Sunday, 10th December, 2023
My last entry was 04th November, a month and a week ago. I had a file for the blog prepared marked 051123, but its content is blank. Like, I guess, that part of my mind. The part that writes Creative Content. That can’t quite be true, or wholly true, I’ve written a dozen poems since then, but that’s different. This is work, poetry isn’t. Poetry is something I do like I read or breath. I’ve also been writing, or designing, structuring, my book based on the book proposal for Routledge which is an extension of my PhD thesis. That involves getting back into reading Academic texts, taking notes, thinking. Funnily enough, that obviously isn’t work either. It’s what I did when my dog died. Why I went to University in 2016 in the first place. To escape self-inflicted mental torture. My book about the dog, Zen and the Art of Woofery, my novel about disabilities, The Silence of Sound, nothing. Zilch. Zero. Much as I don’t regard them as work, not this blog either, by the measure of how much have I actually done in the non-PhD related activities, since the beginning of November, nothing.
Why?
No idea.
Can I work it out?
Probably.
Here goes.
The (then) upcoming November the 14th appointment with Oncology post-treatment is massive. Could it be the impending anticipation of that?
Don’t think so.
November the 16th was amazing for me, I’ll get into that elsewhere. But nothing blogged the day after, so not that either.
I think the event and the battering my body took, the implications and PTSD from October 30th, took me into new and different realms of despair. For me, the management of my mind in coping with some traumas at the time delays the PTSDness effect, which I guess to some degree is the measure of the ‘P’ in the acronym, Post. The implications of my bladder were just too subtle and too enormous for me to process. Then, as I was coming to terms with wearing a catheter and having a toilet strapped to my leg, coming to terms well enough to drive the 140 miles to Cheltenham, stay in a BnB, attend my graduation and spend all of Saturday sitting in the pub with my family (not many wee-ing issues there, then), they changed the rules of the game again on the Tuesday after graduation, removing my external catheter and sending me on the path of Intermittent Self-Catheterisation (ISC). I’ll spare you the details. Oh, OK, no I won’t. It involves sticking a tube up my penis, which is a reluctant participant and already diminished in status through half-a-year of testosterone blockers, so it tries to disappear along with the tube into my body. Try telling that as a chat-up line. This tube then penetrates the sphincter muscles around the bladder, which no longer function owing to a month of a permanently inserted catheter, and let the urine flow. At the moment, because my MS-dominated fingers don’t work, I can’t control the other end of the tube and when the pee begins to flow, it flows anywhere. Everywhere.
The implications of all this (‘Will this be for life?’ ‘Probably’.) have had a deep and bruising effect but at a very low level. A level lower than I am accustomed to tuning into. As I try and think about problems and issues, difficulties of differing configurations of public toilets, overcoming shame, probable public embarrassment, I keep returning to my mantra: I’m still breathing. I’m still alive. Many my age are not. The folks out there, even when stuff goes wrong, are trying to keep me alive.
For free.
So, November 14th. I have a recording of the session but have not listened to it yet. Treatment will have killed off the tumour in my prostate and the lymph node. The other specifics, the left iliac nerve, the seminal vessels, weren’t mentioned but the headline was of ‘the pelvic region.’ My PSA was six, down from 196 in December last year which I regard as amazing, the Oncologist was non-comital. The key is the February PSA reading which should give an indication if, as she suspects, the cancer has already spread through the lymph system but as yet is too young to show up on scans. ‘Young’ is not a medical term. Micro-metastasis, I think, is. Prostate cancer, apparently, even when it’s not in your prostate, weeps the PSA proteins into the bloodstream. We shall see.
Personally, I’m optimistic.
Why?
Writing words again, en’ I?