Life After Chemo …

The tile which, after suffering an unfortunate accident, nevertheless became a work of art

Today someone asked me if I could see my life lining up after chemo. It stopped me in my tracks.

I’ve been living in the moment of having cancer and having it treated for so long that plans about what to do afterwards are not on my horizon.

Should they be? I’ve gotten out of the habit of making plans. After all, it wasn’t just cancer that hit me. There’s COVID too that hit the whole world. Does anybody now think they know what is around the corner?

— — — —

But let me tell you what happened with that tile.

I was learning to paint with ceramics at the time. My next big project was going to be a 30 cm square tile using all the techniques of applying texture available to me. I’d gotten as far as recessing the sky areas by patient scraping and sanding with the scrubber part of the dish-washing sponge. The applying the three coats of sky blue. In the foreground I’d started the stylized bamboo, and the carving-in of various landforms.

Un-kilned tiles (referred to as green ware) are extremely fragile. I decided to leave it at the workshop for my next class the following week for that reason. Nobody knows how it happened, just that sometime during the week the tile broke.

The pebble insert above was my first idea for saving it. The rest of the class, Carmel, Carole, Sue and several others all made suggestions. If I was to have a band of pebbles, I’d first need to saw off part of the existing bits, top and bottom, then stick the middle two bits on another tile, kiln the whole assembly, and finally glue the pebbles in.

I didn’t like it. No elegance in it. There had to be a better solution, I thought. I took the tile home for the four-week interim around Christmas and New Year and studied it often.

Finally, I realized that the only way to camouflage a break so definitive would be to have more breaks. More pieces.

Did that. Very satisfying. Ended up with about eleven pieces. Was able to highlight a different technique on each of them. I use it as a puzzle. Lend it to people and they call me in the night to ask which piece goes where.

— — — —

I think that this puzzling-together of the pieces I am left with after my life broke is probably going to be the way into a new way of being. There will be no lining up of the pieces. How can there be?

I’ve got old bits that need upgrading … my writing and my painting … friends from then, and family, to convince that my new way of being is how I’ll need to be.

New bits … the amount of attention I now need to give to my health … new friends to make and maintain … my grandchildren now within reach to nurture … a new way of gardening to learn …

More new things than old things possibly, and all of them having to fit into a narrower borrowed time.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

While the beast illustrated here was once what a newspaper printer looked like, being in the Magnetic Resonance Imager today felt just like this looks like. The whole event was as near to a first hand nuts and bolts steampunk experience that I will want to experience.

Imagine lying on a stretcher bed inside a machine like this in essence, being told to take deep breath and hold it. Dozens of times. Each episode you’ll hear a clickety-clacking, high pitched whistling, rumbles, moans and groans, cracking and creaking; each soundscape in sets of six to nine instances.

At the same time you’ll feel waves of heat traveling down the presumably steel stretcher you’re lying on that’s sliding slowly in and out of the MRI donut. The ghostly voice in your ears and the SOS squeeze bulb in your right hand are your only contacts with reality.

At the end, one of the staff said quite matter of factly that they don’t have many fans. First thing I would do is modernize the monster and cut back the high decibel sound effects. I doubt that my hearing improved.

End Times: Societal Collapse

Yes. Pretty serious title. It’s the mood I’m in. After a twelve week euphoria about still being alive, first in hospital and then for six weeks in a respite community, learning to be a normal person again, the other day I got back to reading some of my favorite commentators on the state of the world.

Michael Mobbs, of Sustainable House fame, writing a Spinifex column in Fifth Estate, told the story of how he looked for a bolt-hole for when what’s coming arrives … this is the end time we’re talking about. The societal collapse. He’s convinced we have no more than ten years!

He couldn’t find a good bolt-hole. The whole east coast of Australia was burned in the 2019 bush fires and most of the creeks he looked at were either dry or running at about ten percent of what they once were. There’s no safety, or security in the bush. He went home, back to the city, where he’s thrown himself into food gardening, and modelling that.

Me? I was in shock. Here I am … went my thinking … going through the gnarliest treatment on Earth in the hope that I last ten more years and see my grandchildren on the way to growing up, and my society is going to fall over around my ears? Ending is such a final thing.

I’m aware of course that the average length of time for surviving cancer is five years, and I aim to step off my mortal coil with grace when the time comes. But only if I’ve given my descendants the best possible chance at surviving what’s coming.

In my mind I ran around like a Henny-Penny complaining about the sky falling in, me trying to think of solutions. Imagining how I’m going to spend the next five years.

Some time later I remembered that I’d known the 2030 deadline already. That I had accepted it already and had become nihilistic in my attitudes toward the end-time events, being a long-time environmentalist …

——

The above was all written a few weeks ago. Treatment is on-going. I feel sicker and less able to get involved in any damn thing with every turn of the cycle. Two to go. Maybe in six weeks … two more chemos, one more lumbar puncture with chemo … and when I’ve been able to address the near constant oral thrush in my mouth … I’ll be able to think again.Maybe then I can get excited again.

Too tired right now.

Cancer is the New Go …

My life couldn’t have changed more in the two months since I posted last.

It started with a respiratory infection. In May. GP sent me for my first COVID test (negative) and then sent me home to sweat it out. Three weeks later, I was still coughing and I agreed to a tele-conference. The Doc heard me coughing and prescribed asthma medicines. He was of the opinion that my asthma had been “turned on” by the bushfires earlier in the year, and was now being exacerbated by wood smoke from cosy winter fires.

Six weeks of serious coughing ensued. The Doc asked me to count the average number of times I coughed during a minute–which was six times when the bout was particularly fierce. And how many hours per bout. Some days that would be six or seven hours. Another tele-conference and two live appointments, different medicines and different regimes of when to take them didn’t throw any light on the matter. Because, since my lungs were clear, it had to be asthma.

In the first week of September, maybe, I decided in my dull, sick state of mind I should get a second opinion. To be able to have my blood tested–I had to go for another COVID test as local clinics refused clients with any symptoms of COVID. My second-opinion doctor rang me as soon as he had the results on his computer, on a Sunday, and convinced me to come into the surgery the next day on Monday 14th September.

“Your blood doesn’t look very good,” he said. “Anemia and probably malnutrition are only two of your problems.” He organized for me to be admitted to hospital in Queensland. A friend drove me–the border crossing was a mess of detours and a long conference with the police charged with keeping the border safe.

In hospital I was required to be quarantined for a fortnight and COVID tested, again. Ten of those days were taken up with all the tests medical expertise could put me through. Plus blood transfusions to address the anemia, a platelet transfusion, oxygen (which finally stopped the coughing), lots of good food. I swear I ate red meat at every meal.

It wasn’t until the PET scan that my hematologist got a hint. An inconclusive lung biopsy was next–other than I definitely had a lymphoma. The results had to be sent to the state medical review board for confirmation.

What I’m sick with is called Intravascular diffuse large B cell lymphoma. Also known as Intravascular DLBCL. It’s rare and largely unknown how well chemo will work.

My second-opinion doctor saved my life for the present.

Transport

This one, yes, this one I would really like … it’s an EV of course … built in 1918 by I think it was Millard

My car is yet again incapacitated. I didn’t drive it enough through my illness and the battery is flat once more. The poor NRMA guys have been to my place at least three times already this year and I’m wondering why I still have a car with an internal combustion engine.

If I had an electric car I could just plug in the power cord and charge it up. Problem solved. It isn’t as though I don’t have enough electricity.

I started to research that today. New EV cars cost an arm and a leg. I’ve never spent more than 20k on a car even when I was still working. Second hand EV cars are as scarce as hens’ teeth in Australia. New Zealand has enough sense to import them from Japan, but Australia is a Johnny-come-lately, still wanting to run the world on coal, oil and gas fracking.

Then I plugged ‘lightweight EV vehicles’ into Google. It came up with the goods, of a sort, but I can’t imagine riding 10 kilometers along a narrow secondary road–two lanes only with a shoulder meant for single file bicycle riders–up a steep hill and down it again on the other side to Brunswick Heads, for example, on something that looks like an electric wheel chair.

I’m not old enough. I’m not a daredevil. I’m not stupid, we get rain here sometimes. and the new bike path is still a long time off. Maybe another ten years, when I have gone into my feisty years.

Listening to …

David Parsons The Valley Below on the 2009 album Jyoti …

Personal Headlines

When she was a first-time grandmother. It might take a while before she meets the new baby.

Trawling through my social media accounts during the week, I came across a little article written by a man in his late eighties. He said the thing that cheered him up most through all the troubled times that he he experienced in his life, was his daily habit of composing a positive personal headline.

I had a think about the idea for a couple of days without doing anything about it. I was negative. How could any of my personal positive news compete with COVID, political stupidities, cyber-attacks on all government departments (in Australia), and the thing not sitting just over the horizon but already in our midst, climate change and the continual ending of species diversity?

Then a new baby was born in the family.

I let all that stuff up there go. Released it from my mind. I filled my mind with thoughts of the baby’s parents. Her other grandmother, her grandfather. Her little brother. How could I not celebrate her arrival? Even in these frightening times, a new baby is a powerful sign of hope.

My headline? Two-times grandmother welcomes her grand-daughter into the world.

Of course, yes, I know the world is not a perfect place. When was it ever and for everyone at the same time? That’s Utopia we’re talking about.

In this world, there are positive things happening. The #BlackLivesMatter movement. I heard #GretaThunberg speak again yesterday. The Fifth Estate keeps plugging away for more green jobs, green buildings, green cities. People are still planting trees. I’m looking at you #Brunswick Valley Heritage Park, Maslen Arboretum in Mullumbimby.