What It's Like Now....

(18)

Twenty months after diagnosis and eighteen months since treatment began life is settling into a routine.  Pain and limitation of mobility, inability to go out and have fun and needing to be dependent on others have all become a way of life for me now.  Not a way of life I would choose - most definitely not, but it's what I've been reduced to, unfortunately.

Notwithstanding the above, the biggest challenge to work on overcoming is the monotony of life and the lack of spontaneity as everything I do has to be planned carefully first.  This takes a toll on my mental resources and those of my wonderful husband and son as they try their hardest to keep me from sliding down the slippery slope into depression.  I'm not the sort of person who easily becomes depressed, no matter the circumstances, but when a person is reduced to a social life consisting solely of visits to the pathology lab and cancer centre, it takes a lot of strength and inner resources to constantly find ways of keeping one's spirits up.

Add to that the fact that the treatment cycle causes an enormous upheaval to the body by lowering every facet of the blood count, causing a very low immune status and anaemia just to name two factors.  When the body comes under such an assault the lowering of the blood count to such an extent causes not only physical but mental and emotional changes and it's impossible to fight off the fluctuations of mood that are caused by the constant adjusting of the body to tolerating the extremes of treatment then no treatment; treatment then no treatment on a cyclical basis of three weeks on and two weeks off.  Hormone treatment is generally underestimated, in my opinion, and I think most people would imagine it would be the easy way to fight off cancer cells as, instead of killing all the cells in the body the way chemotherapy does, its action is to starve the cancer cells of food, i.e. oestrogen.  However, this isn't so.  These drugs are extremely powerful in their action as the body constantly produces oestrogen even though it has been put into a state even lower in oestrogen production than menopause.  Cancer cells are constantly trying to find a way around these drugs.

Stage IV cancer means being in lifelong treatment which can never be stopped.  Once one treatment fails, as is apparently inevitable, another treatment must be tried until eventually all treatments have failed and the patient becomes terminal.  This shadow is in the back of my mind all the time, despite my optimistic and positive nature and it is a constant battle to keep morbid thoughts in their place and, for me, I'd rather keep my head in the sand and live in a "cocoon of denial", as one of my dear friends phrased it recently, so that's how I manage.  I take my head out of the sand every so often and face what I'm told is ahead of me, make some loose plans and then place my head firmly back in the sand again.  That way my family and I are able to pretend nothing has changed (except that I'm no longer running around cleaning everything and organising everyone!)

So, summing up, I'm very fortunate to have a fairly philosophical outlook on life and even more fortunate to have loved ones who care so much for me that they think of every way they can to make the time I have as happy as possible.  We don't know how long I have; it could be quite a number of years or it might not, there's no way of knowing which way the cancer will go and how long this treatment will continue to work.  I'm also fortunate to have some very close friends who go out of their way despite their own challenges to spend time with me, talking about everything under the sun and making me feel loved and wanted.  There are always the few who choose to close their eyes to a person undergoing difficulties like mine and, although it hurts to know there are some who ignore me, I constantly remind myself that the ratio of those who look away to those who care is very much in my favour.

So, I take this opportunity to thank the many, many people who keep my spirits up every single day.  I'm eternally grateful to know so many generous spirited souls.

That's where my Saturday afternoon musing ends for now ~