Cancer 177

This is painful. A couple of days ago I started to get severe pain in and around my shoulder. Tramadol alone barely touches it, Tramadol plus paracetamol works for a time. I am sitting writing this in the bathroom of a very nice hotel because I can’t sleep. It is painful to lie on my back, painful to lie on my right side, and just about manageable to lie on my left side if I am careful. It is gone 0415. I have managed a couple of one hour sleeps. Perhaps I should just get in the bath to see if that eases it (it doesn’t, I tried it last night).

Then of course there is the one track mind that is having cancer. Is the pain there because the cancer has spread? Unlike real life, everything with cancer is interpreted as though it is cancer. Obviously a pain is a pain. It can have many causes, but once you have cancer then every pain is cancer. If it has got to my shoulder then it is in my bones, it has spread uncontrollably. That is it. I am dead. Of course, as my cancer is terminal I will be dead, but at the same time as the pessimism there is optimism. This can’t be it surely? I can’t really be dying.

The result of all this is sitting in a hotel bathroom at 0420 unable to sleep not only because of the pain but because of the wild and contradictory thoughts and feelings rushing around my head.

Perhaps I will run that bath.