5 out of six weeks of treatment completed, including both doses of chemo. 5 more sessions of radio to go. But tonight is the night my voice finally gave out. Many thanks to all who have called to show support and concern, but for a while at least it looks like the phone is no longer a useful tool.
Every Friday I have a meeting with my review team and they ask me how I am feeling. The most apt answer I felt I could give last Friday was "Like a late nineteenth Century consumptive..." It honestly felt that this was the best way to describe how I felt. The result of radiotherapy, apart from fatigue, forms of radiation sickness etc, is, in the case of oropharyngeal cancers, a kind of severe internal sunburn in the throat, which means coughing up very large amounts of blood-stained secretions (sorry, but that is how it is). It's exhausting, and the chest aches with the muscular exertion.
Yes, last week was a very difficult one, but I feel much better after a weekend's rest I must say. Again, sounding like that nineteenth Century consumptive...
It occurred to me to ask myself, why did I have to use another illness as a metaphor for my real one? So I read Susan Sonntag's excellent little book "Illness as Metaphor" and it made things clearer. TB used to be a mysterious and frightening illness, till the discovery of its cause and of effective antibiotics. Nineteenth-century/early twentieth Century novels are replete with characters dying of it or suffering from it - Dickens' works for example. Even Orwell died of it. Then a cure was found and cancer took over as the frightening and mysterious disease in Western societies.
But the way cancer is used as a metaphor is very different from TB. People of my generation (I am 53) have grown up hearing cancer used as a metaphor for something evil, for example, to the effect that social ailment X, Y or Z is a "cancer which must be cut out of our society" etc. reflecting the fear, ignorance and horror surrounding the disease. And that is a major factor in making cancer so hard to talk about. I admire my brave and kind neighbours who, rather than avoiding me because I personify the fear and horror, still invite me for a cup of tea. Thanks guys!
When over 1 in 3 of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetimes, it is absurd that even we patients still do not talk openly about cancer and resort to unhelpful metaphors rather than naming things for what they are.
