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.
Cancer 73
Posted on September 1, 2023 Leave a Comment
I have never really seen the humour in farting. While I am probably as childish as the next person when it comes to humour generally, fartingi s just not funny. At school several of the kids would fart then expect everyone to laugh. Many did laugh, but I always was a little disgusted by the idea that small particles of shit would stimulate my olfactory system. Inhaling the contents of someone else’s arse lacks that certain something that is required to make me laugh. It was, and is, disgusting.
It is much worse for me now with a stoma. I have absolutely no control of the output of my remaining bowel. If it is going to discharge shit, it discharges shit. Sometimes I am aware of it, sometimes I am not. If it is going to discharge wind it is the same. Usually no warning. Just like complete people it is sometimes silent, sometimes reasonably quiet, and sometimes very loud. It can be short or long.
I am not normally embarassed by things, but I am embarassed by my uncontrollable farts. I don’t like it, I want to disappear. Inevitably the people around me will either remain silent or will laugh. I don’t like that either – not that there is much choice. How can you respond to someone farting? We are all conditioned to laugh or remain silent when someone farts. The thing is, you lot can control – to a large extent – when you fart. I can’t. You can deliberately do it for a laugh (if you are puerile), I can’t. When it happens at the dining table it is worse. When it happens at a dining table in public it is even worse. In private with friends and family it is bad enough. They may understand I have no control, though they still often have the horrid laugh/silent reaction. In public people just think I am rude. I haven’t yet told strangers at a different table about my predicament but I probably should. It is just that I am embarrassed to do so.
I should probably avoid foods that generate wind, but this is not fully effective. Everyone generates wind, no matter what they eat. Dietary control (not a concept I have ever been fully familiar with) can only partly solve the problem.
The only advantage I have when farting is that it never smells. The stoma bag has a very effective filter. So, Mr and Mrs general public, you may hear me fart, but you will never smell me. You will never have that fine olfactory experience of particulate shit finding its way up your nose.
Cancer 72
Posted on August 22, 2023 1 Comment
I am sitting in the cancer ward with my drugs drip dripping into my arm for the 6th time. This is the last round of my first cycle. All being well I will start the next cycle immediately. This is the 11th week of my chemo. If I complete two full cycles I will have been undergoing treatment for 24 weeks, nearly half a year. At this very moment, and I know I have written about this very moment before, I am feeling somewhat lightheaded, my guts are churning and I am having some abdominal pain. Don’t tell anyone though, it is best if they don’t know.
I have had the lightheadedness before. It probably arises from taking both drugs at once at the fastest possible rate. If I took them at the slowest rate it would take around 5 hours plus changeovers, flushes, etc. At the fastest rate with both drugs it takes two hours, so I suppose it is my fault. The churning guts are probably related. It is probably because I am in general eating too much. I was weighed today and it has increased by 2kg since my last treatment. I need to follow that particularly effective diet called eat less, especially less cake – which is difficult when my other great pleasure, alcohol, has disappeared from my life for the last three and a half years. I need either alcohol or chocolate cake because I am certainly not going to take up smoking.
That leaves the abdominal pains, which have increased over the last few weeks. What these are is difficult to say, but perhaps bowel cancer is a clue. There are a number of possibilities. First, I am neurotic and imagining these pains. That is quite possible. Second, tumours are growing. That too is quite possible. I am stage three with fast growing tumours, though they were not fast growing between my operation and starting chemo. Third, the chemo drugs are eating away at the bits I don’t want them to eat away, eg my abdominal wall, liver, stomach, etc. That is also quite possible and may be an indicator that at some point I should stop treatment and let things repaid (though that is the point at which tumours may grow. Decisions, decisions). Fourth, and I would like this to be the reality, my abdomen has been battered and punctured over the last few months. Now I have started moving more, gardening, etc (I threw my old lawnmower into a high skip at the tip the other day. It really flew above my head height – hello the return of strength), my abdomen is protesting and saying that it is somewhat weakened by recent experience and I should be more careful.
I choose the last option.
Dr Nigel Hunt 