Twelve Months On

It has been something of a standard practice in the French household at the end of the year to conduct our own personal review of the year, to then bring some objectivity to all the things that have happended in that year and remove any sense of limiting meaning or interpretation to those events, and, through this process to enter the New Year with a feeling of clarity and opportunity. It may sound a bit esoteric to some, but this form of "completion" (a Landmark term which could translate to "getting fully objective and real about what actually happened during the year as opposed to what you made all that happened in the year mean about you, other people, and the world - hence the shorthand term!) has always proved useful for Sarah and I in the past as it really works and gives the New Year a true sense of being new - never experienced before and genuinely full of potential. It works better than making New Year Resolutions ever did for me anyway!

So, I thought I'd share a bit of that process with you today, because as I look back on '08, and look out onto '09, one thing I am clear on is this - it would be all too easy right now to think I should give up, curl up into a foetal blob on the sofa, after saying a firm "Sod it!" to the world, and allow the potential peace and quiet of non physical existence to take me away. When I feel like that about it, I know for sure I need to complete the year like never before!

In January 08 I was going through chemo having been told I was terminal just a month to 6 weeks before. I was, in spite of this, still running training courses where I'd be on my feet all day (never being one for sitting behind a desk and talking at people), enjoying country walks wiith Sarah, sleeping well with the aid of some morphine, and still enjoying a beer on occasion as well as being able to intermittently sit down for quite extended periods of time. In April, I was able to fly to Rome, walk around all the sites unaided and without pain, take the train to Florence and walk around the Vatican Museum and see the Sistene Chapel, and then drive to a villa in Tuscany for a week of complete isolation and relaxation. It was on this trip that the first signs of the tumours appeared on my bottom (although at the time I did not know that's what the slight soreness and bleeding due to a small tear on my scar was). By the time December rolled around my life in comparison seems to be so much more limited. No need to reiterate it all here as it's been the subject of most of the blog anyway! But when I look at the stark contrasts, it is frightening how quickly things have happened, such that in 12 months I've become unable to walk any distance, sometimes unable to breathe, drugged to the eyeballs and a person living in a family who are, all of us, literally confronted by cancer every moment of every day - there is not one decision we can make which does not, even if in some small way, require my illness to be taken into account. It really is quite a challenge to get to the point where I can interpret all these events as something other than indicative of my death, and the fact that it would appear to be likely to occur sooner rather than later. One brief example from recent days: on the 29th, this Monday, I took a bunch of stuff down the tip for recycling, as well as a few bags of stuff to have to into the skips designated for landfill. I emptied the boot of all the glass and plastic and so on and put it into the appropriate spots. To do this I'd parked the car near to the recycling containers, and needed to carry four bags across the width of the tip to get rid of them - a round trip of perhaps 60 metres. On the second trip, one of the two bags I carried was slightly heavier than all the others (as it contained cat-litter - heavy and smelly stuff I was desperate not to drop anywhere near me!) I was, as I reached the side of the skip, breathing a little heavily - as if I'd run up a very short flight of stairs at full speed. As I walked back to the car, it got worse. 5 metres from the car, I was in full blown suffocating mode - I could not breathe deeply enough to get sufficent oxygen to the rest of my body because of the stress this huge task had placed upon my system. As I reached the car, I grabbed open the driver's door, and leaned heavily on it, my shoulders heaving as I struggled to force air into me. I was imagining collapsing in the middle of the dump, an ambulance being called, and me dying before it arrived. This fear lasted for two minutes, at which point the episode passed, and I began, quite suddenly, to breathe normally and easily again, with the burning sensation in my muscles and chest subsiding before it reached the full blown burning up sensation achieved by the nocturnal episodes that had led to me getting my lungs drained in hospital. So now, even the simple act of "taking stuff to the tip" is heavily laden with the overtones of cancer, and has resulted in my thinking I should put the portable oxygen cylinder in the car whenever I go out and may need to walk somewhere or carry something.

How then to complete this year? At it's most simple, it is this. What has really happened in 2008, when you look at just what occurred and not what I have made it mean? The answer is this: my bottom developed some growths which have inhibited movement, and to this point such inhibition has become progressively greater due to the greater degree of pain relief used to control the pain it produces; I have found breathing difficult and have been told it is due to fluid produced by a tumour in my lung; my legs have swollen and my skin on the lower leg in particular has become very dry and scaley; other growths similar in appearance to those on my bottom have developed in my groin and the top of my left leg; I now find it hard to bend over as to do so causes pain; the doctors tell me I am incurable, which I have chosen to interpret as "they don't know how to cure me yet".

Does anything in "what has actually happened" point to my imminent demise? No. Does any of it mean that I will not be cured by some means at this point unknown? No. Does it say that any parts of my body currently containing tumour cannot once again be tumour free? No. Does it say that any parts of my body currently tumour free will be infected in the near future? No. Does any of it, therefore, indicate that a cure will not happen? No, not that I can see. Now, just to make sure you know I'm not completely bonkers and off my rocker, there is nothing in what actually happened that says a cure will occur either. That's one of the things that you notice very quickly about events when you subtract meaning from them - they are completely neutral. What happens has no moral content or any other form of abstract content at all. It just is what happened. What happened in '08 had nothing to say about whether or not I live or die, or when. So I get to decide for myself when I think that will occur and, indeed, if it will. I know it will one day, but in that sense I am no different to any of you. How and when? That's a different matter.

There are, of course, many opinions out there that tell me I will die, and there are many opinions out there about what that will mean, and how it needs managing now in terms of preparing myself for the inevitable, and Sarah and Emma's need to do the same. They are of course potentially right, and in the case of the doctors, possess a certain amount of past evidence with which to argue their case. Yet there are also examples where even people in such advanced state of illness as myself have somehow been cured.

And so, for now, I shall choose to continue to believe in the possibility of my survival. There have been times recently when I have doubted it and thought that my death was really not that far off. But now, without putting layers of meaning and opinion on top of what has actually happened in the last year, I can believe in the miracle. I am still going to visit the hospice on Saturday to check out the facilities and the lie of the land, because I may need to use it, and to know about it will be useful for both Sarah and I. But I'll not be asking for a place just yet, until I can be certain I will need it.