Sinclair on life: My kingdom for medicine that tastes like food

These is one of Peter Sinclair's final two columns, sent via e-mail to the Herald just before he died early last Wednesday.


As a kid, I was the despair of my mother.

Like Augustus in the German children's classic Struwwelpeter, I wouldn't eat my lovely soup, or not much of it, so that to her I was always in imminent danger of fading away altogether.

Which goes to show that mothers always know best, it seems, for now I am.

I've always been skinny - although my preferred adjectives used to be lean ... lithe ... anything contriving to suggest the power of the puma combined with the dangerous grace of the jaguar.

I used to weigh in at a limber 70kg, depending on whether any given week had included reading, boozing, exercising, partying ... then I got cancer and, boy, did that unsightly fat melt away to an ethereal, indeed almost transparent, 60kg or so.

The weight problems of the cancer victim are the mirror image of those suffered by the non-cancerous. I found that without the pot belly and the incipient jowls and the flabby bits under my biceps there wasn't a great deal left of me at all, and there seems to be no way of reinstalling them.

With a stomach presided over by a great thunderous spleen there's not a lot of room left for food, so I've been largely reduced to a diet of fairly nasty liquids, insipidly sweet, chosen from a range of cardboard cartons pretending to be milkshakes.

Actually I shouldn't be so ungracious about them - I should be grateful, for apparently if the worst came to the worst I could, God forbid, actually survive on these alone; although, with a lifetime of strawberry, banana, vanilla and such stretching ahead, it's a question of whether you'd want to.

Then there are the pills, almost a diet in themselves. Sometimes I feel like the ultimate pill-popper - but with a menu of only about 12 different sorts, I'm much better off than those fellow-sufferers whose daily splurge approaches 20 or so.

They may not be very cordon bleu, but they try to make up for it with the weird range of effects some of them produce.

Chief among these, of course, is Lady Morphine, sprinkling her strange mixture of dreams and fairy dust at that time of night when there's no hint of dawn. Kaponol is her name then, the slow-acting, slow-breathing essence of darkness; for the more impatient, Sevredol is her persona for quick results.

Then there's temazepam for the unsleeping - that's the bizarre one which, in combination with alcohol, is capable of editing entire incidents from your life leaving nothing behind. This scary amnesiac can and has lead to embarrassing incidents on international jetliners involving total strangers. As far as I know it hasn't happened to me yet, but if you're a friend of mine and I ring you late one night with some unseemly rant, please forgive me, it will be the temazepam talking.

These are the main courses, so to speak, of my cancer-diet, apart from the chemo and a garnish of lesser pills which keep you busy taking them all day - Maxolon for nausea, and Losec for a different sort of nausea, and Cisapride for a third kind and Zofran for a fourth; the dexamethasones and prednisones which come in and out of my life on a now-and-then basis and make you feel much better, though I forget why.

For this is one of the problems of taking so many different remedies - after a while you forget which nostrum is doing what to you. What on earth am I taking roxithromycin for? I ring and ask Roger, my long-suffering doctor. Oh, that's right - my right leg thinks it's in the Congo and is swelling up like elephantiasis for some reason.

Frusemide? Of course - that's to keep fluid moving off the lungs ... as long as I make sure I'm never more than about 10m from the nearest loo when I've taken it ...

Then there's the quinine for when stray bits of me decide to curl up tight and twitch for a while, and Combivent for breathing through a Star Wars-style mask, not to mention fluoxetine ...

All I'd like, and it doesn't seem a lot to ask, is medicine I can pronounce. Like, for example, "sausage roll" ...