47 With a Zimmer!

So that's resolved then. I've called Dr. Hall and told him I will need to change the cassette on Monday, as I am using too many boosts for it to last beyond a week today. Last night, I took three boosts between going to bed at 11.30 and waking, because the pain was a little too high again, and does not seem to be infection based. I've also called Eleanor who is the physio attached to me, and requested the walking frame be made available (preferrably before the weekend, as I tend sometimes to be too immobilised to be safe walking about with just the stick to support me), and the self propelling wheelchair: the next increase will almost certainly mean I need it occasionally to go out with the girls and not be walking so slowly on my zimmer I delay reaching our destination by a few days!
It will be a landmark step, as I've mentioned, but I don't expect to need the chair permanently just yet. I will still be able to walk (probably a bit stiff legged) around the house, and with luck, manage the stairs for a while yet. If I can't, well, we will simply have to ask for the bed to be delivered and installed in one of the rooms downstairs. Fortunately, we have a downstairs shower, so I won't have to go unclean on top of everything else.
Now I've noticed the last few entries have been all quite factual, and that reflects what happens to both Sarah and I when we have a few medical appointments one after the other. We both seem to let the facts sink in a little before anything like assimilation takes place in terms of our lives and how to continue to live powerfully in face of the new circumstances. It's one of the reasons why visits to Maggie, our homeopathist, are so useful: it's not because the curious preparations she gives to both us might have any effect (they may do, I really don't know) but because she is a person who asks questions about how we are and how we are both reacting to the situation right now. It helps me, and I think Sarah, to contextualise our experiences, and to come to terms with what we have made all the latest news mean, and thereafter, how we can interpret the situation in a way that has us both be supported and feeling able to cope. She is also a person who interprets the world through what I'd call a spiritual filter: she doesn't take things as merely facts, or regard human beings as merely biochemical machines, but beings with a non physical element, and, dare I say it, a spiritual journey to accomplish.
I've mentioned before, I think, I have spiritual beliefs too. I'm not a member of any religion, although I have often described myself as a Buddhist, just to keep the conversation short and not too weird. Most people think they know what a Buddhist is, so I avoid a lot of complicated questions by calling myself one. So for now, let's just say I am a Buddhist, (it's close enough anyway), and I can tell you then how I am able to interpret the latest news and my cancer as a whole.
People often describe Buddhism as fatalist, because it is so accepting of what is so. I, for example, know that my circumstances now could not possibly have been any other way. The reason I know that is a bit hard for some people to understand, because it's a bit simple. It could not have been any other way, because THIS is the way it is. Nothing I could have done would have stopped this set of circumstances occurring, and that is what some people think of as fatalistic. Personally, it's just common sense to me. In the same way, whatever the future holds will be exactly what it holds: nothing I do now will change the circumstances I am in at some point in the future. Why? Because when I am there, however the world is will be the way it is then. Did that make sense? Probably not. So if it turns out I am in a wheelchair in a fortnight's time, that is exactly where I am meant to be, and, as Maggie might say, it is exactly where your spirit or soul wants you to be too, so that it can experience all that it is meant to experience on it's journey this time round.
That is how I find myself able to live with the set of circumstances I am in now: it is, in some way, exactly what is meant to be going on for me. If I survive (which I still hold to be extremely possible) then I was meant to, and if I don't, I was meant to die.
There is something else that helps me live happily now, and that is the love I have from Sarah and Emma. Last night, for example, Emma was watching Sarah massage the emollient cream into my legs to help control the swelling and keep the skin from disintegrating further. I could see her glancing away from "Survivors" on the telly to my legs every so often, although she didn't know I was watching her (gotcha, sweetheart!). When the massage was done, and I put my track suit bottoms back on, Emma said to me "I love you." It not only lifted my heart, it nearly wrenched it in two, it was so simple and honest.
Then there is Sarah. I want some of you to know something of who Sarah really is, because for some people she still occurs as "Dave's Wife", and not the full and amazing human being she is. Sarah is the kind of person who, having lived through the miscarriages she and I experienced, became a counsellor for the Miscarriage Association, and a press volunteer giving interviews to the press about how the MA helped us both through. She is the kind of person who, when her mother was dying from cancer, badgered the health authority every day for a fortnight or more to get her mother a hospice place through the NHS, who travelled the 400 plus miles round trip almost every weekend to visit her mother, and who arranged for her mother's care home when she could no longer live alone. She is the kind of person who, when her husband first had a colostomy, sat on the bathroom step and forced herself to look at the hole in my side to come to terms with it and to understand what I felt like every time I looked in a mirror. She is the kind of person who, when her husband was declared to be incurable, went onto the internet and searched thousands of pages to see what drugs were being researched in other countries and what alternative treatments people were using that seemed to show some chance of success. Every day she reassures me that she will eventually recover from my death should it happen, and that she will be fine one day, so I don't have to worry. She also tells me that my dying will be the worst thing she has ever had to face, and yet that she will face it and help Emma through it too. That is a fraction of who my wife is, and I would love even a fraction of her. The fact I have and hold the complete person called Sarah French is one of the greatest gifts I could have been given, and I cannot, even though I may be dead some time soon, regret a life in which I have been given the chance to be her husband.