HP Sauce

Oh my lord.

I'm not sure where to start.

Yesterday might just go down in my small history as one of the weirdest and funniest days of my life. Which given the context of choking gloom that I am wading through on a general basis, is quite a claim.

S is a bit of a snacker. Not a lardy, just-a-few-too-many-calories-each-day snacker, a high metabolism uber-active fit kind. If he doesn't keep eating on a regular basis he becomes hypoglycaemic. Literally starving. Metabolic shutdown.

Yesterday he had an online meeting in the afternoon. He felt a bit low sugar just before the meeting, and remembered that a kind friend had given us some fancy chocolate – the first of many pressies coming our way, I know – which was upstairs. When he looked in the bag, he saw the fancy choccies, and then he saw a simple looking chocolate bar on top of the fancy ones. Being S, he went for the simple, cheaper looking one, figuring that he'd keep the smart ones for me (i love him for so, so many reasons).

He had a bit, went and put on his grown up persona and smart shirt, and took the meeting.

The meeting was an hour, short for him (thank god, you will see why in a minute). He came out of the office at the end, and told me he felt really, really strange, low blood sugar, faint, clammy. He said “I'm so sorry” and sat abruptly down on the sofa. I said “what do you need?” and he pointed to the chocolate bar, and said, sugar, pass me the bar, and quickly ate the rest of it.

It got worse and worse, very quickly, and I called an ambulance. I thought he was having a heart attack, so did he (all he could say was that he was so sorry to leave me now, to do this to me). “Describe his symptoms” – short breath, clammy, couldn't feel his hands, couldn't stand. My body and mind went into battle mode, with time slowing to try and remember everything and anything I could to help. Note to self, at least I don't freeze in a crisis.

Ambulance response times being what they are in the UK in 2024, we had a full 20 or 30 minutes before they got here. Thank god it wasn't a heart attack. My CPR skills weren't tested. I'm not going to stay smug about not panicking, I think I would have if it had got to that.

S was together enough to ask me what was in the chocolate. I didn't know what he was talking about, then a cold wave swept over me. My gorgeous friends had told me that the present was to keep me going when things got really tough. I rang.

Yep. The Cacao bar was in fact....chocolate and magic mushrooms. S had just eaten the whole thing, enough to keep you going for months.

I made him drink water with lots of salt in it, then stick his fingers down his throat. I'm writing that here so that if you ever need to vom something up you will have the template. It does work, although too late to stop the strong dose that was already in his system.

Then the doorbell went. The first responders were here.

Oh boy.

Honesty was the best and only response, so they could help. They held it together very well, but I imagine that we will quickly become one of their stories – there was a twinkle in their eyes once they had taken S's stats and knew that he was all right.

Diagnosis; massive trip, will last several hours. Might see colours and hear noises with increased intensity.

They helped me get S upstairs into our bedroom, curtains drawn to reduce stimulation, then told me to keep him hydrated and wished me luck.

The next four hours were absolutely extraordinary. If hallucinogenics bring out the “real” you, heighten your “real” emotional state to absolute extremes, then I've now seen deep inside S's mind. And what did it tell me?

That he loves me. So much it hurts.

He veered from guttural howls of pain to giggles, and if I stopped touching him he panicked. So I didn't stop, I just curled up behind him (if I was in front apparently my face started changing colour and moving around, which didn't sound helpful) and put my hand on his chest. And tried to sooth. His howls of anguish were a constant (don't let anyone tell you that a trip is guaranteed to be fun): he doesn't want to lose me, he can't bear to live without me, don't leave me, I love you so much it hurts, you are the best of me. My wonderful, strong S, in normal life holding on to a determined positivity in the face of our new cancer-strewn world, showed his pain. Again and again and again.

Well, at least I know he really, really, REALLY loves me. I am a lucky girl, to be loved by someone so kind, so warm, so gentle, and who loves me to pain. I think we got to experience a decade of couple counselling in one evening – after all, all we humans really want to know is that we love and are loved absolutely. If you know that, you can work everything else out.

And then the giggles. Helpless laughter. Exclamations about the colours. I played soothing background piano music and that made him giggle, then cry. It was tricky to pitch the help.

Meanwhile....

This was the day I had chosen to tell my son. We had been to a doctor's appointment for him in the morning so he had the day off school. I had decided to tell him when we got home. The morning was spent holding it together, in freefall, building to a moment of unbearable release. The power of inflicting total pain with my words.

How do you tell a child who lost one parent to cancer that their remaining parent now has cancer? With apologies to those of you out there who believe, there is no fucking god. There's no logic, there's no correlation between being a good, or at least decent – or needed – person and fairness. Putin and Trump get to live on in power, I need say no more.

There are the gods, though. I think the Greeks and Romans had it right. Petulant, bored, sulky gods who meddle with their human playthings to pass infinite time.

M took it. I'm not going to say well. But calmly. Looking it up on his phone, seeing that the first entry shows that recovery stats for breast cancer are at 98%. We can explain that it is like a chronic disease, that it is nothing like Jack's 5% survival chance from first diagnosis.

But still.

He didn't go to school that day, he didn't go yesterday, he's not going today. And I'm not the one who is going to make him. But it hurts just so much. He's doing so well, he has a lovely group of friends, he was on a path of determination of his own young making. Will that go? It could. It did for Y. And whilst it's not my fault, it just is my fault. It's because of me, it's because of this. My poor, poor child.

He agreed that we shouldn't tell Y yet. I didn't lay it down as an imposed action, I asked him to tell me what he thought we should do, and he agreed strongly. Amazing boy.

Then he went upstairs, to his room, to take on his once again altered world.

And THEN, the ambulance arrived, and I disappeared with S, and was so intent on keeping S sane that I didn't and couldn't leave for long enough to explain for at least an hour. My poor son didn't know if the ambulance was for S, or for me – and I'd just told him I have cancer. He said he calmed down a bit when, listening outside our door, he heard first howls, then giggles from S, so he figured that the giggles meant it couldn't be bad.

Moral of the day? The drugs do work, they got that wrong, but I'm not sure you want to see where they take you. S's experience was a pure response, he had no expectation of mind altering, he didn't do that with any anticipation or knowledge, and it took him to a place of absolute grief. A good moral lesson to tell the kids (we did).

I told you you couldn't make it up.