Trying to stay motivated
I tend to avoid updating my blog when things get too much for me. And they do, regardless how positive I might seem most of the time. Often it's the little things, like no longer being able to tolerate coffee. Other times it's the larger issues drowning me in doom and gloom. These last weeks though have been low point after low point, starting with the news the chemo regime had failed to prevent the tumour from growing and ending with the call from the hospice I've been referred to for palliative care.
Suddenly the one thing I’d chosen not to dwell on since receiving the terrible diagnosis was centre stage.
I don’t want to die, of course I don’t. And yet we all do, and usually without any advanced warning as to when, where or how. It’s a blissful ignorance, believe me.
Like most of us, I blithely thought I would stagger into a disreputable old age, hand in hand with the man I’ve loved these past thirty or so years. After all, my mother was eighty at the time of her death and her mother in her nineties. Instead, it appears that unless we can find a way to stop this tumour in its tracks, at some time in the not too distant future the discomfort I’m already enduring will become outright pain and fatigue until I’m finally allowed to drift off in a haze of morphine into whatever might await me on the other side. And when that happens Jas will be left to pick up the shattered pieces of his life. Even thinking about what he will go through during those weeks and months tears me apart.
But I’m not done yet. Not by a long way. There is so much I want to live for and so much I want to be a part of. Like seeing the grandchildren growing up and achieving things I couldn’t even imagine right now. But more than that, I’m not ready to give up on our future; Jas’s and mine. So I’m grasping the next lifeline; a meeting next week with a different oncology team to see if I’m a suitable candidate for radiation, something that was originally considered a less attractive option given the close proximity of other vital organs to the tumour.
Suddenly the one thing I’d chosen not to dwell on since receiving the terrible diagnosis was centre stage.
I don’t want to die, of course I don’t. And yet we all do, and usually without any advanced warning as to when, where or how. It’s a blissful ignorance, believe me.
Like most of us, I blithely thought I would stagger into a disreputable old age, hand in hand with the man I’ve loved these past thirty or so years. After all, my mother was eighty at the time of her death and her mother in her nineties. Instead, it appears that unless we can find a way to stop this tumour in its tracks, at some time in the not too distant future the discomfort I’m already enduring will become outright pain and fatigue until I’m finally allowed to drift off in a haze of morphine into whatever might await me on the other side. And when that happens Jas will be left to pick up the shattered pieces of his life. Even thinking about what he will go through during those weeks and months tears me apart.
But I’m not done yet. Not by a long way. There is so much I want to live for and so much I want to be a part of. Like seeing the grandchildren growing up and achieving things I couldn’t even imagine right now. But more than that, I’m not ready to give up on our future; Jas’s and mine. So I’m grasping the next lifeline; a meeting next week with a different oncology team to see if I’m a suitable candidate for radiation, something that was originally considered a less attractive option given the close proximity of other vital organs to the tumour.
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