This is the first in a series of postings related to my cancer treatment. The aim is to talk about the personal experience of illness in a broadly analytical way.
I am starting with blood: what it is made of, and how that affects our very being.
Blood and its qualities have long served as powerful metaphors for the human condition. And people spend a lot of time putting things into the bloodstream to alter their mental state. In the case of medical treatments, the alterations are less voluntary.
In the case of chemotherapy, you are also taking something away from the blood’s basic composition, rather than adding to it. Chemo works by killing off cells that divide and grow rapidly. This targets cancer but also catches other, more useful, cells like hair and the bone marrow, which produces red and white blood cells. So the patient feels worse during the long treatment, not better.
What is it like to receive a dose of chemo? It is like being in a pool, and someone throws you a boulder. The boulder drags you down into the water, until you shake free and float back up to the surface. In the body, the chemicals feel heavy, like an unmoved meal. They are heavy – body weight goes up by several kilos immediately after a dose, before coming down again a day or two later.
Medicine worries a good deal about the effect of chemo on the body; specifically about the blood cell count, because a deficiency in red cells causes anaemia, and in white cells leaves you vulnerable to infection. Medicine doesn’t worry so much about the effect on the mind. (The mind, that is, as a complex process of thought and feeling, rather than a disembodied, Cartesian object.) But even when there is no physical emergency, the lack of white cells has an impact. Without those cells, you literally have no ‘fight’; no defence against a threat to existence. And this state exists at the level of feelings, not just as a physical fact.
At the lowest point in the chemo dose’s three-week cycle, it feels humanly hard to go on living. Not because you are depressed, but because you lack the basic bodily ingredients, which we otherwise take for granted, that make living possible. And in a long course of treatment this happens not just once but over and over again, leading to an accumulated feeling of precariousness. It is this specific effect, I believe, that makes chemotherapy the dreadful experience that everyone acknowledges it to be.
Future postings will look at the business of being a ‘patient’; attitudes to risk and mortality; and the impact of serious illness on our relations with others.
Any feedback on these themes, or any others that you think I should consider, is very welcome.
Thank you for this. It helps to understand what you were feeling.
It is not for nothing that Latin “pateor” is the root for “patient” and means “I suffer”…. it is all about suffering.. courage mon amie!
Nothing personal, but POOR YOU - having ones energy ( ergo, joy of life ? ) semi-permanently removed takes a giant leap of faith and trust; no easy task amid our media fanned tin pot ’scientists’ busy sneering at religion and belief systems all round
However , ‘ heard this one ? ‘ :
Q ” What’s the difference between God and a consultant ? ”
A ” God does not think he is a consultant ”
Despite sound survival instincts demanding a hasty exit any which way up , our bodies are a lot more resilient than we might think ; chemo really can work miracles - sticking with the programme is a brave but ultimately sensible move - even when the hammer horror film side-effects ( corpse-like appearance / ‘chemo cut’ hair do ) contrive to demolish what little spirit is left altogether
It can be difficult to take medicine seriously considering the not too distant treatments of the recent past ( many of which seemed to have shocked the body / immune system into recovery rather than had any direct effect ? ) ; once our then family GP wrote an ‘ emergency hospital admission ‘ letter for a tonsillectomy - which I quietly folded and left in my teenage pocket ; convinced the bug was nothing more than a respiratory tract infection bought on by a Belmondo inspired affection for Gitanes
Years later this proved a good move - apparently the operation was simply a fashionable one at the time, practised far too widely, given the risks involved
However, if, as the docs now know , stress hormones delay wound-healing - whilst it would be insane not to question everything ,
perhaps worrying too much about prescribed treatment could
reduce the desired effect and possibly even ‘ sour the blood ‘
On the bright side, from what I have observed, chemo side-effects
are so tiring, patients are unlikely to have the energy to throw themselves into the Thames before they get better ; but they ought to take up the counselling offered by kind Macmillan staff anyway
Meantime, in relation to what we add into the mix of our blood, personal experience showed that on a subconscious level our bodies do seem to know best : following a luckily ‘routine’ op last week
( well, routine for them, perhaps ; and yes, in a comic moment, reassuringly tried to leggit from the ‘recovery’ room - despite significant dose of morphine - legs temporarily out of order and sitting in a large pool of crimson fluid ) it is almost impossible to swallow anything synthetic - only fresh, hand-made by elves nosh will do, and in easily digestible amounts ; as if the appetite compass gets automatically re-set to ‘health’ by the petit mal of general anaesthetic
A surgeon chum presrcibes large bars of chocolate, squashy sofas and a video … I, personally cannot wait for Usain Bolt’s triumphs on You Tube. Meantime, Boris Johnson’s “Who Do You Think You Are ? ” is a universal painkiller - ought to be cloned for Lourdes - and
the star himself headhunted to rule the world before it is too late
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00d56ky/
‘ Any feedback on these themes , or any others that you think I should consider , is very welcome ‘
Boris’ fine conclusion :
” We are not the ultimate expression of our genes .. we’re just
the temporary custodians of these things .. it’s fundamentally,
in the end, incredibly democratic ”
might be a fascinating philosophical horizon to consider - and
might even appease the destructively dim ‘class warriors’ too ?
Hello Bolter, thanks for keeping an eye on me, as it were. Medical lore has it that chemo patients generally put on weight, so perhaps they are all following your surgeon chum’s advice. In my case, I went on a diet as a way of feeling in control of something, and as a result everyone now says how well I look — which is funny really. Also enjoyed the Boris Johnson TV episode, though thought it says more about his writerly imagination that it does about his strengths as a politician.
The Susan Greenberg piece was so unusual, bringing the mind into it. It was also admirably concise. However, I found I wanted to read a little bit more about the mind thing — explaining it a bit more because I think it is a really unusual idea. Susan, do you actually mean that the lack of white blood cells affect the mind ? Or do you mean the lack affects the brain, a physical thing, as in liver or kidneys?
Thanks for the question. I feel I am straying into tricky territory to do with the old mind/body debate, without being an expert, and will try to pull together some thoughts in a separate posting. Meanwhile, I think my idea is that whatever gets added or subtracted to the blood affects the whole body; what affects the body affects the mind; the mind and the brain are related but not identical; and feelings come from a complicated process involving both the body and mind. What do other people think?
Yes.Thanks for this.Sounds familiar.Reminds me,with a shudder,of last year.I remember speaking with a friend who was nearing the end of her treatment as i was just beginning mine.She seemed so vulnerable and exposed…Skinless.Raw.A psychic translucency.I vowed to myself that I wouldnt let it get to me like that.It did though.