Cancer 112

I will apologise at the outset for bringing up a subject that some people responded negatively to in an earlier post, that of dying. Over the last three weeks, I have been having a bit of a rough time. Initially, it was pneumonia, then a general feeling of malaise, and yesterday I got a bug and was laid up in bed, feverish and with diarrhoea. The fever has gone but the diarrhoea is still playing its games. I have had to change my bag five times since last night, everything pure liquid, and one with a bit of a spill onto my body and the bedsheets. Lovely.

Throughout this time I have been coming back to the idea that I am dying. Being ill with a cancer that is going to kill you is not like being normally ill. When you are normally ill you think that the pain you are in, the sickness you feel, etc, is bearable because it will go away and you will be healthy again. I don’t have that. On the other hand, the feelings of pain and sickness are not like ‘normal’ pain and sickness. There is something else inside me that I am unable to name or really describe. It is a general feeling of illness and deterioration that is not all-consuming, but it dominates thoughts and feelings. There is a sense of lethargy. I can’t walk as far as I could even a few months ago. I don’t have the energy to do things. It is an effort to even walk up the garden.

There is a sense that I am being taken over by death (for want of a better word), that I can detect the growing number of things I cannot do, and that eventually I will stop driving, I will take to my bed, and I won’t get up again.

People say I am doing well because I get out and go places. We go for a drive, we go to a town or village (not a city of course, they are too big), we go on holiday. I am fighting my damnedest to keep doing these things because I know that if I give in then that is it. Yesterday we were going to Calke Abbey for a look around the house. We got to the cafe there when I said I couldn’t go in. I couldn’t walk as far as the house. I could have used the crip wagon that runs up and down, but I don’t think I could have got round the house. We had to come home. It is so frustrating, and goes entirely against my will to keep active. Then again, when I got home I took to my bed and slept, except when I was unloading the bags….