Wednesday, 03rd, May, 2023.
Thinking about the 12th, December 2022
Deep within our DNA is the resistance to and honed ability to avoid, change. Change takes effort, energy. Energy is our most precious resource. We harbour energy for use in staying alive, falling in love, building a shelter, extracting nutrients from food and turning sugars into glucose (combusted by muscles and organs). It is easier to seek prey at the waterhole we prowled to yesterday and know the way to, well, the known well, rather than seek, possibly fruitlessly, a new one. Finding a new one takes risk, uncertainty, confliction. (Physical) energy. Resolving these takes even more (mental) energy. Fine if you’ve got some to spare, foolhardy if you’re running on reserve. Einstein’s famous equation, E= mc2 is about the conservation of energy. Great if you surround yourself with people who have energy to spare, foolhardy if the people around you suck yours out.
Yet change is all around. The weather, seasons, day into night into day into night. We grow up, we grow old. We fall in love, fall out of love, back in love again. We ‘fall’. And rise again. New is novel, different. Scary but attractive. New job, new house, new friends, new year.
It takes less energy to run along the road, follow the laid-down tracks, than to beat a new path through the bush. Sometimes the tracks go off in a new direction. The points might slide effortlessly and our metaphorical journey by train continues without interruption or notification. Sometimes the points clunk and jar. Maybe we’re halted by a signal. Pause while we consider choices. Study the signposts or a map. Thinking takes energy. Decoding signs and stuff takes energy, unnecessary at times. Sometimes we stop at a station, do or don’t get off, sometimes we stop in the middle of nowhere for no obvious reason why. Sometimes the other person’s on another train. Or another track.
Enough of the UK train system metaphor.
A diagnosis of cancer is the points juddering, jarring. Not clicking in engagement. The train’s at a halt. And it came to a halt pretty bloody quickly. All of the passengers want to get off, there’s only you left. However many, however loving and caring, however empathetic friends and loved ones, there are times in life when you’re utterly alone. That’s just how it is, it’s nobody’s fault.
[Editor’s (me) note. This next bit repeats itself (but only if you’ve read previous entries), but I feel it was on my mind, it was important, so I’ve left it in. Oh, and, editing it out depletes the word count …]
My own diagnosis came in code. Codes take energy to decode. There was room for interpretation, differing readings of the signs. Prostate cancer releases a protein into the bloodstream. The quantity of protein per volume of blood can be given a number. This number, relatively, encodes information about the tumour. The normal number for a man of my age, 60 [December, 2022, other than the last three days of it], is about 4.5 per thingy-ma-bobs. The mean number for my age group at which the men died, according to studies coming out of the States, is 165. My number was 196. This puts me into a term I refer to as The Killing Zone. Rhymes with ‘chilling’.
Here’s the thing. These kinds of scenarios do strange things to the mind. Waste a lot of energy.
But not for a day or two. After the numbness has worn off.
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