Monday, 04th September 2023
Today is the last day of an old life. An ending. At the same time, a new beginning. Things have got to change. Starting now (0500 …).
I’ve said that to myself so often in my life, the new beginning stuff, start again, especially in the last five years, that the wolfness of the crying probably leaves everybody not even looking up from the TV. That’s a metaphor. Their mobile phone is probably a better, more modern, metaphor.
This time, tho’, it’s not of my choosing.
Tomorrow I start a course of Radiotherapy. To try to kill off the cancer in my body. Or at least the cancer in my pelvic region, if it’s spread elsewhere, targeted radiotherapy won’t help.
Why a new start?
Why is this one different?
In the last five years I’ve had two conditions architected to kill me. Progressive MS, lymphedema in my right leg (a large ugly swelling that isn’t uncomfortable but has major impact on self-esteem), knackered knees. These weren’t going to kill me, although the lymphedema is a carry-over from ‘large and multiple’ PEs (Pulmonary Embolisms, Embolii??) which will have if not checked. Not insignificantly, I grew to seven stone overweight. I’ve not worked since October 2014, soon nine years ago, precisely. Until I moved counties, five months ago, I didn’t go out of the house other than to University, hospital or to chat to my mate Sam who runs the (then) local chip shop.
At all.
After the dog died in April ‘21, I started to go and see a personal trainer once, sometimes twice, sometimes not at all a week. We’d both seen her in the park during Lock Downs, although the dog wasn’t too interested in the training.
As each of these things has come into focus of consciousness and then started to be addressed, it has felt like the start of a new edition of me. Of a new life. But in time they started to dilute, or fade. This one is different.
With both the blood condition that thickened the liquid of me such that it would no longer churn around my system without intervention, and the successive lung conditions that put pressure on, and overworked, the right side of my heart (the bit closest to and in connection with the lungs, the left side pumps blood around the rest of the body), once the conditions were picked up, the NHS acted fast. VERY fast. No-time-to-think fast.
With a ‘very high’ PSA-presenting Prostate Cancer, I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. My blood test results were December 12th, 2022, it’s now September 2023. All that time for thinking, and there’s been plenty of it, has felt like academy stuff, theory. An abstractioned view of various types of reality, at one or two removes.
Today feels like the day before turning up at the new and first workplace to be told to forget everything I’ve been taught, this is going to be how it really is. How the world really works. Or school were you haven’t got a clue as to what’s going on.
We’ve all been there, I suspect.
The strange thing about this type of cancer is its stealth. It doesn’t hurt. Other than the weeing frequency (a good name for a band?) which could easily be put down to old age, there are no signs. But there is the word of it. It installs fear. Removes hope. Changes thinking. Cancer. It is something you hear about, know about, but it affects other people. So sad. Sometime’s they’re famous and have charities set up. So sad.
PV, or PRV, and CETPH were conceptually architected too kill me. As in, if not this, then that. This one, Prostate cancer, this one’s on the telly, in adverts, film scripts. Everyone knows someone who. I’ve not met or heard of anyone with a PSA higher than mine who’s alive. There are famous dead people with lower PSAs. (A former Army colleague did get in touch to tell me his PSA which was a number four times higher than mine, but it was a number I can’t compute, like grains of sand or stars in the sky). This one doesn’t feel more deadly than the other two diseases I’ve had recently, but this one has a presence in the popular culture (as in population, not as in, er, popular). The collective consciousness. Even if modern technology kills it off, I presume if I don’t change my lifenesses it will just come back. If it hasn’t already spread too far anyway. (The medics are worried about ‘micro-metastasis’ where it has already spread but the new tumours are too small as yet to be picked up by modern scanning technology.)
This time there’s no choice. No option.
Things ‘a gotta change.
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