The mercury is at 36 degrees, humidity at 75 percent. Felix and I just returned from my Echocardiogram. Two hours ago I plonked down in a waiting room seat wet with sweat. My son bottom shuffled up to all the other people on chairs and in turn plucked at their shoes, looked up at them or gave big, toothy smiles to anyone who engaged with him. Twice now I’ve been asked my daughter’s name. Zoë – I think would be my daughter’s name. But of course they don’t mean my future (not possible) daughter’s name, but my son’s.

Felix has strawberry-blonde curls, a cherubic face with the high colouring only Caravaggio knows how to deliver. In short: he’s gorgeous. The first time I was asked ‘her name’ was last weekend. It probably had something to do with my son wearing a pink bond’s singlet. It was cute.

Why are we still correlating pink with girls and blue with boys? I thought second wave feminism put that one in the garbage bin. Apparently not.

I digress.

It’s hot, and on days like this you have to fill up the water glass often: one for you, one for your head then one for you again.

Weeks ago my ovaries were turned off. Since then I’ve started getting menopausal symptoms with a vengeance. The hot flushes are the worst of them. However, it has to be said that after chemotherapy these kind of bodily discomforts are manageable. When the hot flush comes on it’s like molten lava oozing out of a volcano. The heat is red hot, and consuming. My heart goes from thumpidy thump thump to boom boom in an effort to manage whatever’s happening internally with the rushes. A nurse informed me the other day that her Aunt named them ‘power surges’. They are powerful.

The hot flushes combined with the moist heat of a Brisbane summer make for many showers and changes of underwear.

We’re twelve days into the New Year – 2010 – Kubrick’s space odyssey hasn’t happened nine years after it should’ve. Humans are still grounded on earth. Virgin will fly you through the Stratosphere where any person, who can afford a sizable house in Sydney’s inner city, can float free from gravity for a few minutes. But no, Earth is still our main residence. What a job we’re currently doing folks: paying an extra $2 per plane ticket to minimize our carbon footprints in the sky, political argy-bargy on minimising emissions and many countries experiencing extreme weather conditions – from snow covering all of England to catastrophic fire warnings in South Australia.

I may think globally, but my world is still very much local. I’ve resumed cancer treatments. Right now I visit the oncology day unit more often than when I underwent chemotherapy: for Zoladex injections (menopause maker) once a month, regular echocardiograms to check the drugs aren’t compromising my heart functioning, and IV Herceptin every three weeks to suppress the HerII protein that my particular brand of breast cancer likes for breakfast.

These visits fall on different days. Last year Friday was chemo day and Brett took our son for the day. So now I take Felix with me. He gets a lot of attention from the nurses. Plus, my fellow patients engage with me in a way they wouldn’t if the subject wasn’t babies – mainly their own and their own’s own (i.e. grandchildren). He’s a bit of babbling sunshine and normalcy in a place where people are going through really difficult stuff and feeling sick along the way.

Right now he’s asleep. I just finished Larson’s Millennium trilogy (great fun). I loved the heroine Salander as a character. What we all would give for a photographic memory. My hair has come back greyer and thicker. Right now I have a faux Mohawk ala Beckham. I’m eating well. I feel good, really good in fact.

This group of lovelies spent a morning cleaning mould off our dining and living room ceilings (a.k.a semi-tropical foot prints), as well as stacking bricks, tidying up a passion fruit vine and taking unwanted green waste to the tip. Plus, they left a Christmas card, which when opened later revealed a present: a free haircut. They work for Adshel: the company that owns Brissy bus shelters and rents out ad space on them. Every year they do volunteer work. This year they chose mummyswish (link on side) to dedicate a day of their time. Fabulous.

Me walking near Lake Tekapo, New Zealand. It was blowing a near gale that day.

Mount Cook, New Zealand as seen from Red Tarns (500 metres up from the valley floor).

Walking 3-4 hours return into sub-alpine environments; the beauty of Milford Sound (or more correctly fjord); relaxing and enjoying the company of my partner and son were a few of the delights of New Zealand. It helped me to breathe in deep again.

We’re going on a holiday to New Zealand’s South Island. We arrive in Christchurch, pick up a camper van, then make our way south on two weeks of day walking and basking in the beauty of fjords and mountains. Back on the ether waves after December 8th. I can taste and enjoy food again – my old mouth has returned.

P.s re-found a favourite hot chocolate sauce topping – care of my stepmother.

Stepmother’s brew:

• Equal parts (as much or as little as you want) butter, golden syrup and cocoa. It goes sticky/hardish when it touches the ice-cream. Delicious!

The nurse did something clever when she gave my Zoladex injection. First, she injected a local anaesthetic just under the skin to form a small bump (bit of a sting). Then, she got the biro sized Zoladex needle ‘don’t look’ she said, but I did; and injected a pellet sized deposit of chemical into the bump so it wouldn’t hurt, which it didn’t. Ten points for hand control I say. The pellet takes four weeks to disperse, then I get another hit. I’ll do this every month until … well … forever it seems. Until I’m naturally post-menopausal.

Finished chemo three-and-a-half weeks ago. The cumulative effect of the cytotoxic concoction made the side effects get worse – and – worse. I practically spent a week in bed looking at my hips protruding from my fifty-two kilo frame. My gut didn’t work brilliantly, so there was quite a bit of pain in there. But, when it all got too much I watched episode one of the The West Wing (damn fine – I miss Josh Lyman and CJ).

Three weeks on and my hair’s growing back. I no longer experience nausea or food aversion. The metallic twang appears to be fading from my mouth. The residual effect of Taxotere is muscle fatigue, anemia and tiredness. These beauties are just peachy for now. I’m happy the dreaded chemo times are over and the next phase is in full swing. Herceptin (the drug I’ve been taking alongside chemo) continues every three weeks for another eight months. Herceptin is delivered via my portacath, so I’m in the oncology unit for half-a-day.

In two weeks I’ll get my ovaries turned off with Tamoxifen and Zoladex. Tamoxifen is a daily pill – sort of the opposite of the contraceptive pill. Zoladex is a monthly injection that sends me into a chemical menopause (also used to chemically castrate men).

A mind journey of what my tongue and mouth feels like:

You were out at a good friend’s house last night and drank too much cask red wine, take-away pizza, and sucked honey-comb for dessert  – then you went to sleep without brushing your teeth – woke and forgot to brush your teeth again. You go to the bathroom to have that shower you need, hop in with a thick wad of aluminium foil and simultaneously chew it while showering: crunch, twang, crunch. Once out of the shower you brush your teeth with double strength mint toothpaste. With the toothpaste taste fresh in your mouth you go to the fridge, take some cold strawberries out and bite down on them – nice? No, in fact, it tastes like cold, fuzzy metal; aha, this is my world.

But, my mind is searching forward to that magical time when food is again a source of great pleasure.

I’ve started hungrily peering into cook books for new and yummy things to cook when my taste returns and the metal twang disappears from my mouth. My palate is bland at the moment due to my fizzing tongue and stripped throat. However, on the weekend I looked for a recipe for fresh tomato sauce and found below. It’s so simple, yet so delicious. Give it a go if you have too many tomatoes in the garden or fridge.

Roasted tomato sauce (taken from Stephanie Alexander’s the cook’s companion)

Ingredients: serves 2-4

• 8 ripe tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped (to peel tomatoes you cut long crosses on the bottom, plop them in boiled water for a while then cold water – peel skins away from crossed sections).
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 small fresh chilli, seeded but whole
• extra-virgin olive oil
• salt

Preheat oven to 180C. Place tomato, onion, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, chilli and 100ml oil into a baking dish that will hold ingredients in a 4cm thick layer. Roast for about 1 hour until tomato looks a bit scorched, onion is quite soft and there are plenty of juices. Remove chilli and discard. Taste for salt.

Add sauce to good quality fresh pasta (I added it to spinach tortellone).

I’m coming out of the ill-health haze now. My stomach appears to want food again, and my nausea is abating. I’ve attached some photos of the last chemo session. The black bag in the background is my last cytotoxic brew. The stuff attached to my chest is my portacath, which has been accessed for IV infusion (some might be interested to know what it looked like). I was fed chemo through this line.