Cancer 11

I generally have an optimistic starry-eyed view of the world, where my cancer will be cured, but today has been one of those days where it has been difficult to keep staring at the stars. Last night I spent too long on or near the toilet , with my abdominal cramps worse than normal, and blood oozing and spurting – I hope you are not eating. There should be some good toilet humour in this, but I am not in the mood. Let me know if you think of any good jokes. It is not particularly painful, but it is worrying that it is getting worse, ie that the malignant tumour is increasing in size and narrowing my colon, so making it difficult to get things past it.

I telephoned the cancer nurses to let them know what was happening. They have put me on a low fibre diet (where at least I can eat white bread, meat, fish and eggs) to help ensure the safe passage of looser stools.

My second worry over the last few days has been that my operation may be postponed because of the junior doctors’ strike. I hope it won’t be. I asked the nurse if there was any information. She checked with her manager and we should know sometime towards the end of next week, which is a week too long for me.

The stress of the day meant that we completely forgot that my niece was taking me out for my birthday afternoon tea today, She phoned me 15 minutes after the due time, and we got there half an hour late, extremely apologetic. This never happens. We are early people. Tell us to be somewhere at 1100 and we will be there at 1030 and think we are just in time. Stress has profound effects on behaviour.

Whenever I worry I inevitably think things will go wrong, that my cancer has spread so that it cannot be easily controlled, that it is in my lymphs, in my liver, in my kidneys. I feel it everywhere. OK, I know this is my neuroticism but neuroticism is real so my feelings are real (even when I know they may not be – see, even here I can only say may not be rather than are not).

These are the times when I reflect on my life and wonder whether it has been of some value, I mean subjective value. We can’t all be Einstein, Gorbachev or Churchill. Do I think it has been in some sense worthwhile? I start to think in existential terms, with the ideas of being and becoming and absurdity to the forefront. In the end I know that objectively no life has value. A few atoms bonded together in a weak, floppy body, ever-changing for a few rotations of a minor star around a minor planet until it dissolves into the earth. None of it matters. Yet of course it does; it matters to ourselves in some absurd manner. It matters that we have achieved things, that people like or respect us, that we have in some minor way contributed to the world. These things give life some meaning. As Sartre would have it, a sense of becoming rather than just being. Albert Camus would conclude that while life is absurd, the meaning we put on it is important, and so we should not commit suicide (see The Myth of Sisyphus for a fuller explanation) . Thanks Albert, I was not thinking of committing suicide just yet, no matter that parts of my body might want to.

Sorry that I have been negative again. The key thing is that I just want this operation over and done with. Inside I am under stress, but my self is aware that the chances are that Western medical science can destroy my cancer and make me reasonably well again (apart from my heart failure, my pinned big toe, my outsized belly, my flat feet, my alopecia and my perennially broken shoulder).