Post Operation Blues

Why does being told I’m generally cured make me feel like the Ex-Leper in Python’s Life Of Brian, deprived of what was beginning to define him.

I'm not actually cured – the main symptoms have gone, along with a large chunk of my colon, and I’m stuck with a revolting Stoma bag that is very hard to hide under general clothing. I still get easily tired out, go through increased insomnia and anxiety and there are dormant flakes of the cancer in me, including some on my Pancreas. If they ever erupt, I’m probably stuffed. I feel like a walking time bomb. I’m being monitored over the next five years (up to 2026).

The biggest change, six months after my gruelling two months of residential hospital care and two dangerous operations, is that my operation entry wound has healed up. While still open and leaking, it showed little sign of progress and I had daily visits to the treatment clinics and district nurses seeing me at home when the clinics were closed. In May, the wound suddenly healed, rapidly shrinking in the space of a week, though leaving some ghastly scar tissue in its wake.

I was walking with the aid of a cane and struggled on stairs but now I’m walking freely again, and I have made the best of post-lockdown freedom by taking some 5-6 mile walks with my camera.

Though I welcome the renaissance in much of my health, part of me starts doubting if I ever had real cancer at all. I got off rather lightly.. Most people I know who have had cancer got chemotherapy and went through much more Hell than I did/ I had two operations, which weakened me and gave me over a month of projectile vomiting, and tubes down my throat.

I applied for the government Personal Independence Payment Benefit PIP soon after release back to my flat but they still haven’t arranged to see me – by the tie they do I’m likely to look and feel much better and get nothing. Had they seen me even two months ago I might have had a chance.

The biggest casualty for me has been my sense of humour. I have done performance poetry since the mid-1980’s, much of it humorous. I was contemplating giving stand up comedy a go, but Covid and lockdown put that plan in mothballs on me, and cancer came to really kick me while I was down. Post-op my writing is getting darker, bleaker and more downbeat in tone. I keep trying to think how to translate my cancer experiences into comedy gold, like an alchemist trying to turn lead into gold, but I’m more likely to reduce an audience to tears than tears of laughter. I’d get chased off the stage with jeers, heckling and pitchforks.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’m not convinced a/. the killing of me has fully stopped b/. That I’m any stronger for coming partly through the grinder.

The escapism of getting out and about helps, including getting to see the occassional film or show, though alarm bells tell me that despite now having had both of my anti-covid vaccines, I’m still in a plague zone. I feel like a prisoner getting his hour in the exercise yard. 

                     It doesn’t help when film or book reviews posted from the sheer joy of seeing / reading them again face either being ignored or crass comments that I’ve watched something that should only appeal to ‘daily mail readers’, (puerile heckling mutton dressed as criticism lamb) or my posts get hijacked so someone can talk of something else, it's like finding your cherished wedding videos wiped in favour of the football or that your house was demolished and replaced with a different property – a way of saying your (my) stuff and you (me) are so rubbish what people really want and need is 'this', even though 'this' could easily have its own threads and co-exist alongside your stuff. Sure, my thread was probably at the end of its natural life and received all the valid replies it was going to – I do post the same reviews on other sites where they seem to get a better welcome from strangers than they get from friends on a page that I am signed up to that is supposed to be for such discussions, - of course there was a half-sincere at best apology though coming when I have raised concerns before about such revisionist ways of finding my threads derailed in the same way from the same source, again I find my sense of humour and sense of trust may not have survived the cancer as well as much of the rest of me.