Better

I love going to work. I am able to work more now since I've finished chemo, and it makes me feel good. It makes me feel normal. It makes me feel that I am useful and not a cancer-ridden waste of space. 

I have also taken to doing more non-work stuff, like going to conferences, attending meetings, participating in committees, doing charity things. 

My Trusty Companion wondered out loud if going to a CME meeting with a chemo pump strapped to me was a good idea. He pondered that taking on more stuff when I'm "ill" may not be wise. We discussed it, and lo and behold it turned out I was right and he was enlightened (amazing how often that happens...)*

In one of my recent extra-curricular events, an eminent professor quoted this chap, Daniel Pink, who is a business guru type. He spoke about what makes us do what we do (in this case, work as GPs for patients with high needs). Mr Pink talks about Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. That really got me thinking. 

These are exactly the things you lose when you are a patient. No more autonomy (though there is sometimes a token "how do you feel about that plan?" at the end of the consultation). Am I realistically going to turn around to my consultants and say "go away out of that, I want methotrexate and cadmium and a small drop of ricin in my drip, you don't know what you're on about." I am not, because these lads know what they are talking about, and I am happy to surrender myself to their expertise. But I am surrendering, and giving up my autonomy. So that's one down. 

Mastery is about getting better at something, and relishing that achievement. Obviously, my whole life is now about "getting better", but not at any one skill, just at simply being. And while I am participating in this effort to get me well, I am not in charge, and my gains feel a bit small. How "good" can you get at sitting down and letting people pour drugs into you or cut bits out of you? Being a good patient isn't much of an achievement really - "wow, look at me, I'm a whizz at being passive!" So mastery goes out the window.

The Purpose bit seems straight forward enough - Become Well Again. But it's a bit vague, a bit wishy-washy, and also not in my own hands (see above). It's a dream, an aspiration, a hope. But not really a jump-out-of-bed-in-the-morning-I'm-going-to-change-the-future situation. 

So it suits me to throw myself into activities where I do feel I am in charge, I am good at this, I can make a difference. 


It might not be quite what Mark Andrus intended when he wrote this, but cancer makes me want to be a better person. 


In all senses of the word "better".  




*Ooh I'm in trouble when he reads this.....

Done Done Done

Last chemo.

This time I actually made it to the pre-planned six cycles (though I only managed four each of the irinotecan and panitumimab). My body is getting less and less tolerant of the toxins. 

Or maybe it's my brain. The better you get, the harder it is to put up with side effects. Cancer is becoming a chronic disease, not a killer, and so the treatments will have to become more tolerable and less likely to kill you first. People don't tend to put up with life-threatening side effects from blood pressure tablets or diabetes medication. If I gave someone a pill for their indigestion and it made all their hair fall out, they would be pretty cross with me. So it is a tricky one for the oncologists - you'll be furious with them if they don't cure you, but also raging if they make you sicker on the way to getting better. 

I am waiting now for my body to drag itself up out of its pit of misery and start recuperating. I am looking forward to no longer frightening children with my crack-addict face. I am particularly keen to be rid of the pustular infections on my toes which make me hobble like an old witch. I'll be glad when the scabs in my nostrils heal. 

But mostly I'm looking forward to just feeling the same most days, instead of up and down, up and down, manic/tired/depressed/pitiful/okay/better. 

It's been quite hard work. 

Life's Not Fair

After my assiduous chronological documentation of what was going to happen after my last chemo, typically enough, none of what I had predicted actually occurred.

I didn’t get the “strong stuff” (irinotecan, not poitin) because my bloods were too low, so I didn’t have the same sequence of horrible side effects. 

Instead, this time I got a brand new batch from the Vectibix. 

I never knew how much I loved Epidermal Growth Factor until I started inhibiting it. 

Come back my little EGFs, all is forgiven!

My skin is disintegrating. I have pustules on my face, chest, legs, jacksy, and most tearingly itchingly painfully on my scalp. I spend most of my day picking scabs off my head. You know when your mother tells you to stop scratching, but you really just can’t? I try sitting on my hands but it's a bit tricky to examine patients or write notes while doing that. I can only imagine what patients are thinking when they see me with boils on my face, scratching my noggin like a particularly unhygienic chimpanzee. 

Oh well. 

My fingers are becoming useless again, can’t tie buttons or laces without wincing and griping. 

I found the world’s greatest plasters though - they survive OCD levels of handwashing and actually helped the cuts to heal - unheard of!

In the spirit of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to have a look at the lives of some other women born in the same year as me. As I have mentioned before, I am ferociously nosy. I have convinced myself that accessing the data available to me through our patient database is all in the name of research, but it is actually just satisfying my endless curiosity. 

So it turns out that there are 35 women on our books the same age as me. Surely none of them have it as hard I do? I've got to be the unluckiest nearly-40-year-old out of all of them.

This is a random list of the things these women are going through.

Well-educated immigrant, husband and herself unemployable here as qualifications not recognised. Child abuse, ongoing abusive relationships. Alcoholism. Cot death. Sarcoidosis. Depression. Emotional abuse. HIV. Anxiety. Bereavement. BMI 45. Son with autism. Kidney surgery. Pathological terror of intimacy, possible undisclosed childhood abuse. BMI 55. Infertility. Children left behind in home country. Headscarf attracting verbal abuse on a daily basis. Physical abuse. Incontinence. Bruises, post-traumatic stress. Job loss. Ex-husband jailed for white-collar crime. Painkiller addiction. Post-operative infection. Bipolar affective disorder. Diabetes. Ulcerative colitis. Domestic violence. Fibromyalgia. Panic disorder. 

Yeah. So my life is hard at the moment. 

But I don't think I'm the only one.

P.S. General practice at the Deep End is good for one's sense of perspective ;-)