Cancer 107

Many people who die of cancer have certain patterns in their decline. They tend to become less interested in the world, they interact with fewer people, their world gets smaller until the focus is largely on the self. This is something that does concern me, not the process, I can understand how people lose interest in the world around them as they are dying. I get it. The concern for me is that, as I watch for the signs in myself, I will declare to the diminishing world that I am in decline and that I will die soon, when actually what is happening is that I am having a bad day. There is the danger of crying wolf, that I declare I am in terminal decline so many times that people cease to listen or take it seriously, so that when I do have he real decline nobody is interested any more. Of course, if this is the case then presumably I won’t care whether anyone is interested because I will be unconcerned with the state of the world.

I do try to put off this decline. Now I am retired I can develop new interests. I always think that had I read the right books at the right time, ie in the weeks before I walked off the building site declaring that I wanted to get a PhD, I would have been a physicist rather than a psychologist. As it was, I had been reading psychology books so I went and got a PhD in psychology. There have always been psychologists who wanted to be physicists. I assume it wasn’t just because they were bad at spelling that they ended up doing psychology, perhaps they just weren’t bright enough, or were too bright. I don’t know.

Anyway, partly as a way to show myself I am not in intellectual decline I have started reading physics books, particularly books relating to quantum physics. This is not because I think I am clever, it is just that I have always had an interest in the subject. I know very little maths, so I am not going to understand a lot of it, but then most theoretical physicists claim they don’t understand quantum theory. Perhaps physics and psychology are not so different. Both are about relationships rather than things, both are trying to find explanations of complex phenomena that are in many ways unpredictable, both are employing methods that are perhaps not the best methods to apply, and both come up with some daft ideas about the way the world is structured. The black box of cognitive psychology is the black hole of quantum physics, we make predictions that often come true but we don’t know why.

In terms of decline, I have not been feeling too well in the last few days. I have a ridiculous and very itchy rash around my PICC line entry. I appear to be allergic to all the dressings. I have been having abdominal pains for some time. As I have mentioned recently my stoma and associated hernia have been troublesome, and today I was called into the hospital where I underwent my third Covid test – I really do not like things stuck up my nose. I can bear anything except that. Please give me another serious operation, chop out my liver, play bagpipes with my heart, use my fingers as piano keys, my eyes as pin cushions, give me terminal cancer, but don’t stick anything up my nose. Anyway, it was negative, but unfortunately, I have pneumonia, hopefully not too serious as I have been given only five days of drugs, but it does mean next week’s treatment has been postponed for a week. I am cancelling the next week. I am going nowhere and seeing no one. I need to get better quickly so my treatment can resume.

I am not claiming my current troubles as terminal decline, just a set of irritating pains, aches and illnesses. I fully intend to be functional within days. In any case, it is my birthday on Tuesday. I need a wild celebration. Perhaps I will eat a little chicken, drink some ginger beer, and hope I get another book on quantum physics for a present.