Archives for December 2022

Thursday, 29th December 2022

Today I am 61 years of age. All of the times my parents gave me a joint Christmas and birthday present, it’s a rubbish time of year to have a birthday, go through my head, but these I gloss. I am alive, I am breathing. My friend Tracey is coming to pick me up later, it’s the first time we will have been together on my birthday. Other, she later reminds me, than that time when I completely and utterly — and quite unreasonably — lost my rag. Seth and Alf were there too; she went home. What a pain I was. I can understand the source of my emotional pain that made me such a pain for other people, but my stuff isn’t their problem and they don’t deserve to have it made so. When I think reflexively on all of the adjustments I’ve made in terms of mental attitude and approach to life since D-Day (Diagnosis Day) — idiot: all of the changes that life has thrust upon me, they had little to do with me — I believe myself to be an infinitely more chilled and easy-going person now than I ever was before. ‘Know Thyself’ the precious wisdom as inscribed above the entrance to the Oracle’s cave at Delphi. In Ancient Greek, though, obviously. I can think of half-a-dozen people who would disagree, but they didn’t know me before. It would be idiotic to say I was grateful for a diagnosis of Progressive Multiple Sclerosis, but that’s somehow often how it feels.

I obviously didn’t learn well enough, though, or embed the lessons deeply enough. Because now along comes a pretty life-arresting diagnosis of prostate cancer to finish off the process. Hopefully not to finish me off too, we’ll see. This time I can almost feel the changes in me, in my attitude, adjustments being made in real time; I don’t have to look back in retrospect. And they seem to be happening fast. It is as if my body is tuning my mind, preparing it in the processes and chemistry it is going to have to mix in order to think through to maximise my body’s chances of survival. Or maybe my brain’s worked that out for itself: no body, no brain, after all. Unless there is such a thing as reincarnation and it’s readying itself for me to come back as a prince. Or a slug, perhaps.

Tracey’s coming to take me to the scanner. I’m to have a CT scan, called a ‘cat’ scan. This one is to check the degree to which the cancer may have spread out of the prostate into surrounding organs and tissues. Sharing the good will. It’s what friends do, after all. Later I’ll have a bone scan to check whether it’s migrated to my, as it says on the tin, bones. The consultant has told me that if it’s spread to other tissues there might be stuff they can do. If it’s spread to my bones, I‘m toast. Pretty sure those weren’t his actual words, but there again, he isn’t a poet.

I’ve been in many many scanners since 2018, and started my MRI collection years and years ago when I had a couple of knee ops. The CT scanner (Computer Tomography, tomography coming from the Greek [of course] for ‘slice’ or ‘section’, the computer puts all the slices together to form the holistic image) uses X—rays to build a three-dimensional image of the insides. With a CAT scanner the ‘C’ and the ‘T’ are the same but the ‘A’ stands for Axial. Clear? The PET scanner, Positron Emission … I’m sure you’re losing the will to read on, I’m losing the will to write it. Just noticed the language, ‘losing’, ‘will’, let’s talk about something else. Although I am going to lookup why a Will is called a will. Last ‘will’ and all that. 

Wednesday, 21st December 2022

On this date in 2012 the world ended. Or so it had been predicted. It’s an interesting insight into human nature and our belief systems. And that property called, when I was a kid, ‘Chinese Whispers’, a label I suspect is now deemed inappropriate. And it probably is, always was, even though I don’t know where it comes from. Lateral Transfiguration of Literal Meaning through Mishearing or Failure to Understand. Or LMMFU for short. There, that’s better. A phrase is uttered quietly to one person, say first person front left seat on a bus going to a sports event, then whispered to the next and so on round the bus until the message arrives at last person in the seat front right. The exit phrase is then compared to the entry phrase. The two never meet and shake hands.

Rather than the end of the world as we know it, 21st December 2012 was the end of the Mayan Long Form calendar. Unlike our modern uses of a calendar that are culturally specific (any idea why July and August are the only months in succession with the same number of days? Augustus Caesar didn’t want the month named after him to have fewer days than the month named after Julius Caesar. Two thousand years later we all just go along with it. [Why do we still put up with months having 30 or 31 days, but February having 28 which confuses the hell out of accountancy practices?]) Where was I? Culturally specific calendars rather than ones based on Physics …  the commonality of calendars being based on the revolution of the earth’s cycle around the sun; the Mayan Long Form calendar, however, had a cycle of 26,000 years. Longer than the span of a politician’s gaze. The date, December 21st, 2012, represents its own turn for the Maya, the slide from the ‘masculine’ age to the next 26,000 years of the ‘feminine’ age. Good luck with this mess of a world us lot have left for you, girls.

My own turn, move from one world to another, slide from one gendered mindset to another, comes with another visit to hospital. In 2018 I had 72 visits to one sort of medical practice or another in a single calendar year. Including four different hospitals, three different diseases two of which were architected to kill me. (One was a blood cancer.) This is a new one on me though: Urology. Familiar hospital, new territory. This guy’s a ‘Mr’ not a ‘Dr’ so has to have a serious game face. Another male finger up my arse, I might get a taste for this. I ask his oppo, who’s either learning or has a strange taste in spectator sports, if he wants a go. He declines.

Mr Tudor, which is a name, not the continuation of a dynasty, confirms that the soft mushy pulp of my prostate gland is now a tight knotty lump. 

This is not good news.

I am now the proud, lucky owner of a tumour, commonly known as The Big ‘C’. It’s probably not commonly known as that, but it is by me. The thing that does not speak it’s name.

Cancer.

The end of the world. But not as we know it, Jim.

Monday, December 12th, 2022

I’ve decided to start a blog. I’ve been meaning to / wanted to for many years, but have been too chicken. A road I couldn’t cross. Maybe this is partly about why the chicken didn’t cross the road. I first came across the term, an abbreviation for Web-Log, not road-crossing chickens, when I worked in IT for the spanking gleaming then-cutting edge internet bank, Egg. As a writer as well as an ITer, I was intrigued. But I’ve always been shy. You know, that disguised shy you learn to grow up with using a mask that people don’t pick up on? Unless they know. What, you too? Who knew? Having fought long and hard, sixty years, to overcome it, I mostly have, but the odd dragon still lurks deep in the bowles of my being, at the edge of the map of the known universe. It still raises its head every now and then to spit flame, mainly when it comes to posting stuff online. I remember plucking up the courage (overcoming shyness) to post a queston on a programming forum in the late nineties. The first response was, ‘What the fuck are you on about???’ Because I fear so badly being misunderstood, I over-explain. You know, use too many words, often with turns, in too many sub-clauses so that people … that’s not clever and not funny.

I unjoined the forum.

Now, it’s been confirmed, I’ve got cancer.

The big ‘C’.

Not like last time, this is the real thing, proper cancer; the real deal.

Nobody might read my blog, but if they do it’s unlikely anyone will post ‘What the fuck are you on about???’ Not when you play the cancer card. Top Trumps in you now have to do politically-correctness towards me. Unless that line is seen as a challenge. Or the reader served with me in the Army.

I’d become aware of a significant change in my nightly wee-ing patterns. Multiple Sclerosis leaves one more tuned to wee-ing patterns than the average bear, (the word ‘wee-ing’ might come up often in these pages, disclosure, so I’ll probably drop the ‘-‘), add in getting older, Boom! I had a specific blood test, I’ve had many many blood tests, but this was a new one, on December 1st. I reckoned I knew what the return would be, but, and at this point folk usually say ‘to be honest’, but to me that always implies there’s an alternative. I’m always honest. To be honest, I had expected the return but I hadn’t expected the severity. The enormity. The high-ness of the numbers.

Prostate Cancer releases a protein into the blood-stream, the quantity per unit of blood can be measured. A ‘normal’ reading for men my age, what am I saying? women don’t have a prostate, it has to be men, is 4.5. The killing number for the England rugby player Andy Ripley was 133. Between 2009 and 2019 the killing number (the mean ‘score’ for the cohort of men who died of the disease) was 165.

And the scores are in …

Oh!

Now, at this point, I could start a blog and feeling sorry for myself go on about how this and that or whatever, life is. But I won’t. Because I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’m 61 years of age (two weeks and a bit off 61 on results day) as I write. Many people haven’t got to 61. I was in the Army. I suspect the number of former military personnel who didn’t get to 61 tilts the numbers. I know some. I have seven Facebook friends who still have an account but the only posting they can do is via Oouija boards.

And, what the heck, it’s a challenge, right?

No, the point of starting a blog is to expose my thoughts — usually a scary thing — because if in some small way, however small those numbers, if I help only one person in their thinking on how to face the disease, decrease fear, my work here is done. And in fact, it’s wider than that. MS has taught me that however tough it is to face a chronic condition, it is often tougher for friends, relations or loved-ones because they are powerless. Without agency. Made worse by the fact that many people with the disease clam up, or refuse well-intentioned help. Many people without it looking in haven’t got a clue what to say or do. Sometimes embarrassment rules, or awkwardness. Or no skills. It’s not something taught at school. 

In the middle of it, it is, he says with an inward chuckle, for me at least, it is do or die. So you might as well read about it and hopefully gain an insight you might not otherwise have had. 

Let’s hope it’s not the latter, hey?

🙂