And so an update on this evil, awful, bastard of a year: the cancer treatment is still ongoing, months later, which is, as you can imagine, incredibly depressing and demoralising. Back towards the end of July I had the last of the seriously awful, three hour IV chemotherapy sessions, where basically poison is pumped through your body, making your feel dreadful, buggering up healthy cells as well as the cancerous ones (it’s a blunderbuss weapon compared to a sniper rifle), ruining your immune system, white blood cell count and attacking your nervous system. It is also cumulative, so each session felt worse than the preceding one, and the recovery time took longer. So I am very glad to get that bit done.
It was a combination therapy of those long IV poisoning torture sessions and two weeks of highly toxic pills (eight a day), so nasty you are told not to touch them, pop them from the blister right into a cup then swallow. So they are so bad you shouldn’t touch them, but you are to ingest them… Yes, welcome to cancer care, where all the medicine is a fucking poison…
After the last IV session I had two more weeks on the pills, then an appointment with the oncologist after that in early August, so I fairly naturally assumed that was going to be the “it’s all done meeting”. Was it hell. Nope, she said she thought I needed further treatment to be sure. Quite demoralising, as you may imagine, when you think after eight months (since being sent for scans to diagnosis to surgery to recovery enough to then undergo brutal chemo) thank god it is done… And it isn’t. Thought perhaps another couple of weeks, oh no, four more sessions they said, each being two weeks of pills and a week to recover then repeat. Which takes me to the end of October. Oh, and the pills now go up to ten a day.
(the weird, Brutalist-inspired architecture of the cancer centre at the Western General)
So that took what little wind was in my sails off to the land of nothing good. Frankly it left me so bloody miserable that what I thought was over wasn’t even nearly over. I was in today for yet another poison session, and this time they upped the bloody meds to now twelve a day, ye gods. Because I have recovered some of the weight loss during the cancer and surgery time when I struggled to eat, and of course meds are often calculated according to size, mass etc. I understand that, but it’s still bloody depressing, not just to still be on these, but now on even more.
The thing is, back in August the oncologist, just to make me feel even happier about all this, told me they wanted me to do more on the pills but have to be careful as they will eventually cause irreperable, permanent damage to my body. Swell – stop now and hope it is all gone and not going to come back, or take months more of the toxic pills and hope it doesn’t destroy the healthy parts of your body. What sort of choice is that for anyone to have to make??? So today when they upped the level of these damaging drugs, I was understandably upset and concerned, so the specialist talked to me for a while.
End of the day, what bloody choice do I have but to continue with this horrible, toxic regime? But I am long since past the end of my fucking tether, frankly. I’ve had enough, more than enough, of this miserable time, and I still have weeks more of it to endure, now at an even higher level of dosage. If the oncologist in November tells me anything other than it’s all fine and done, they will hear me screaming in every fucking parellel dimension. I’ve gotten so tired of it all now I don’t even keep up hope or faith that it will be finished then or not.
And frankly, even if it finally is done this time, I can’t imagine any sense of relief, just weary resignation, because bastard cancer is never, ever really over. You will worry the rest of your life about it coming back. Every time you feel odd, or ill, you will worry it is the cancer cells returning, destroying you from within. Yes, they will scan me regularly for just that sort of thing, I know (the level of care has been incredible, bless our NHS and its staff), but still, no sense of rejoicing, just a tired appreciation that the treatment is done for now, but always wondering at the back of your mind what if it comes back?
Very, very, very tired; that’s going to be pretty much a full year of this now, and I’m worn down by it all.