Chemotherapy Diary #4: Cycle Four

Well, this is the last one, but I'm not sure whether to feel relieved or anxious.

Annie's final shot of chemotherapy poisons was delivered on Wednesday. Not much to report really, except this time there was a much longer wait, caused it seemed by the shortage of nurses who could locate the veins with the intravenous needle!!

So, Annie came out after over three hours feeling as sick as a parrot. And wouldn't you? We took her straight home and as I write she is still having the vomits and feeling weak.

She has one more hurdle to go in her cancer treatment - radiotherapy. Now, I have no idea what radiotherapy involves, but apparently they aim some sort of radiation source at the place where the cancer tumour originally was and they zap it with radiation. Don't know how long or how much, but some people I have spoken to say there will be some blistering of the skin.

Sounds pretty scary, in the light of some highly disturbing reports I read recently from France, where the government is investigating a number of cases of radiation overdose that go back over twenty years. Some patients died because they were given too much radiation, and others are still suffering great pain to this day.

As you can imagine, I hope to God that they don't microwave my wife's mammary too much. The thought turns me cold! Or hot, as the case may be...

Just to let you know, Prof. Madder and his darling wife will be taking a holiday from 15th to 29th December. As we are going to a place without an internet connection, it is most probable that I will not be able to provide you with the usual morsels of delight that you have been accustomed to. Don't worry, after 29th, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. In any case, there are still 7 days to go before I go away, so I'm going to cram as much in before the end of the year as I can!

Don't get too excited now!!

Snow Joke...

There are two industries that must be doing a roaring trade at this time of the year. The first is whoever it is that makes that fake rubbery snow that shopkeepers spray onto their shop windows to make it look like it’s snowing. I’m pretty sure the makers of this stuff don’t sell any of it during the rest of the year then suddenly BOOM! It’s going faster than pieces of cake that have had heat applied to them! And all because people want to make Tropical Malaysia look like a Winter Wonderland.

The other highly lucrative business at this time of year is the cotton wool industry. Yes, cotton wool – just imagine, how many tons of cotton wool every year at this time are diverted from their true calling in the cosmetics and healthcare sectors to be used to make snowylooking window displays, tree decorations and fake beards?

And why is all this fake snow being produced? 'Cos it’s CHRISTMAS!!!

Now, I love Christmas and have many happy memories of it from my own childhood back home even though I’m no longer an official Christian. But try as I might, I cannot get my mind around Christmas in a tropical country. It just doesn’t compute. I have been programmed all my life to associate the Season of Goodwill with winter – big coats, woolly hats, snowy landscapes, snowmen, sleigh rides in the snow: snow, snow snow!! Definitely not tropical heat and monsoon rains...

So when I see all this faux snow and winter kitsch being created all over town, I can’t help feeling somewhat bemused by it all. It’s just another cultural juxtaposition that doesn’t really have the right to exist in this context.

There are so many examples of this kind of weird juxtaposition in this new, globalising Malaysia. Like transplanting Valentines Day to Malaysia every year. Very Asian Values. Or what about this: Muslim ladies wearing baseball caps over their tudungs and Western style blazers over their baju kurungs at formal meetings. I have seen this, honest! Or finally, the huge numbers of Malaysian women (and some men!) dying their hair orange (mistakenly called blonde!) to look Western, or something. And I thought they had got their independence from foreign rule in 1957!!

Moving focus a bit to another Asian country that has been polluted by Western influence, I remember reading some time ago about what happened when a department store in Japan decided to have its first ever Christmas window display. The result was a schizophrenic and highly offensive tableau that featured a Santa Claus crucified on a cross!! Talk about mixed messages!! I expect they did not repeat that cultural snafu the following year!

So, ladies and gentlemen, as an outsider looking in, I can’t help but feeling somewhat jaded when Western influence disguised as fashionable cultural practice becomes an established part of the local scene here in Malaysia. I have in fact coined a term for this phenomenon – ‘cultureference’, or cultural interference. It’s not that I’m against influences from other cultures – they are perfectly natural should be encouraged, when they bring positive outcomes.

But I have seen what Christmas has become in my own culture – a glorified excuse for spending money that you haven’t got on presents that people don’t need. Christmas in the UK has become an orgiastic, booze-fuelled homage to excess and frivolity where the true meaning of Christmas – good will and caring for others less fortunate than yourselves - has become blurred and illegible like a scribbled message on a wall after a rain storm.

I just hope and pray that this is not the future of Christmas here in Malaysia. I hope that Malaysia’s traditional values of family, religiosity and common sense will hold back this swelling tsunami of cultureference.

So, I would like to wish a Merry Christmas and a decidedly jolly New Year to all my Christian friends.

Just One More Before December..

In my last posting for the month of November, I thought I would be a little bit phatic and talk about the weather. We seem to be getting rather a lot of it at the moment here in Kuching, probably because it is the rainy season and there’s a theatrical amount of water falling out of the sky.

You can have sugar shortages, you can have petrol shortages, but one thing Sarawak is definitely not short of is water. It is everywhere – in the bathroom, in the rivers, in the drains and in the air we breathe. It’s the main reason why we have such a humid climate, which can make life fun sometimes for part-time asthmatics like me!

I remember my first serious encounter with a tropical, humid climate. It was at the Butterfly House, in Lancaster’s excellent Williamson Park in the North West of England, more than fifteen years ago. Williamson Park was built by a Victorian philanthropist who, to keep his factory workers in employment during an economic downturn, set them to work building a park. The result is one of England’s best-kept secrets – a gorgeous rolling park with lakes, forest walks, floral gardens and a spectacular Victorian folly, the Ashton Memorial, that looks like the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. And of course there’s the Butterfly House.

If you have ever been to Lancaster, you will know how bitter cold and windy the place can be in the winter – most of the ancient city is built on a hill, and the Butterfly House along with its surrounding park is built on the highest and windiest hill in town. So to keep warm at the Williamson Park in Winter one has two choices – the coffee shop or the Butterfly House. The latter is an enormous greenhouse that recalls London’s Kew Gardens. It houses a wide range of tropical and sub-tropical plants, trees and enormous butterflies. I also understand that there are some tropical spiders there too and some snakes.

Entering the Butterfly House is like abruptly passing from one climate to another, or like being transported from one world to another in the blink of an eye. Upon entering the main structure, you pass through enormous clear plastic rubber doors and you are immediately and intimately involved in the cloying, superheated, steamy interior of a tropical rainforest. If you were wearing winter clothes before you went in, they’ll not be on you for very long. Within seconds, your hair and face and body will be soaked with sweat, and you will feel like you are in a sauna – though fully dressed!

That’s just what it feels like for me every day here in Sarawak. Only here, the greenhouse is the whole planet, and the enormous butterflies that were prisoners in the Lancaster greenhouse are here flying around free here in Sarawak. When I first came over to Kuching, I felt the need to drink ice cold drinks all the time, because my body was not programmed for the heat. Eventually, I learned that it was best to take hot drinks like coffee or teh tarik, or warm water because you can catch a cold if you drink too much cold water.

You can imagine how I reacted when my wife told me that I could catch a cold. I mean, how can you catch a cold when it’s so hot and humid everywhere! But of course, if I had a fifty ringgit note for every cold or flu bout I have had since I have been in Sarawak, I could probably buy an Apple iPhone. Or two!

That’s because the body slowly adapts to minute changes in temperature which are undetectable if you are not used to them. Here in a tropical climate, the change from a hot, sunny and humid season to a hot, wet and rainy season means a considerable drop in temperature, especially at night. At first, this difference hardly meant anything to me, as I could only feel stifling heat all the time. Sarawak was either hot and dry or hot and wet, when I first encountered the place.

But now, I really have to be careful to wear something in bed at night, especially during this rainy season when the air is cooler and you don’t need to switch on the fan so much at night. And now that I have a spanking new air conditioner at work in my office, I have to keep drinking warm drinks to stop the icicles forming! By body has gradually switched over and become sensitive to the temperature ranges in this tropical greenhouse we call Sarawak!

So we are now in what I call the Sarawak Winter – the skies are cloudy, it rains Biblically all day long and you can sleep at night because it isn’t too hot. I wish that Sarawak could be like this all the year round, but as they say, if the weather was always the same, we’d go mad with boredom. And the flu pill manufacturers would probably go out of business!!

Where you from?

Just the other day I went for a coffee at Starbucks again and was subjected to a friendly interrogation routine by the barrista (barman) which has become very familiar to me after nearly 8 years in Malaysia.

It went something like this:

Barrista: Where you from, Sir?

Me: I’m from the UK

Barrista: Oh! Which part of the UK is that sir?

Me: Reading, between London and Oxford.. South East England

Barrista: Really? We learn most of our geography about the UK from the EPL! Do you follow any of the EPL clubs?

Me: (pretending to know something about football) ..well, I think Reading have done very well lately but I don’t really follow any of the clubs. I only follow England and Italy during the World Cup.. it was a pity about Steve McLaren getting fired as England Coach…..

Barrista (serving my coffee) OK sir thank you! Please come again!

This is a perfect example of the kind of conversation routine which I have to go through time and time again here in Malaysia. Everyone thinks I am a football lunatic just because I say I am from the UK. So I have to pretend that I know something about the game, just to maintain social cohesion.

This is what linguists call ‘phatic communion’ – the use of meaningless bits of chatter to maintain social ties, just for a few moments until the need for the social tie is gone. Then, the conversation instantly pops like a balloon.

In the UK, we talk about the weather – “nice morning isn’t it?” “Let’s hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow” etc etc… There is no real communication or desire to know each other’s deepest inner feelings about it, just the need to fill in those unpleasant silences while we wait around for something more meaningful to happen, like a bus.

The conversation I had with the Starbucks employee had a mildly noteworthy and equally phatic sequel. Just as I was picking up my coffee from the barrista, there was a well-heeled Malaysian Chinese man also picking up his order. He said that he overheard that I was from Reading, and informed me proudly that he had studied in Brighton, that quaint remnant of 19^th Century seaside hedonism on England’s South Coast.

So we shared a brief phatic exchange about the British weather and Brighton fish and chips (the best in the world), which was finished off by the obligatory “what do you do for a living?” sequence. It seems everyone is faintly surprised that a professor in a local university drinks in Starbucks. Especially at the airport. They all think I’m in town waiting for a flight to somewhere else. Very embarrassing.

So next time I get asked where I’m from, I’m thinking, I’ll pick a different part of the world, just to mix things up a bit and make the conversation a bit more meaningful and genuine. I won’t say I’m American, because I might get my coffee thrown back at me, I won’t say I’m Australian, because the barrista might start talking about cricket and his auntie who lives in Sydney, and I won’t say I’m from New Zealand, in case they start talking about Rugby.

I know! I’ll say I’m Italian. With my new goatee, I could pull it off and my stepfather is from Lake Garda so I can talk about Italy a lot without sounding stupid even though I’ve never been there. That’ll work nicely.

As long as they don’t ask me about football!!

The Beautiful (?) Game

Contrary to everyone’s stereotypical image of Brits, I actually do not like football.

I’ll give you all a few moments to recover from the shock. There. OK now? Good..

Call me an old-fashioned snob if you like, but I have always considered football to be a rather rough game played by over-paid primadonnas with a massively over-inflated image of their own importance in the world. Football, in my humble opinion, is not something that should be followed by intellectuals like me. Probably why I am here in Malaysia, not home in the UK where football and evidence of its worship are stuffed down your throat all the time.

I think my ambivalence toward Britain’s Second National Religion goes back to my childhood when, being the only big boy in the class, I was usually put in goal during school football lessons. Now imagine the lack of logic in this management choice. You put the biggest boy in the class in goal. Now why would you do that? Because the ball won’t go past his body? Well think again, because I am pretty certain that I let in more goals than, well, the current England goalie!

Thing is, I couldn’t dive. You need to be able to dive, as well as having twenty foot long arms, to be a successful goalkeeper. And, seeing as I had none of those attributes, my goalkeeping days were short and bitter and humiliating.

So, gentle readers, my love of football nowadays only runs to the World Cup. And that’s only if England or Italy are in it. I don’t support any club in the English Premier League (which everyone in Malaysia calls EPL) and couldn’t give a flying fig whether Arsenal or ManU or Chelsea are top of the table because to me they are all the same, with different coloured shirts.

Anyway, I happened to be surfing the web on the phone the other day when I stumbled upon quite a shocking story on the BBC website. It concerned the sudden sacking of the England Manager (not Coach please, this is England!) Steve McLaren because, it seems, England failed to qualify for the Euro 2008 tournament.

Now, even though I hate football, it doesn’t mean I can’t discuss it like any other topic – after all, I am a responsible blogger who respects his audience! So, I started thinking about why on Earth England think they have an automatic right to qualify for the European Cup when the British government can’t even make up its mind whether or not to join the EURO currency. Surely, if their players aren’t up to the mark – which seems to be the case – then they deserve to be left out of the draw. Work harder – get it right next time!

Then, I thought of how utterly stupid it was to fire the manager who after all had only been in the job for 18 months. Wouldn’t it be better to give him a chance to improve his own management techniques, learn from his mistakes and motivate his players to stop thinking about how much money they are making and how many yachts they are going to buy next week or how many models they are going to sleep with, and actually PLAY BETTER FOOTBALL!!

But that’s not how the world goes these days is it? How naive and stupid of me?

Facial Growth Shock Horror!

With all the excitement going on in my life at the moment, I thought I would do something really radical and out of character. I have decided to grow a beard!!

For the last two or three weeks, my upper lip and chin have become the site of a wondrously bushy, black and white goatee. The moustache is black, while the tufts of hair either side of my chin have an Amitabh Bachhanesque whiteness.

Why grow a beard, especially in this climate, you might ask! Well, beards and me have crossed swords many times before. The last time was about ten years ago in Poland when I grew a similar goatee to go with my Byronesque long black hair of the time, and one of my American friends told me that I "looked like a hood", which can't be good I suppose!

Further back than that, much further back, I had grown a beard while an undergraduate. A full black sea-captain beard that would probably these days get me a part in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Fat Cap'n Madder! In fact, my degree graduation photo has me standing there all grand in my cap and gown, with my facial fungus making me look older then than I am now!

The thing is, I actually hate shaving. It's such a time-wasting chore. Also, it's quite a dangerous time-wasting chore because I use a wet shaver, and no matter how hard I try, I always manage to draw blood when I shave in the morning. Once, when I was at a conference in Kota Kinabalu, I almost cut my nose off because I was shaving in a hurry. The only safe shave I have ever had was with an electric shaver, but my old trusty Philishave died just after I came over to Malaysia!

Of course, the unkind among you will say: "well, that's what you get for being such a fat bastard! Round faces are harder to shave than thin ones!" Well, I've had enough of feeling sorry for myself - I have decided to change my appearance and look more professorial and serious - hence the beard! And, the amount of shaving I have to do in the morning has been halved, because I only shave the cheeks and neck!

Well, so far the reaction to my metamorphosis at work has been largely positive. So far, nobody has burst out laughing, but then again, Malaysians are so polite in that way! Some of my Malay colleagues (who like to have little goatees but often complain that they cannot grow beards) are mightily impressed with my facial fungus. One of them the other day actually said that I look more Malay now.

My students think I look cool (or did they say I look like a bloody fool - must be going deaf!) and my dear wife, who has lost nearly all of her hair, seems to be warming to the fact that I now have a little more.

So I will keep my beard for a while, as an experiment in personal presentation and to be in sympathy for my wife's temporary hair loss. Besides, I want to look more intellectual!

But, sorry folks, it's against blog policy to show you what my new beard looks like! You'll have to come and see for yourselves!!

Chemotherapy Diary #3: Cycle Three

While I was sitting waiting for Annie's blood test results the other day, it occurred to me that the hospital I was in was probably the best place in the world to have a heart attack. That being the case, I made absolutely sure that I didn't laugh too vigorously.

It was Annie's third chemo session (just one to go!!) and we were all squeezed into the crowded little waiting room where Annie had just emerged from having her blood test. Her face was crinkled in pain and her arm bent upwards to keep the cotton wool from falling off the puncture wound she had just been given. "Adoi, sakit bah" she said ("ouch it hurts!") and she took her place between my son and I at the back of the room.

We had arrived at the hospital hyper-early to get the blood test done (7 am) and the blood testing lab waiting room was already filling up with young and old. We had already established our slot in the wonderfully bureaucratic system by which health care is administered in Malaysia. It's so simple. You go to the front desk, hand in your appointment card, wait for fifteen minutes, they call your name, they give you a number, you sit down and wait for your number to appear in bright red letters on the wall monitor.

This kind of system is used widely in banks, some shops, most government departments and is, I suppose the best way available of managing queues in a culture that doesn't understand what a queue is. Some of these ticket based queuing systems have robotic voices that periodically announce things like "satu dua lima kosong, kaunter empat" (one two five zero, counter four), usually accompanied by a slightly off-key beep.

Well, in the hospital, there was no beep or robotic voice, just a harried-looking lady with a microphone. Perhaps she had been up all night dreaming of beeping robots and wishing that they could do her job for her so that she can get back to her card game on the computer. Maybe...

So anyway, Annie's test results came back, and we all trundled off through the Harry Potteresque labyrinth that is the Sarawak General Hospital. After stocking up on nibbles and drinkies, we made our way to the oncology department, for Annie's third dose of medical poisoning.

The oncology department is located in a different building and the way you get to it is worthy of Kafka. From the blood testing laboratory, it's a short couple of hundred yard walk to a set of elevators. You take the elevator one floor up to the first floor (usually it's quicker to take the stairs!). Then, you turn right and walk along a covered walkway which is actually a bridge linking the two buildings.

Across the bridge, you find yourself in the cancer ward, where patients and their visitors are arranged for all the world to see. I always feel slightly uncomfortable walking through a crowded hospital ward. It's a bit like walking through someone's bedroom while they are still in bed eating their breakfast.

Anyway, you turn right through the ward and you come to another set of elevators. Take the elevator down to the ground floor and then turn left (or is it right? can't remember!) and you arrive at the chemotherapy waiting area with the water feature and the room with the stained glass!

Phew!! I feel like sitting down. And I'm not the patient!!

This time, Annie's chemotherapy has taken its toll just a bit. The second session featured very severe mouth ulcers - sometimes she couldn't eat, swallow or talk properly, and understandably her mood, and that of my son and I, was a bit subdued this time. But, luckily, she was taken into the chemo salon quite early, after being weighed, and took her place once again. Two and a half hours later, Annie emerged, with some new drugs and something to help her with the mouth ulcers. She was happier, because she had made some more new friends, including one of my work colleagues who is recovering from throat cancer.

You see, gentle readers, cancer is a disease that must be handled, and treated, with the support of others. Nobody should have to face cancer alone. Stress and worry and anxiety can cause the immune system to be suppressed, and that's when cancer thrives. So one thing we try to do in our family is to make Annie as happy and stress-free as possible (even where there are painful mouth ulcers, headaches and vomiting to contend with!). And that means going with her to the hospital and holding her hand when necessary.

So if you have a loved one who is suffering from cancer, undergoing cancer treatment or who is facing death from cancer, it is your duty to keep him or her smiling and happy. Happiness spawns hope, hope leads to well-being and well-being can bring recovery.

So spread the word. Be happy. Support your loved ones. Keep reading this blog!!