The Tropic of Cancer

Saturday, 21st January 2023.

Today I’m back with the NHS. Not cancer related this time, with the foot folk. Podiatry. More in a minute.

I managed to get the bone scanner appointment rearranged at a cost of only ten days. It’s now just a month since I saw the Urology consultant, a month and ten days since the GP’s feedback on my blood tests and my Killing Zone PSA levels. The NHS is capable of attracting all sorts of adverse observations, my own experiences on the front line of emergency procedures has been consistently excellent. I am well aware of the horror stories of people waiting long and weary hours in overrun and understaffed Accident and Emergency units, let alone GP’s waiting rooms, maybe I’ve just been lucky. But the consistency across different units, Neurology, Haematology, Pulmonary Hypertension and Cardiology, now Urology and soon Oncology, has been excellent. And consistent. Maybe it’s because I live in a ‘Shire’?

Where’s some wood? Even fitting into five ‘at risk’ categories announced at the onset of Covid-Time, touch wood, so far I’ve avoided any contact with the NHS’s Covid units, excellent, again, as they proved themselves to be. From the chronic damage caused by DVTs in my lower right leg, that limb looks like something from the Elephant Man. Blood doesn’t flow continuously through arteries and veins, the heart pumps it in beats, hence a ‘pulse’. With each pause, gates in the veins close to stop liquid flowing back down as a result of the downward force of gravity. My gates don’t close owing to damage, thus there’s excessive fluid, causing excessive swelling in my lower leg. This ‘oedema’  (from the Greek, as always with modern medical science, the words of biology and its ailments are thousands of years old, ‘oidein’, ‘to swell’) doesn’t seem to be pernicious to my health. But it does to the mind. It is unsightly. Gross, in the vernacular of the modern young thing. Other genders are not attracted to the unsightly. A possible solution, wearing a disguising cloth sack from my waist doesn’t strike me as a babe magnet, and a long dress might take me to places I wasn’t expecting. With numerous high-end health conditions, you’d be forgiven for thinking a possible sex-life — or otherwise — might not be high on one’s list of priorities, but the whole business of sex can be a funny old game, right? And I don’t mean ‘business’ in a business sense there. If many disabilities lead one into the world of taboos, the sexuality from within disability is ten-X taboo. Maybe I should get my lower leg inked, I could then write about a tattoo taboo. You-hoo! Poetry, huh?

‘Pod’ (I think from the Latin, but it must be Greek) means feet. Of course it does. The first time I saw the podiatrist she cut my toe nails with these enormous hoof-shearing clipper thingies. One sight of them and I was ready to tell her anything she wanted to know. I’d make it up, if necessary. Once I’d been clipped I had a revelation. One of those life-changing insights. I suddenly became aware of why girls ‘got their nails done’. It was an immense, hidden and unexpected, pleasure. And free too. God bless the NHS!

Monday, 09th January 2023

So it’s now a new year, a time for New Resolutions, emphasised with camel-case lettering; new attitudes, new stuff. Living a new, or different, life. All that sort of thing. Today I’m due in the bone scanner. Different day, same headache. Ironically, dealing with cancer’s a slow process. The time lag from diagnosis to treatment for my other diseases was fast.

Today, next step in the process.

Different day, same old problems. MS, cancer, I live on my own, whatever, life’s ‘normal’ problems don’t suddenly go away because life somehow ought feel sorry for you. It doesn’t.

My cab is due in five minutes. I’m taking a cab because my trike’s close to VOR, but mainly I’m not sure of the internal geometry of where the bone cancer scanner is, so I need to take my powered scooter. Trike for distance, scooter for building internals. 

No card. 

Bank card, not a scooter thing. My bank card, this card, lives in the same place All of the Time. Right now, at departure minus five minutes, it’s not there. Despite looking in the same place at least five times. It’s too late to take the trike, too late to call anybody. I’lI just check my bag again, where the card usually lives, for the sixth time. The card might have magically turned up since I last looked. Obviously.

Tomorrow, confusing writer time travel, but today as I write (AIW), tomorrow / today (AIW), it will turn up in the garden having fallen out of the back-pack pocket whose zip I can’t do up with fingers that don’t work properly.

Confusing, what? Oh, ‘VOR’. ‘Vehicle-off-the-Road’. It’s an Army term, maybe tri-service. Some of the old vernacular lives with me still. In answer to a question, ‘Wait One!’ as I pause to think, ‘Dobbie’ for washing — probably a derogatory imperialist / racist term from the old India days, but I hope not. ‘Scoff’ for something to eat. ‘Stickies’ for a sweet, fizzy drink. (From Belize, in the topics. Spill some on a table and wait one. The spillage becomes stickier than glue.) ‘Stills’ for Falkland Islanders. The MOD banned the term ‘Bennies’ from an ’80s TV Soap character, so the military switched to ‘Stills’: they’re ‘still’ Bennies. Army humour, huh? ‘Numpty’ for being an idiot. I made that one up. The term for being an idiot in the Army vernacular is not repeatable here.

‘Checking out’. A euphemism, not that the Army tend to do that sort of thing, euphamise, for dying. Not like being ‘slotted’, that’s when someone else holds the agency for your death. Checking out is the natural, if a little premature, processes.

In life, an old Ireland hand used to say, there are no rehearsals.

There are no rehearsals for cancer. No script. No pre-knowledge of how to deal with what goes through your head. Or how to get rid of that ear-worm loop of I don’t want to die, yet. Dying’s easy — when it’s quick.

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.