[Cancer]
[cancer] Minor notes
Some minor notes.
My recent post on the life logistics of cancer [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] has gotten some links and reposting from various quarters. I just want to add that almost everyone one of those line items decomposes into multiple subtasks. Sometimes dozens. The discontents of this disease are fractal in their complexity.
Still working through some late stage and end of life thinking. Those are not issues for this year, or even this treatment round, but I think it’s important that I know my own mind and understand my basic options now, while my head is still clear, rather than in some post-treatment panic a year or three down the road. With luck, none of this will be needed, but luck has been in notoriously short supply in my life since cancer became my boon companion.
Made myself cry twice yesterday. On leaving my hotel, I said good-bye to Fred K— the night clerk I’ve been on good terms with for years. We talk about the weather, each others’ kids, my cancer episodes over the year. I realize that if things go a bit poorly, I’ll never see him again. When I got in the car, I was in tears.
Leaving the office at the end of the day, I was talking with one of my co-workers about their father’s death from cancer some years ago, when they were a young adult. They told me one of the things he’d said to them near the end was, “You’re only losing me, but I’m losing all of you.” That really hit me. Once more, I got in the car in tears.
And so it goes.
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Posted: 5:04 am Sat August 25 2012 |
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I always look at my living will and medical directives before I have surgery. I was uneasy when my surgeon planned my most recent surgery for a Catholic hospital, but their versions of those documents were as reasonable as other ones I’ve seen. That was a small relief.
Yeah.
(And on a side note, at this point, I would refuse to be treated at a Catholic hospital. I prefer to support modern pro-woman/pro-child social values over retrograde patriarchialism and criminal coverups.)
Thinking on your friend’s comment about her father dying of cancer. I took the opposite view when I was experiencing my first post-diagnosis panic. I have lost enough people in my life, years apart, and I have no desire to outlive anyone else. I don’t mean I want to doe soon though. Just working to get as close to a normal life for as long as i can. But if I do die ahead of the people I love, I take comfort in that.
Hope that doesn’t sound as though you should feel differently. The idea of death is ultimately lonely.