Hildegarde

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Archive for June, 2018

9 Sunday Bloody Sunday

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This is number 9 in a series. If you want to start at the beginning, scroll down to number 1.

It is Sunday, and because it is Sunday, I am giving myself a stab at writing thus blog.

When I first started looking into the realities of what I was about to go through, I was told over and over again that virtually all the pain and sickness patients experience with cancer are not the result of the cancer itself, but of the treatments for it.

So far, I can attest to this. I get up in the morning (usually around 6 these days), feel more or less fine, drink a lot of tea, get a bunch done, then stop at around 8:30 to take my meds.

Half an hour later, I’m a mess, shaky and distracted.

So anything I need to get done has to get done early. Sometimes even reading is impossible later in the day.

What’s worse, starting tomorrow I go on a new and stronger medication, so 5hings may very well be about to GET worse.  I have no idea what this is going to mean on any practical level.

I have friends who say that if they were ever diagnosed with cancer, they would just let it go. They’d rather have a shorter time feeling relatively well and living a normal life than a longer time feeling sick and unable to do the things they love to do.

All of these people are, like me, “senior citizens.” None of them seems to have children like mine, who would stage apocalyptic fits at the very suggestion.

Have staged apocalyptic fits at the very suggestion. Don’t ask.

At any rate, it’s Sunday, and I’m worried about tomorrow, so I am having an absolutely complete day of rest.

Not only am I forgoing any real work, but I’m listening to my absolutely favorite Bach CD (Harmonia Mundi Bach Harpsichord Concertos from the Academy of Ancient Music with Richard Egarr on the harpsichord), which contains my favorite Bach piece (Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1052)—

But I am working my way through a venti caramel Frappuccino from the local Starbucks, which required my making a kid take a long and arduous journey to bring it to me.

If they complain about that sort of thing, I just reference childbirth.

Anyway, I’ve been doing all that, and reading Khalnani’s The Idea of India, and wondering why I am the way I am.

Because in spite of everything that’s going on, I don’t seem to have lost any of the interests I’ve always had, and I don’t seem to have lost any of my intensity about them, either.

There is the Bach, of course, and reading both heavy and light, but also things like double standards and freedom of speech and conscience, and a dozen or more other commitments that haven’t lost their grip on me by a millimeter.

I know we all live in a delusion: that life is forever and we will never die. We have to do that, because if we lived every minute of every day in full realization that we are inevitably going to die, we’d never get anything done.

But I would think that, having arrived at this situation, I would have started to let go of my conviction that taking a stand on these things, and fighting for them, is absolutely, desperately essential.

And I haven’t. Not even a little bit. Not yet.

I am still so driven by these things, I have several times managed to force myself past the shakes and dizziness and nausea that are the side effects of my medication to engage in FB debates about those issues.

I don’t know what that means.

But it’s Sunday, and I’m thinking about it.

 

Written by janeh

June 10th, 2018 at 11:46 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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