Time to take stock.
It is now almost exactly a year to the day since I received the news of my diagnosis from the urology surgeon at QEH. I was told in a direct manner that I not only had kidney cancer but that it had spread to the lungs. The prognosis, based on statistics that take the mean survival rates as 'the measure of central tendency', gave me just over two years of life expectancy.
Such a moment changes you - 'but how, exactly?' - I hear you ask.
I'm not ducking the question but first I have to make mention of the fact that it soon became clear I was faced with a 'double whammy'. As it transpired, I not only had advanced kidney cancer, I also had degeneration of vertebrae of the lower spinal column caused by scoliotic curvature which in turn was resulting in serious 'mechanical' and 'neurological' pain - perhaps a 'triple whammy' would be more accurate.
I think that it has taken a year for me to make sense of this, to disentangle these conditions, understand and begin to accept how such an avalanche of misfortune could occur.
The first thing I must now acknowledge is this - if I hadn't had the back/leg issue I might well be dead by now.
Without a reason to give me an MRI scan, it is almost certain that the kidney tumour would have continued to grow and the cancer to spread. By the time other symptoms had raised the alarm, I might well have been beyond the reach of the drugs that I now take and which have already had some success in shrinking the metastatic nodules in the lungs. (Btw, I have my second end-of-three-cycles scan next week - I hope for a continuation of the same progress).
So, I have two very separate conditions, with separate symptoms requiring separate (but interrelated?) treatments. I may have done some disentangling but I am still unsure as to what condition I should ascribe some of my difficulties.
Take walking for example. I need to, have to, walk for the exercise but it causes me problems with my back after a couple of miles and if I am walking uphill I experience almost immediate difficulty with breathing and exertion of my leg muscles. Is this down to my back and the drugs I take to alleviate the condition or the toxicity of the cancer drugs or some combination thereof? Who knows? Not me and from my conversations with medics (including a recent appointment with a doctor at the QEH's pain management clinic) not them either.
I sense that your eyelids are growing heavy - keep going.
So, how has the knowledge of my illnesses changed me? I hear you ask - a second time - but now with less enthusiasm.........
In many and varied ways, I am sure (I never promised original insight!) and perhaps some have become apparent to you if you have read my posts over the last eleven months (and not twelve, because it took me a while to absorb the initial impact before I could start to write this blog). However, it seems to me that the most profound area of change relates to my adjustment to the nature of what life is.
For virtually all of my time on the planet, B.C., there was something that I can only describe, and did so even back then, as 'unreal' about 'existence'. There was some self-consciousness (or was it the lack of it?) that insulated me from the fragility and time-limited, accidental, nature of life. I always knew that I could die but I knew it 'intellectually'. The only moments of 'reality' were those when I had a visceral fear of death, such as standing on a cliff edge and looking down or when I lost someone who was close to me, such as my father or my mother. The break-up of my first marriage too, that was real. But the 'insulation' soon regrew over the wound, like a cicatrix, to 'protect' me. I stepped back from the brink, back behind the safety railing.
But when you are told you have advanced kidney cancer and there is no cure but only palliative care - there is no longer a safety barrier. 'Life is unfair', I whined. Yes, I now understand with clarity, that life is unfair - get over it. As Christopher Hitchens said (and I paraphrase) - the universe is profoundly uninterested in fairness, in whether I live or die.
Is this a penetrating or prosaic discovery - you decide - but, if interested, I'm sure that there is more from whence this came............
Things to do before you die.
Drive to the Torridon mountains in Wester Ross (as we have done - this is a live, streaming, blog) and arrive, preferably on a sunny day (as we did) in the ribbon settlement of Torridon village at the eastern end of Upper Loch Torridon. Perhaps you might pause here to enjoy some refreshment in the solitary cafe and chat (as we did) to the English emigree who moved to the village a couple of years ago. Then drive on down the road alongside the loch. You will see that it is signposted 'no through road' but put aside your reservations about 'dead ends' and drive the big dipper of a road for another few miles. You can admire the panoramic vista across the loch of dramatic snow-capped mountains. You could drop down (as we did) to Inveralligin and explore the enviable beauty of the village there but you should also drive on the extra miles, over another hill, raggedly clothed in peatbog, that will take you down, eventually, into Lower Diabaig.
Here you can park and walk out onto the harbour wall and look up and around - the full 360 degrees. It is as though you are in an amphitheatre, or possibly the centre of the bowl or cone of some extinct, now flooded, volcano.
Try to organise it so that you all travel on different (sunny?) days otherwise you will miss out on the eerie sense of isolation, the feeling that you are alone in a beautiful universe and in all truth; very, very small.
