Let's establish some ground rules for reading this blog post: I'll let you know it's up on Facebook but PLEASE, if you decide to read on from this opening point, DO NOT send me any message of sympathy for what I'm going through--I know you care, and I have avoided writing posts lately for the reason that I don't want to think I'm just trolling for support. I want to be honest about this experience and what's happening to me and not be an emotional suck hole. I leave that to other people who seem to have professionalized the technique.
I think I've gone through three distinct phases in cancer that I call fighter/quitter/die-er.
In the earliest days, after my first big surgery, my whole attention was engaged in fighting the cancer and regaining as much of my former "normalcy" as I could have--and I knew I couled do it! I was strong, I would become strong again. And frankly, there didn't seem to be any other response to make. I couildn't see why you'd start defeated by anything, even the Emperor of Diseases. I was encouraged in this attitude by most of my health care professionals, my family, Charles, and others who were involved in my life. It was right, and right for me.This blog was born at that times and closely followed the fighter's creed of accentuating the postive and deriding the negative.
I have been in fighter mode for most of the past 2 and half years. And the mode still makes sense to me, except for denying the negatives, or at best, declaring them simple roadblocks. After pneumonia, I found I was truly diminished, and I began to wonder if I should quit being a simple minded ring boxer. If I should accept the negatives and try to learn to live with them better. Not as an enabler, but perhaps as a more strategic fighter--to keep ones friend's close, but one's enemies closer. To succeed in a new way by accommodating the changes instead of just trying to shut them out. They had become bigger, and burdensome, and impossible to just forget. A strategic fighter knows when to stragetically retreal, to strategically quit.
But in the middle of this back and forth transormation, a third phase started. The dying phase, the first inclincations that I have been so damanged as to be capable of dying far sooner than I thought. I can't walk very well, I pant unpon light (I mean light!) exertion. I sleep irregulary, fearful I won't wake up. Breathing is not esasy, seaonal change is a killer. I feel more pain, more bones creak, more diarrhea, less appetite, less happiness, less energy, less me.
While I feint, fight, quit, there is behind me a drain emptying, not nearly as far distant as I would like. A drain I'm circling, unfortunately. This week, I told Dr. Dayton that I wanted one of the complications I live with to improve, just one. I challenged him to discover one thing that might make my life easier, give me a peg upon which to hang the electrolyte drip my optimistim needs right now. He's come up with one, and if it works, I'll let you know.
You an drive yourself mad trying to just be one person, which sounds mad, but somehow isn't. You can fight/quit/die all in a day, and I'm beginning to see that if you don't do those things, you're the crazy bastard. You have to face those mixed up phases in cancer, I think, you have to figure out the proportion of each day which will get, and surprisingly just throwing all your eggs into the fighter basket is about as much sense as monkey feces and the zoo. The fact that there's a zoo at all is gross; the fact that you can't believe a sentient being held prisoner there shouldn't throw shit is equally amazing.
Anyway, that's what's going on. I'm fighting to get some new space for optimism, I'm quitting just being a postive-mouthed fighter, and I'm trying to figure out how to prepay for my cremation and leave a list of account numbers and site passwords for Charles to suss out how many death certificates he will need. When should that happen? How should it happen? All I know is that I wish us both the best of luck in dealing with it. I face my fear of death as a fear of transition, from this life to that, to the pain of going, of reawakening, the pain of discovering how right or wrong I've been.
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