer to the wall and punch him repeatedly until he tells me what he can see, succeed at this too, take the ticket back, remember to smile and thank him, walk back to clinic holding slip of paper but by now almost unable to breathe or stand, and wait for the clinic door to open and the rest of our lives to play out. Anyway, half an hour later when the relief and the crying was subsiding and we had both feasted on the sight of her beautiful prosthesis on the computer with no shadows, no lumps or bumps, and we were able to croak out our questions we asked what then we were looking for in Rose's leg. Exactly this. Pain, changes of any kind. So. At least we weren't wasting their time. Give her painkillers and come back in six weeks. Another decade aged in an afternoon.
It's a bit like living in six weekly instalments - the next date goes in the diary (this time coinciding almost exactly with the next chest x-ray ) and we frenziedly start to plan the maximum amount of fun that can be fitted in before that date. Lets take her here, lets take her there, lets see so and so, lets live, live, live. Lets buy a mobile x-ray machine, image her weekly and sod the radiation... So anyway that was Thursday.
Since then it's all been fabulous again - she's been to arts and crafts at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and made Valentine hearts, she's been to a Valentine tea party with her friends from school, she's been swimming with her brother and now it's half term and there's much more fun to come. I'm still feeling the relief, still working through how this next week might have been but it hasn't, it won't and it's going to be another fantastic week with both my amazing children.
