I see London, I see France

Travels, The Trial, Theatre, and Theadora

As soon as I entered the waiting room in Institute Gustave Roussy in Paris, I found myself abruptly brittle, as if pieces of myself were about to break off and fly apart. I shouldn’t have come alone, I realized. I needed someone else to listen to the trial doctor, someone to help me process the information.

I never usually worry about being alone. I made it through my first 20 months of treatment largely alone while in the hospital. But this time, I was worried that my French might not be up to the task of understanding every detail of the trial. That I might miss something critical, though I had already read through the entire document about it.

Worried I’d cry in front of a roomful of stoic French cancer patients, I sat down and grabbed my notebook and pen like they were the last floating pieces of the Titanic and began to write. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I felt my body calm and I was no longer at risk of tears.

When I had written myself sane, I turned to the dreamlike book I was reading, This Happy by Niamh Campbell. It’s inventively written, her words pushing the limits of description, depiction. It’s not a book that it is possible or desirable to read swiftly, each paragraph requiring the turning over of the words in the sunlight. Each paragraph like a prism. I read them over and over, and not always in order. It was like swimming in poetry. I write better after I read books like this.

When writers don’t use quote marks—and so many don’t anymore, including me sometimes—there is an underwater feeling to the words, as if they are muted. Like no one is speaking aloud. Even when I know they are.

The trial doctor was running so late that by the time I actually saw her, my fear had exhausted itself and turned into impatience. She looked about 23 years old; it was hard to believe she was old enough to have completed medical school. Yet she was kind, and made sure I understood everything she said as we went along. After she had explained all of the trial’s intricacies, she asked what I thought I wanted to do.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “No one is offering me another option. You don’t have much competition.”

“Sometimes I am my own competition,” she said. She runs more than one trial, and sometimes moves patients from one trial to another.

She told me that alongside all of the necessary examinations, they were going to do a liquid biopsy, in order to analyze all of the cancer dna in my blood and to learn all of its components. That way if there is a future study targeting one of its components, we will know it would be a good one for me. This was the most exciting thing I heard all morning (alongside the news that chemo will be every three weeks instead of weekly—although the other trial drug will be weekly).

I will need to be in Paris at least two nights a week from July 2 until either the trial fails to work or it works well enough to keep me alive for a year. While they will put me up at a hospital hotel just for patients on the nights before treatment, if I want or need (because of illness and exhaustion) to stay in Paris between treatments, I am on my own. So I need to sort that out.

I had come to Paris straight from a less-than-48-hour trip to London with Theo. Because she won Young Performer of the Year in the Richmond Theatre Festival, she was invited to perform one of her monologues as part of a celebratory showcase performance at the Normansfield Theatre in Teddington. We waffled about whether Theo could attend. We don’t have the money. But because so little else in her life brings her any joy, we could not bring ourselves to deny her the chance to perform in her favorite city.

London. Was beautiful. Always more beautiful than I remember. It enfolded us in gentle sun, breezes through its trees, light dancing across the surface of the Thames.

Last week when in Paris, my heart thought, this is where I want to live, here, amidst bustle and art and a million cafés. I forgot about London. Then I was in London and it became the only place I wanted to be. I fall into cities like second skins. Paris, London, New York: I know the lines of the Metro, the Underground, and the subway like I know my own veins. I know where things are and how to get things done.

We stayed two nights in a 200-year-old pub. I had thought that, given neither of us had slept for several nights running, we would have a leisurely afternoon and evening. But I had forgotten I was traveling with Theadora. “We need to do something special,” she said. “It could be our last time together in London.”

“We said that last time,” I reminded her. “Yet here we are.”

Something special, as always, means theatre. To both of us. So I found us last-minute cheap tickets to Hadestown, Theo’s first choice. While we both thoroughly enjoyed the experience, we had separate and sometimes overlapping critiques.

I was disappointed that the actor playing Orpheus, a man essentially made of music who ought to be the most captivating singer and musician in the play, was the weakest of all the singers. I also didn’t understand why his wan music was written in such thin, high notes, notes he could hardly reach. Orpheus ought to be musically mesmerizing! (I’ll spare you the rest of our thoughts—they are lengthy).

Here we are in Hades!

The young people participating in Theo’s showcase were impressive. We listened to a brilliant young harpist, whose slight body hardly seemed able to bear the weight of the enormous instrument. Two beautiful pianists. A supremely confident and adept musical theatre actress. And of course, my daughter. She immediately fell in with the other kids, sitting with them, encouraging them, and congratulating their performances. At the end, one of the pianists asked for her contact details, which cheered her.

We walked back along the river and ate in the pub, joining in the pub quiz, which we failed miserably.

Returning to France sent us both spiraling. Theo was in tears, and I was in terror of the heat, already extreme. I am not built for heat. I am built for the north: Maine, Montreal, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Nova Scotia, Siberia. Yet here we are, in a planet increasingly hostile to my blood.

I returned south after one night in Paris. An unaccompanied bag on my train led to an evacuation and a long wait in the heat for the bomb-sniffing dogs to come. But eventually I made it back, where Tim whisked me to our mobile home in the campsite where we are staying while Theo completes an internship at a dance school in Sète.

Yesterday, we were joined here by my aunt and uncle from the US, here to help us out. This morning we all took an aqua aerobics class in the massive pool and I regret there is no photographic evidence, because I have never looked less like a cancer patient than I did bobbing up and down doing French aqua aerobics to “Can’t Stop the Feeling.”

Swan nesting along the Thames