Cancer 190

Today I started my 36th round of chemotherapy. It is late evening and I am sitting with my bottle of flourouracil dangling from a tube attached to my portacath and hence to my heart. It is dripping slowly into my bloodstream, and should continue to do so until Thursday afternoon, so I need to be very careful what I do in case I catch it, crease the tube, yank it out of my chest, etc. This is the 36th time I have had the bottle attached and that has not happened so far. Why do I worry that it will?

I have been feeling quite awful recently. I have felt that I have started a decline, the decline, that unto death. I have been unable to move around as much, it is getting hard to climb stairs. I weeded the gaden for five minutes and was knackered. Then I had a conversation with two good people. Within that conversation the word depression was important, the idea that depression can explain the physical decline in the ways I feel. Then the term endogenous depression was used, and linked with the possibility that it is caused by the drugs I am taking. Twebty four hours after the conversation (I am a slow learner) something clicked. I may be declining, but it may be reversible. If I believe it is depression that is caused by factors out of my control then perhaps I can do something about it. The negative associations with depression need to be turned round and made positive. I need to start thinking positively, Back to my favourite term, I need to get a grip.

When I returned from the hospital today, I felt as bad as usual, wanting to sit in my chair, feel sick and brood. Instead I put my pinny on and made the wife some arancini from the leftover risotto. Then I sat in my chair. She liked them.

Neuroticism is a rather loaded term. It is usually seen negatively. I get accused of being a neurotic, and it is true. I am neurotic. I can make a fuss about all sorts of things that make other people just raise their eyebrows or worse. It is different now though. When you have life-buggering-up cancer with permanent nasty treatment it changes the way you live. I don’t have time to be a miserable bastard in the ways I used to be. Those who know me may still say I am a grumpy git, but I am talking about my inner self, that bit I don’t show so often.

Perhaps neuroticism provides a kind of special insight into the way the self operates, particularly with regard to emotion, but also enables a deeper connection between the mind and body (not in the Cartesian sense of a link at the pineal gland, there is no physical versus mental, we are gloopy bodies. There is no non-physical mind. It is neural connections folks). Having this deeper connection may mean that the neurotic person can turn negative neuroticism into a more positive force, one that benefits the body, one that can keep you alive longer when you have a nasty illness, or can make you more effective in the world, simpy because there is this complex relationship with emotions, and emotions are our main drivers, not cognition or motivation. Cognition provides that veneer of intelligence. Motivation arises from emotion. If we have negative emotions, we are motivation in negative ways. If we have positive emotions, we are positively motivated.

I am not saying I am special, there are millions of neurotics out there. You probably know if you are one. It is a normal way of being, usually interpreted negatively, but perhaps that need not be so.

Obviously from the above I have not thought this through very well, but I reckon there is a book in it: “Positive Neuroticism: Getting a Grip on your Body by Breaking the Inner Woody Allen” Dreadful title as usual, but trying to write a book is a damn fine way of understanding a subject.