I am now one week into cycle two of six of the palliative chemotherapy course that may slow the spread of my now body-wide cancer. But that is not what I want to write about right now, I will come back to the medical stuff.
In ‘One Trick Pony,’ I wrote about the mental challenge of accepting my new and rather gloomy reality. This has been so hard. And I am not there yet, wherever there is. One of the support services that I have is a counsellor, someone to help with the ‘head game.’ This was organised on the suggestion of one of the oncology nurses and facilitated by my local Macmillan support worker and the ‘Hope Centre’ at Musgrove Park hospital.
Most Monday mornings I have a video conversation with the counsellor. And, in today’s conversation, I realised something, which I will try and articulate here. In earlier essays I have described how I often feel like two people: the me with cancer, and the ‘real’ me. The ‘real’ me was organising things, very philosophical about mortality, and so grateful for the kindness of those around me – truly overwhelmed by and carried along on a wave of support by family and friends. I was living in the ‘real’ me and cancer me was a similar looking (for which read unconventionally handsome) person who occasionally got overly personal with various unpleasant side effects of treatment.
The two Me’s have merged. And right now, cancer me is being quite dominant. I think the critical change for me has been the removal of the option of a surgical ‘cure’ for my cancer. I had not realised that this thread of hope leading me through the cancer labyrinth was so significant. I have previously described the scale of the surgery and my heartfelt fear of how much this would change my body. But it may have removed the cancer and given me an unknown number of extra years of life.
Snip
That thread is broken. I will live my life in the cancer labyrinth.
And, you know, it is actually quite helpful to accept that. I am not going to ‘embrace’ it, that’s one of my ‘trigger’ words! But to keep with the labyrinth metaphor, I am going to light lots of candles and make it as bright and cheerful as I can until that stupid but unstoppable minotaur blunders onto me.
We have been very busy at home this summer, replacing a leaky plastic conservatory with a ‘proper’ build and this has now reached the finishing stages. Floor coverings are going down next week and a decorator is booked. We have also been shopping for various bits of furniture and collected a few pictures and other things to furnish it with. It’s been great doing this and we feel very lucky to have found a good local builder to do this work.
Just before chemo cycle one, we got away for the weekend and went to Dartmoor. We stayed in the hotel near Haytor where Agatha Christie wrote her first published novel. ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ was written as a response to a challenge to write a mystery that the reader could not solve although they would have all the same clues as the detective. Critics acknowledged that she achieved this but were discombobulated by the preposterous notion that the detective was a…Belgium? We had lovely meals and a couple of shortish (for us) walks in this old landscape.
Before cycle two, we went to Shropshire to stay with some old friends. Who happen to be our youngest son’s godparents, who coincidently now lives and works a few miles from them. The Severn-side town of Bridgnorth is lovely, winding streets and stairways weave down from a hilltop market street to the river. It was a transport hub when rivers were the commercial arteries and, bizarrely, was the British town that Hitler had earmarked to use as his base for controlling the UK. I can report that it has many good pubs. And a very good independent bookshop. If you have not already visited, do, I haven’t noticed any Nazis.
And we spent time with our son. He is a countryside ranger with a particular interest in arboriculture, that’s trees, something we share. We visited an arboretum, had a pint and a BBQ. He has recently become a mountain biker, another share with his old dad, and I passed on my bike to him; a lend, as I don’t have the energy for this at the moment and his bike is broken. It was lovely.
Now, I talked with my counsellor about this, and she reflected on the pride with which I spoke about my child. And she used the word ‘legacy.’ That parts of me are within my children and will still be here after I am gone. This was something that I had not really considered before. I think, maybe, a legacy is important to me. This realisation is odd, I am a trained scientist and not convinced that we have a ‘spirit’ that lives on. So, when I die, why would a legacy matter to me? Or rather how could it matter? I will have ceased.
But what this conversation has helped me with is actually living now. I started this essay describing how hard adjusting to my short ‘use by date’ was. I have really struggled to complete the ‘life admin’ tasks that I had pretty efficiently started. Our building project has been a great distraction, requiring thought and timely decisions to keep progressing. But I had stopped tying up the loose ends on various financial and personal details. Nothing hugely complicated but tasks that I can do now and line up to be much easier for my family to complete when I die. I am back on track with them now.
And, I am proud of how I have completed my job as a parent. I have three adult children who are questioning, responsible, respectful of others and kind. They are some of the candles lighting my labyrinth. Don’t worry, I still do plenty of dad worrying, you never stop being a parent!
I am the guy with cancer, ridiculous life-taking and horrible treatment cancer and I am still me.
I mentioned ‘embrace’ being one of my trigger words and I have through my ‘cancer journey’ (another trigger!) become aware of how certain words can elicit strong responses among those in the ‘club that no one wants to join’ (groan!). I am putting together a glossary of cancer words, and along with ‘Hospital Bingo’ and ‘Hospital Trip Adviser,’ will complete this before my date with the minotaur*.
25 September 2024
(*my labyrinth/minotaur metaphor, my parents gave me a book about Greek myths, check out Theseus and the Minotaur. I went to a big state school!)
