Post 196: The scans are done and so am I.
Bad timing seems to drag me down to the height of a worm’s belly. My cancer is what it is — but the way, the path, is utter torture sometimes.
Three years ago, I started on a medication highway that led me to understand a whole lot of things I never wanted to know.
Chemical castration — a historical nightmare — brought to life with a single-barrel rifle in the hands of a friendly assistant, oblivious to the mental anguish it caused over time. With shrinking assets and disappearing drive, it’s only when you read and relive the experience of a criminality all but forgotten, and never forgiven, that you start to feel the weight of a therapy designed to kill choices and curb wayward thoughts and actions.
That’s not all.
There’s also a necessary cocktail of other chemicals that assault my body, and the malevolent, unwelcome visitor it’s swallowed to overpower. However successful that initial attempt is to quell the beast that snorts its rage within me, it also harms me too.
Even with the advent of scientifically-aimed, lethal microscopic weapons designed to break chains of the smallest size imaginable, my body resists — and embarrasses the trained professionals guiding me to supposed salvation.
And worse still follows, in the shape of killer infusions. Those tri-weekly doses never settled successfully, leaving me in a truly life-threatening situation I was thrust into with careless abandon. Since then, confidence has evaporated with increasing speed as the remainder of the treatment lay before me in tatters.
But even now, after all this time, the primary way to check for the disease’s progression or regression is with today’s scans — using more radioactive dyes sensitive to the invisible, marauding, and malevolent cells that ought to be gone from their physically devastating and deteriorating host: me.
So I drink clear, healthy water to excrete the residual toxic chemicals still residing in my system — until they finally decide to vacate and get disposed of down the loo.
But I can’t just watch and wait for the reports that will follow in their own sweet time, only to have best guesses and platitudes received as gospel-like answers to questions on stressed lips and anxious hearts. I’ll be there physically, but my mind will be on vacation — somewhere, anywhere.
With any suggested therapies left hanging in the air like vapour trails from long ago — once tried and tested, now just scars on my memory.
So where to from here, I wonder?
Wonder no more.
I’ll rest.
I’ll recover.
I’ll consider my options.
I’ll not jump straight into the fire — like before.
But…
I’ll put down my pen for a while.
