Cancer 37
Posted on April 26, 2023 Leave a Comment
I thought I would change the subject and not talk about cancer and illness. Through this process of diagnosis and calamity I have been attempting to finish my book. I think I mentioned that I managed to work on it while I was in hospital and submitted the manuscript. I finished it early as it was not due to be submitted until June, so not bad timing despite the little problem of major surgery and a death sentence.
The problem is, for those who haven’t written books, is that while submitting the manuscript is a great feeling, comparable with that moment when a publisher accepts your proposal, the next stages are utterly tedious. If it was just submit the manuscript, wait a while, and then the shiny new book comes in the post then it would be good – but alas it isn’t like that.
I am sensible enough to keep up with my references as I write the book, but they still need to be checked, every one on every page to make sure that they are all there – and there will be some missing, particularly the ones that are hard to find. Because Applied Narrative Psychology is an academic book and I need to provide evidence for my assertions, there are around 350 references to check. Once I have checked it the publisher will check it and still find something wrong. I do like to try and catch them out occasionally. In my last book I referenced The Bible, written by God, and either no one noticed or they understood the joke.
The other day I received some attachments from the publisher, providing details of what I need to do now – there will be another list once the book is edited and formatted. The first one is the marketing questionnaire. This is hell. There is the easy stuff such as name and address. My affiliation was difficult. I put University of Nottingham but added that by the time the book comes out I will be either retired or dead. Let’s see (or not see) how they handle that). Then there are questions about me. What are my key achievements and prizes, particularly in relation to the material in the book? It even said don’t be modest. Right, I won a five a side competition in the first year at school (I was the goalie). I have a medal for completing a half marathon when I was in my 20s, and another one given me by the vice president of Iran. I was the secretary of the allotment society for a time, and the footpaths officer for the parish. None of this is relevant, so I wrote some gumph about narratives.
They also wanted me to write a short piece for librarians and why they should buy the book, and the blurb for the back cover. Then they wanted me to name people who would write something nice about the book, so I listed some people I know who are mentioned in the book in a positive way. Competing books? None of course, mine is completely original and nothing like it has ever been written before (no modesty there). Then it is a question about journals that might publish a book review about it, so I have to search through all the journals to find out which ones publish book reviews because nowadays nobody ever actually reads a physical journal, we all just search for relevant stuff.
Anyway, with those and similar questions it took me about a week to complete. I sent it off today and the Cambridge folk seem happy. They have already edited the blurb etc to make it sound much better than what I wrote so there is a winner!
The next stage, the one I am on now, and the reason why I am writing a blog instead of getting on with my work, is to complete an Excel spreadsheet listing the titles of the chapters, the authors of the chapters, up to 10 keywords for each chapter, and an abstract of up to 200 words per chapter, along with keywords and abstract for the book as a whole. So I have to write another 3,000 words! I have just finished chapter 3.
Another task was to provide ideas for the cover. Given my aesthetic ability is about as good as my written Japanese someone else really should take this on. I suggested, vaguely, some sheets of written stuff scattered about. Lo and behold that picture came back to me and I think it will be going ahead. Achievement!
The easiest element was obtaining permissions for the illustrations. There are no illustrations. Achievement!
Finally, I have just received an email saying that the manuscript is looking good, so as soon as I sort out the references they can get on with the next stage. I thought they might have comments about some elements of the manuscript such as my comments on multi-culturalism but no, perhaps that will come later when the legal boffins have had their beady eyes on it.
So my top tip is don’t write books. Not only do they take forever to write, edit, etc, most of them don’t make much money. In the 31 years since my first book was published I can only say it is a good thing that I have had a paying job as well.
So why is it that If I can succeed better than Knut and stem the tide of cancer I want to write more books? I will never learn.
Cancer 36
Posted on April 24, 2023 Leave a Comment
Perhaps understandably, over the last few weeks I have been a little preoccupied by time. It all boils down to ‘How much time have I got?’ and ‘How much of that time will be good quality time?’
Philosophers and others have questioned what is meant by time for thousands of years. Immediately we are introduced to a problem regarding time. What does ‘thousands of years’ mean? We have an apparently simple answer; a year is how long it takes for the Earth to go round the sun, so it is the time taken for our planet to revolve around the sun thousands of times. That is a somewhat arbitrary figure. Why do we use the time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun? For time to exist we do need the relative motion of at least two objects, but why not choose the Earth and the Moon? Well, we do, that is a month. Why not choose the time it takes the Sun to revolve around the galaxy? Well, that is about 226 million years (that arbitrary figure again), so it means little in terms of our lifespans.
We don’t even get our measures right. We say a year is just over 365 days – and then we get the problem of defining a day, which is how long it takes for the Earth to rotate on its own axis. Immediately the definitions of days, months and years lack coherence because there is no logical relationship between them. The rotation of the Earth on its axis has little bearing on the rotation of the Moon around the Earth or the Earth around the sun.
There is a certain logic to the breakdown of the concept of day. It is split into 24 equal units, hours, which are themselves split into 60 equal units, minutes, which are themselves split into 60 equal units, seconds. But there is no good rationale for all this apart from the simplicity of fitting into degrees of a circle. Napoleon tried to recreate the calendar in decimal format, from the year to the second, but that didn’t work out too well!
As I have already said, time is measured by the relative motion of two or more bodies to each other, or in other words, the temporal distance between two events (which translates directly to the movement of the the two objects). We then measure this change and call it time. We find ways to measure it in ever more precise ways. Atomic clocks make use of Caesium atoms jumping from one energy level to another. They absorb microwaves with a frequency of 9,192, 631,700 cycles per second, which then defines the international standard for time.
Prior to the coming of the railways time throughout Britain was local. Midday was when the sun was highest in the sky. It was only when we needed accurate railway timetables that we introduced standard times across the country and then across the world (there we are, a benefit of the British Empire, standard times. The French tried to argue for a French standard but we beat them).
But does this notion of time make sense to us as people? Do we need that precision? Time is at least to some extent subjective. Sometimes I am bored and time passes slowly. Sometimes I feel it passes quickly. What is time to us as individuals? At the most fundamental level time is the period from when we are born to when we die, but as we are not really aware of time in the first few years that doesn’t count, but perhaps a lifespan should be a unit of one (or one hundred) and we could be aware of where we are in our lifespans. Unfortunately/fortunately we don’t usually know when we are going to die.
Subjectively, there is also the problem of time speeding up as we get older. As we age we have to remember longer periods of time, more summers, more winters, more events, and so with only a limited practical memory capacity these become foreshortened. The endless six week holidays of childhood are much longer than six weeks of summer to a 50 year old.
Another problem is that of past, present and future. It was Augustine (that very naughty man who decided later in life to become a good Christian and ended up a saint – there’s hope for all of us in the Catholic church!) who questioned this notion, and explored the idea of eternity. Why is it that the past stays in the mind as memory? Why is it that the notion of the present is so fleeting and cannot be captured? You are reading this but already the start of this sentence is in the past. Augustine argued that the present doesn’t exist because it is always moving, and so the only real time is eternal time. The problem is that we are not programmed to live forever and so time ends up as a great personal disappointment because we are aware of our mortality. Perhaps this is why man invented God.
Augustine has little to say about the future, unlike Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, where the main character is abducted by aliens whose experience of time is that it just exists, and so the aliens can transcend time, they live with the past, the present and the future all at the same time (same time?). Time can also go backwards. Vonnegut was trying to write about his experiences of the bombing of Dresden (he was a prisoner of war there) so at one point he has the bombs flying up to the bombers. The bombs then go back to the factories where they were built and the components eventually back to the metal ores from where they were originally mined.
Vonnegut made no claims to be a philosopher but he was still trying to understand time, just like we all do in our own ways. Another novellist who examined time was Milan Kundera in the Unbearable Lightness of Being. He focused on how all we have is now, the ever moving now, a little like Augustine. We are stuck in this ever moving now, so how do the past and the future relate to it? This leads to the key question of the meaning of existence. Kundera ends up with the Nietzschian argument about the essential meaninglessness of life, meaningless beause you cannot get out of the cycle of the the ever moving present. This is linked to an odd idea about the endless repetition of everything that has previously happened, which is where the argument starts to fall apart (and just shows what imaginations people have), but again we see this importance of exploring what is meant by time.
We live time as a directional process. We cannot live backwards though we can reflect on the past, but reflectiing on the past is not reliving the past. It is something older people do, or people who know they are coming towards the end of their time, reflecting on what has happened to them, reflecting on the important elements of life? I experienced this long ago with my PhD participants, men who had served during the Second World War. These were older people, and many of them were reflecting back on what they saw as the most important time of their lives, their experiences in the war. Perhaps people do this because they see they have little future, and that future time is unlikely to create significant new memories, and even if it did there would be no further time in which to reflect on them.
I am experiencing something of this. Over the last few weeks I have been reflecting back more than I usually do, perhaps for the same reasons as the Second World War veterans. I have no sense of Vonnegut’s aliens. I have no sense that I can see the future, the present and the past. I do have some idea of the eternal as Augustine might claim, a sort of eternal now. Not that it is making me believe in any god, not that it is spiritual in some way, it is just an attempt to try and understand the meaning of time to an individual. Why is it that we try and do this when it is unlikely there is going to be much more time to work out the problem (unless you are Einstein and you publish your main work on relativity as a young man)? In the end, Kundera’s idea of an ever moving now, drawing on the Nietzschian idea that life is essentially meaningless, makes most sense to me, simply because all my notions of time, including my now, including my memories, will all cease at the moment of death. The only human eternal is in the living individual who focuses on the now.
Cancer 35
Posted on April 19, 2023 Leave a Comment
From September 1939 to May 1940 the Alliies, Britain and France, experienced what was known as the phoney war. They sat behind their defences on the Western Front, the French facing the Germans, the British facing the neutral Belgians (if Germany invaded the British would sweep through Belgium to attack the Germans), the Germans facing the French and the neutral Belgians and Dutch. Elsewhere Poland was defeated and occupied by Germany and the USSR, and in April 1940 Denmark and Norway were attacked and defeated by Germany. But on the Western Front very little happened.
Tomorrow it is six weeks since the operation, the point at which I imagined everything would change. I will start to drive again, I will start my cancer treatment, and the battle will commence.
I feel that I am in the middle of a phoney war at the moment. I am 80% recovered from my operation. I have one small dressing on the wound that is taking a while to heal, though it is not problematic. The rest is developing into scar tissue. I have nearly stopped taking painkillers, and the other day created a new record of walking about 2.5km, so all is well on the operation recovery front. It is just a bit boring.
I am now waiting for the opening of the second front (I know, I am mixing my WWII metaphors here, jumping ahead 4 years), the cancer front. I have been referred back to oncology, but have so far heard nothing from them. I will phone shortly, but I am not optimistic about an early start to treatment. The junior doctors’ strike has delayed appointments, and they are short of consultant oncologists. Never mind, it is only lives at stake, and as I have pointed out in previous blogs, life is essentially meaningless. Except at this point it isn’t. I do still have the desire to live so I do want some treatment.
In the meantime I am looking up hotels and cottages, searching for places to go, things to see. At the moment, apart from going to see the kids and roaming the Peak District, the list includes, in no particular order, Northumberland, Scotland, the Lake District, Morecambe (don’t ask), Shropshire, the Oliver Cromwell museums at Ely and Huntingdon, Norwich (the rebellion of 1549) and the tank museum at Bovington. It is no wonder that, at least for the moment, I would like life to continue!
Cancer 34
Posted on April 11, 2023 Leave a Comment
My apologies for not publishing anything for a while. I spent many days in hospital wanting to be home, and once I got home I have spent many days just sitting in my chair, reading books, going for short walks down the road, and generally spending all my energies on trying to get better. Now I have been home for a while I am wanting to get to the next stage, which is being able to drive, my favourite hobby. Unfortunately I am not yet able to drive as my wounds are not sufficiently healed. I was originally told 6 weeks. That will be 20 April. I am ticking the days off.
I have got lazy while at home, just sitting and healing. I have read a number of books, nothing intellectual, just good novels. I have watched a few films. I have listened to a few podcasts (though I still don’t really understand them). My main achievement since I got home is that I have submitted my book to the publisher. Assuming they accept it, there is now a long process of making changes, editing, sorting out references, deciding on a cover, and so on. It also means that if I have the energy I can get on with my campus novel – a stirring tale of life in the modern university. It has to be humorous though it must be a tragedy. I have not had a novel published so let’s see….
I have not been sleeping. The nights are the worst time. Until the last few days I have not been ruminating. I have just found it difficult to sleep, partly because of discomfort and an inability to turn over. I am getting a little better at moving, but not at sleeping; but then I have never been a good sleeper. My common pattern was always sleep at the beginning of the night, be fully awake and often out of bed for the middle hours, and then get to sleep again for a couple of hours before getting up. At least that gave me enough sleep. Now I am constantly tired. I nap during the day but it isn’t enough.
I am getting better now, so much better that I have started to dwell a little on the next stage of this process, and it makes me unhappy, as that is the cancer stage. I am fearful of finding out that there is nothing more that can be done, that chemotherapy will have little point, that I have grown a new tumour or two in the weeks since the surgery. I know I am usually upbeat with a few downturns, but at the moment there are an increasing number of downturns. I am usually cheerful in the day, but mornings can be difficult. I know that being upbeat is an important tool in keeping cancer at bay, but sometimes it is hard. I am hoping it is linked to my boredom at spending all my time at home (though it is so much better than being in hospital), and once I can get out, drive around the Peak District, visit interesting places, even have a cup of tea in a cafe, then these downturns will be kept to a minimum.
I have a telephone appointment at the hospital tomorrow. Perhaps I will know a little more then.
Cancer 33
Posted on March 30, 2023 Leave a Comment
I am a dead man walking. It sounds so dramatic, and I suppose at one level it is, but generally speaking I don’t feel that different to how I felt before I got the news that I was terminally ill. Currently I am trying to recover from my operation, which takes up most of my energy so I am probably not thinking normally – I know I am not. I keep forgetting words, I am tired, life is a little blurry. I am moving slowly. I am eating little. What resources I have are going towards mending my body. Perhaps if I recover from the operation then I might start to worry.
People keep asking me about the results of the biopsies taken durng my operation. I can only reply that there is nothing that can be done until I recover from the operation so I am in no hurry to find out. I am a little concerned that if I find out prematurely, and the conclusion is there is no point to chemotherapy or other treatment then I might give in to despair (though I hope not). I am fighting one battle at a time. Now is the battle for physical recovery from the operation. If I win this then I can start the battle against cancer.
If I ever thought about death and dying in the past, then I assumed I would be depressed, anxious, despairing, a whole host of negtive emotions. In reality I feel very little. I am not depressed, though one morning I did cry. I am not despairing. I am only anxious that I become so ill that I am forced to return to hospital. That is my most negative thought. I do not want to go to hospital; it frightens me. My thoughts regarding missing out on seeing things in the future do not get me down. This is because at the time I won’t exist so it has no relevance. That thought feels wrong, am I letting people down? It is a fundamental outlook, this matter of non-existence. It ensures that I do not fear death.
We don’t usually know we are going to die, except when there is a diagnosis of terminal illness, or sitting on death row in some uncivilised nation such as Iran or the USA. I suppose older people in the last stages of life know they are going to die. I wonder whether my reltive lack of concern is because I am just emotionally numbed or because I am struggling to recover from my operation rather than a clever attempt at a philosophical outlook on death.
Should I call it an existential crisis? I am not sure. I suppose it is because it is leading to non-existence. That is not a problem for me (unlike the fear of returning to hospital)., so perhaps it is not an existential crisis because I have little interest in whether I exist or not. If I exist, which I do, then I am happy that I exist and can interact to some extent with the world around me. If I don’t exist, which I won’t, then that won’t matter simply because I don’t exist.
When I reflect on death I keep coming back to my views on whether my life was in some sense worthwhile, as Cormac McCarthy says in his latest book, Stella Maris, “The best way to die well is to live well”. I agree with that, which is probably why I also agree with a comment someone made to a previous blog, comparing how I am reacting to The Clash song, I’m not down, written by Mick Jones as a response to some difficult times he had faced:
I’ve been beat up, I’ve been thrown out
But I’m not down, no I’m not down.
Dr Nigel Hunt 