If indeed a battle best describes it. Well here I am at the Marsden, killing tiime between chemo and radiation and just willing it to be time to go home. How you come to value the really simple things wjen you are threatend with losing them. I just want to be in my own home with a cup of coffee, my rabbits, my tv and my own bed. I wonder whether life will or can feel normal again or as normal as my life has ever been I guess.
Hospitals have always figured big in my life even from very early childhood when my step-fathers heart disease took us round Epsom hospitals wards and ICU on a fairly regular basis.
IO was listening to Christopher Hitchin talk about oesophagheal cancert the other day and he was wondering why it is that we single cancer out as being the one big terrifying disease when there are so many others that are as bad and ,in fact carry no chance of cure or treatment and whose symptoms are equally horrific.
Consider Motor neurone disease for example-:a truly horrendous disease, or hodgkins disease!
The very word Cancer seems to portray the very worst that one can be asked to endure. Yet many make full recoveries and the same cannot be said of other disease. Heart disease is a massive killer and I believe kills more of its sufferers than cancer but does not seem to carry such an overwhelming threat when delivered as a diagnosis. I realise that oesophageal cancer is not one of the easiest cancers to cure and as I have read oncologists are reluctant to use the word cure in assosiation with this disease but my team tell me the aim is to rid me of this cancer at this stage although they are always careful to warn me that the odds of that are not brilliant but , certainly a possibility.
Yet I find myself so full of a sense of impending doom. It is like I am constantly waiting and expecting them to say, 'sorry it is now incurable and only palliative care can now be given'.
I am terrified of having the hope of a complete cure taken fromn me. It is like I can endure the illness, its effects, the treatment and side-effects with that hope. Without it, I am not sure how I will endure and that terrifies me.
Just 6 little letters has it taken to turn everything in my life on its head, so inocuous on their own yet put them together and they seem to spell 'doom'.
Cancer, what have you done to me?
