Cancer 78
Posted on September 26, 2023 Leave a Comment
I’ve felt a little odd over the last couple of days. I get this regularly, and it usually occurs in the middle of the chemotherapy cycle. I can’t describe it exactly. It is not like being normally ill with a cold, aching joints, a snuffly nose, or a cough. It feels slightly alien, certainly unknown.
There are elements that are easy to describe, such as diarrhoea, but when you have a stoma even that isn’t normal. Instead of the normal symptoms of diarrhoea my bag fills up, usually quickly, and with a rather liquidy substance – bear in mind that I have a chunk of my colon missing so even normal faeces don’t get a chance to harden up properly. It is potentially hazardous, especially if I am asleep and it fills. As yet I have not had an explosion in bed with all its easily imagined consequences, but it could easily happen. Perhaps that is partly why I am out of bed so long on these nights.
It is the other elements or symptoms that are difficult to describe. I am tired, but it is not like normal tiredness. Sleeping doesn’t resolve it. There is a feeling inside, perhaps best described as being out of sorts. I feel sick, yet I don’t feel sick – my appetite is fine, and I do not throw up. My head feels queasy (is that even possible?). I feel dizzy yet not dizzy. Sometimes I have to stop and reorient myself, yet I am not disoriented, though I am.
I feel at the same time quite ill and quite well. The illness tends to be in a sense on the surface, because underneath I feel quite well, yet at the same time underneath I feel quite ill but on the surface I am fine.
I am not very good at describing these symptoms. I suppose it is because I don’t have the words to describe how I feel. Normally we are able to describe thoughts and feelings, and put them in words, because they are normal, and we have spent years learning to describe them accurately. I have only had a few months to learn this new terminology and I am not very good at it.
I understand why I have the symptoms. I have chemotherapy drugs that make me ill and other drugs to counteract being ill. It gets very complex, and it is no wonder that my body protests.
I am reaching the point where I am utterly sick of going to the hospital for my next treatment. I have now had eight cycles, and there are likely to be four more before I take a break. These indescribable symptoms raise their cancer-ridden heads whenever I think about going to the hospital, and it gets worse each time. Much of this is in my head. Yes, the symptoms do seem to be building up little by little, but I know it is at least in part just my way of thinking. When I am in hospital I do function, though it is the one point of the cycle when my appetite is affected.
We have booked a holiday. While on chemo I cannot leave the country, but when I take a break I can. We are going to France, to stay in a house in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I don’t think for a moment that I won’t be able to drive down through France. I am looking forward to it. I am hoping and assuming that when I take this break from chemotherapy these symptoms will, at least temporarily, disappear.
Cancer 77
Posted on September 20, 2023 Leave a Comment
I have a new variation on the old Boomtown Rats song. My version is: “Tell me why I don’t like Thursdays.” Not very original, I will admit, but appropriate to the last 4 months of my life, and presumably/hopefully the next two months.
I noticed today that I keep speaking of tomorrow, meaning what is happening on Friday. As it is now Wednesday I think I might be unconsciously removing Thursday from my life. I have two reasons for this. My Thursday variations are that tomorrow I will have my chemo manbag removed (the nurses call it a manbag, I am sure there are better names for a bag full of chemo chems attached to the tube that goes into my arm, up around my shoulder and through to just above my heart, so the chemicals can get to do their stuff quickly), but I never know what time. It is on a 46-hour programme (if that is the word for a slowly shrinking bubble pushing the chems into my body one drop at a time). Usually, it means the nurse comes around 2-4pm, and I am always frightened they won’t turn up so the damn bottle stays attached for longer than two days, perhaps forever.
That happens every other Thursday. On alternate Thursdays the nurse comes around and takes blood samples. That has to be in the morning so they can be processed quickly so the consultant can look at the results the following day and see whether I am fit enough to undergo the next round of chemo, starting the following Tuesday. On these Thursdays I am frightened that they are not going to turn up on time. Thursdays are frightening days – though the nurses have turned up every time so far.
By the way, I like the nurses. They are friendly and know what they are doing. When I say I don’t like Thursdays it is not because of the people involved.
The routine overall is becoming more tedious. The two week cycle consists of First Tuesday, in the hospital for hours having several chemo drugs pumped into me while I sit on an uncomfortable chair bantering with the nurses. It is largely politically incorrect, unwoke, or whatever term is appropriate. I like nurses. There is a lot about death and various abuses of the system. There are few jokes as such, but it is good fun. Yesterday I came up with a Stephen King version of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. An improvement I think, certainly if I write it it will be a lot shorter than the standard books by Solzhenitsyn and Stephen King. It probably won’t be as good either. OK, I will give away the secret. Eight patients are in the ward, and there are about three nurses. Over the period of a day one or more of the nurses kills of the patients one by one, in various ways nurses are expert at (I particularly like the snipping of the spinal cord with scissors. The surviving patients don’t realise people are dying at first, and when they do realise they become trapped in the ward. OK, I haven’t worked out all the details yet but either all the patients will die or, perhaps better, one patient survives and kills off the murdering nurse(s). I need to do a bit of research into the best ways nurses can kill patients, so I will ask them next time I am in. When discussing the story there was a bit of an undercurrent regarding Lucy Letby as it is recent, but hey, we’re all going to die. I don’t think it upset anyone but who knows? The name of the killer nurse? I think her surname will be Ratchett, or something like that. I have a first name but she might read the blog, though I did tell her.
And this is what I do on the first Tuesday of the cycle. I then have the bottle attached until the first Thursday, so Wednesday is a bit of a letdown. Once the bottle is off I am free for six days. This is when we have been going away, though not in September, unless you count going to Oliver Cromwell’s house in Huntingdon (one of the two English greatest men, you can guess the other one on the basis that Cromwell is one). Then it is the second Thursday. The following day I see the consultant or the cancer nurse regarding whether I can continue my treatment. So far my results have been as good as can be expected, including last week’s scan. The bastards won’t go away and never will but there is some shrinkage.
Then I am free over the weekend and back to first Tuesday. I have now nearly completed 8 cycles out of 12. I then hope to take a break. They will remove the PICC line from my suffering veins and I will be free for a couple of months. We hope to get to the south of France for Xmas. I hate Xmas. We are looking at a nice house in Certe, close to the Spanish border, close to the escape route for LLuis Companys, President of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.
Cancer 76
Posted on September 18, 2023 Leave a Comment
I have a perhaps understandable focus on thinking about death. I am currently alive, but at some point in the probably not too distant future, I will be dead. As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy for two years as a subsidiary subject. One of the topics was dualism and materialism. While I was and am a convinced materialist I enjoyed the debates around the subject. As a materialist death is death, the end of life, no afterlife, no eternal life for my soul. Indeed, I do not have a soul.
I have often wondered how eternal life could be. Think about it a little and the inherent absurdity of eternal life becomes apparent. How old would I be in this eternal life? A happy child of 12 living in my childhood home? A slightly disturbed adolescent tearing down the mores of society? A young adult, physically fit but without the – ahem – wisdom of age? My age now, physically rather messed up by heart disease and cancer? Do you stay the age at which you die?
What about relationships? Will I spend eternity with my wife? What about those with an unhappy marriage? Do they get to stay with some idealised partner? Do Muslim men really get 72 virgins? What happens when they are no longer virgins? Do they get replaced with new virgins? Where do these virgins come from? Are they real people who lived and died on Earth or are they created by Allah specifically to attend to the desires of dead men?
If I had two wives, with one dying early, which one would I spend eternity with? Do I get to spend eternity with my children, my parents, and the rest of my family? What happens if I really love someone and want to spend eternity with them, but they do not want to spend eternity with me?
Then there is the problem of eternity itself. Can a marriage stand the strain of eternally living together? Do people change as their eternal lives develop? Do they get older? Do their tastes change? What do they actually do all that time?
One of the good things about a restricted lifespan is that there isn’t time to get bored with things. Life develops and changes. You get older. Your ways of thinking change. There are stages in life that are reasonably clear to most people. We have childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. They all have characteristics. They are not the same for everyone, but in many people, there is a clear development of abilities, of making a contribution to society, and a gradual loss of ability and contribution, with an acceptance of life as it has been lived and life as it comes to an end. Most people don’t go screaming into death. It is accepted as a part of life.
If we really believed in eternal life and thought it through then we would have a conflict. While some people commit suicide in real life, I can imagine that after a few centuries of eternal life many people, perhaps all, would want to commit suicide as eternal life drags on and becomes incredibly dull and/or difficult. Then we are left with the philosophical question of whether it is possible to commit suicide when one has eternal life. I would hope so.
Cancer 75
Posted on September 15, 2023 Leave a Comment
After my worries last night, I have had my CT scan results and they are positive. I still have the cancer. That is not going anywhere. It is scattered all over my abdomen, but there are no further growths and some shrinkage. My blood tests are normal, including the CEA which is slightly down.
So what was I making a fuss about? While I believe I am more or less in control of my emotions around this damned subject, there are times when a sense of being out of control can prevail. albeit briefly (at least so far). It is normal when people are having tests – going to sit an exam, meet someone significant for the first time, or find themselves in a war zone – to feel a certain level of stress that usually dissipates once the event begins. I know that even towards the end of my career (end of my career? I didn’t know that) I still feel nervous before a lecture, the feeling disappearing almost immediately after I start talking. Then the confidence gets going, but that is another story.
Getting the results of a test for cancer when the result might be massive growths of tumours, no hope of further treatment success, and death within 3 months could be considered a reasonable candidate for a distressful time. It was, and my relief at the result was equally intense. I wanted to cry like a baby – I didn’t of course, I’m far too tough and manly for that kind of thing, even though I am wearing a flowery shirt.
Cancer 74
Posted on September 15, 2023 Leave a Comment
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.
Dr Nigel Hunt 