Oceans Specific

Monday, 08th & Wednesday, 10th May, 2023

Today (10th) I will be wearing the same T-shirt I’ll have been wearing on the same kind of day every time since the 12th, of December, 2022. Cancer days, or perhaps daze.

Why?

As with every answer to every question ever asked, there are (at least) two layers to that answer. The surface, easy, answer is because it is a cancer day and I wear the same T-shirt on a cancer day. Which begs a better answer to the question: why?

Here’s the thing, you see. I don’t believe in luck. ‘You don’t think like other men, do you Guy?’ A colleague once blurted out to the whole office in frustration to an answer I had given him. And he’s right, I don’t. Which has proved to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing to my private decision making, a curse to my dealings with my fellow human and my social standing. To think differently from the crowd, to travel one’s own path is to not fit in, to become pariah. Only child, I guess.

Yeah, right, ok then, explain the random lottery win!! 

Well, first of all, I’m not sure we have an obligation to explain our private belief systems, but to be fair, I started it a few lines above. I don’t believe winning the lottery is good luck. I think it is just stuff that happens. We then assign that ‘stuff’ a label in retrospect. Let’s say the odds are 70 million to one for winning the lottery (I don’t know what the odds are) and the UK population is 70 million (again, as above) and each person buys a ticket (OK, I know, children can’t gamble, so each parent buys two), then it’s likely someone’s gong to have a winning ticket, all things being equal (interference, noise). Maybe that one person is lucky, but does that mean the other 69, 999, 999 people are unlucky?

I’ve got metastatic prostate cancer. Does that make me unlucky? In its way, counter-intuitively, and I might need to duck with this next statement, cancer is normal, a normal malfunction of the cell reproduction process. How ever many trillions of cells we have in our body, and some are replicated daily, every single cell has been replaced during each seven year period. I’m almost nine of those cycles old. The odds are some of them are going to replicate ‘ab’normally. 

Which alters my thinking. If a good cell can replicate and become a bad cell, then that cell too will replicate and there must be a ‘chance’ it can become a good cell. That would be normal. Can I encourage that process? Or must I wait for ‘luck’ to do it for me and do it with each of the cancerous cells? If a bad cell can influence the cell next so it to turn into a bad cell, then why can’t a good cell next to a bad cell influence it to become a good cell? Eight of my nine year replication cycles have gone well, so that must be the more normal pattern. This is logic, not science, but it might be my only chance and what’s to lose? Right?

The 10th is Oncology Road-Map day. So let’s see what Modern Science has to say.

But today isn’t. The 10th. It’s the eighth. (I’ll get back to the T-shirt in another post). So why am I writing about the 10th on the eighth rather than writing about the seventh or something else that has already happened? Other than one’s the future and one’s the past …

Eight years ago today (on the eighth, 88 curious fact from a previous life :— German radio operators in WWII would often end a message with ‘88’, eight being the eighth letter of the alphabet, ‘H’ …) I moved into the house I’ve lived in since. Life-saving stability. Eight years is the longest period of time I’ve ever lived in the same house. When my two sons were born into the house we were living in in the cutely named Llanfihangel Crucorney, try saying that after a few sherbets, I calculated I’d moved over sixty different times in my life. I was 37 years of age. The longest I’d lived under the same roof was two-and-a-half years. Tomorrow, eight years ago, my friend Kim returned Zen to me, she’d been looking after him for the ten weeks since he got back from Spain while I rented a single room. It was the third time we’d been parted. Other than a weekend he spent in kennels, I hated the idea, we were never parted gain.

My life changed with the move into this — ‘that’, as my current thinking is turning — house. My post-MS diagnosis life. It is changing yet again, now. Post-cancer diagnosis.

Here’s the thing. I’m not writing this in that house. I’m in the kitchen of my friend Tracey’s house. I’ve been here since my first testosterone-blocking injection. 

As a friend, I’m very lucky to have her.