Cancer 74

As usual, I am awake in the middle of the night. It is the standard pattern, go to bed early, sleep for 2-3 hours, get restless, get up, read/write, and hopefully go back to bed for another couple of hours before getting up for another day.

Tonight is a little different as I have a consultant appointment at 0900. I should be getting the results of my CT scan, and quite frankly, I am a little afraid. If one or more tumours are growing significantly then the treatment is failing and the options start to narrow. A different form of chemotherapy? Another operation? The final decline to death? I know the last option is going to happen but given my relatively good health over the last couple of months I would like to delay it as long as possible. I still have too much to do. I still have too much life to live.

My view regarding the fear of death is unchanged. I do not fear death. I fear dying. I fear pain. Once I am dead there is nothing to feel. I have always lived my life with the ‘Je ne regret rien’ philosophy. Choices are made, stick with them. Other choices were possible, but they were not made, so what is there to regret? Life can take many routes, and other routes would have been interesting – perhaps – but the ones we make are the ones we make, so live them to the full. I could have remained a bricklayer instead of walking off site on a particularly cold snowy day after reading a couple of psychology books (which is why I chose psychology. If I had just read physics books I would have chosen physics. It is all about timing). I could have chosen the University of Lancaster for a PhD when they were looking for a medium pace bowler and would have met an entirely different group of people in my life. I could have chosen a different topic for my PhD and spent my life in a cognition lab rather than talking to interesting people. I could have chosen not to enjoy wine and eaten fruit for breakfast – oh, better not go there.

If I am honest, when I started writing about life and death in this blog I was in some ways nearer death than I am now. I was really ill after my operation. Now I have people telling me I look better than I was before I was diagnosed with cancer (thanks drugs). I know it can’t last, but I want it to.

It is the middle of the night, the dark time when misery and depression can come to the fore, so let’s purge this negative feeling. On the positive side, the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) levels in my blood tests are coming down.With a reference figure of 0-2.9ng/ml of blood being normal, over 4 a little dodgy, 8 suggesting recurrence of cancer, and an exponential scale showing that in the hundreds the cancer is in charge, my score has gone from 5.5 at the beginning of chemotherapy to 2.8 now, so that is a good sign – for the moment.

Hopefully, the consultant will present some positive results, and the next 5 sessions of chemotherapy (10 weeks) can go ahead to add to the 7 (14 weeks) already completed. My hope is that once I complete this round (24 weeks altogether) I can have a break, have the PICC line removed, stop chemotherapy for some time, and go to France for an extended holiday. As Roberto Begnini’s 1997 film has it, Life is Beautiful – and the protagonist there was positive about life in a concentration camp. If someone in that situation can be positive, then so can I. The film might be fiction, but life is a narrative determined by one’s interpretations, thoughts and feelings, and in many ways also fictional. And I do tend to prefer longer novels.