Early morning reflections

I am simply amazed at how you can be in a blue funk one minute and then suddenly snap out of it seemingly without any reason. In my case I have been in a state of despair ever since the secondary diagnosis that the cancer that I was originally diagnosed with has either returned or was simply not eradicated in a given spot.

Regardless of which of these alternatives are considered as real there is no escaping the reality that for most people with this form of cancer the odds are not good to start with and certainly do not improve with any history of recurrence or a new event.

I have it seems spent something like six months being in pain and moaning about it.

I sat down the other day to try and think through WHY this has been my response to events.

In the first place I have always taken for granted my ability to control my voice and so be in a position to express myself by oral means. The recurrence of this illness has taken away this ability in one easy cut. As the new growth was wrapped around some of the nerves that control the vocal chords, at one and the same time became a life saver and a death knell.

On the one hand the fact that I was becoming hoarse meant that there was actually something that doctors could see as a symptom that needed investigation and it was with a CT scan eventually that the recurrence of the cancer was discovered and so action could finally be considered that would actually deal with the outbreak of this thing again.

Without it, I suspect that the doctors could still be treating the overuse syndrome diagnosis that they had arrived at and the cancer would be continuing to grow.

So having discovered the cancer what was the side effect? It was to force me to lose the use of one vocal chord and so leave behind - possibly for ever - my ability to communicate orally - something that I have relied on for all of my life and something that features as something that has defined me as a person for these 50+ years.

Now only being able to whisper or croak rather than to exercise the full range of my voice is something that creates difficulties every day. I wonder whether it is possible to regain the ability I have had in the past and I wonder if it is worthwhile - given the recurrence of the cancer and the potential time bomb for survival that this represents.

On the one hand there are stories about Nana Mouskouri the famous singer which state (inter alia) " In fact Mouskouri only had one 'working' vocal chord (rather than the normal two). This unusual condition accounts for both her hoarse spoken voice as well as the ringing quality of her sung registers."

From this I suppose that I can take heart and understand that with time I too may be able to regain some of the ability I once took for granted about being able to speak, articulate clearly and actually make myself heard with changes of pitch and volume virtually under any conditions. The question is of course whether I have the desire to do this and of course whether I have the time left in which to do something about this new condition.

As the time approaches for the start of new chemo and radio therapy I guess I simply have to make some decisions about whether I want to continue to live and if so in what condition. Then I guess I will have to make some decisions about whether the effort required is worth it and whether the pain that will no doubt be involved is also worth it.

To be perfectly honest the matter is a toss up at present, but with each day that passes the tendency is to at least try and not go out with a whimper.

Other than the voice there is the reality that my right hand side is simply not going to be the same ever again after the latest operation to remove cancerous growths. My hands for example are or at least feel as if they are at two very different temperatures. The left feels normal, while the right feels odd. Most of the time the right hand feels as though it is freezing cold and when touched actually seems to have a temperature difference.

So what can we learn about all this - one explanation I have found useful is located at this URL

Whether this is something that applies to me or not I know that at this point, I can control the use of my hands and with some effort I can actually DO something about the feelings of cold even if the results are temporary and transitory. So the message really is, get over it and adjust!

Then there is an unrelated problem that actually occurred earlier - the development of cataracts in my eyes.

While normally a treatable element in life one generally waits until the cataracts are developed before taking the risk of having them removed. In my case the situation appears to be compounded by two things one being that my left eye is more affected than my right and that the left eye also contains some blood vessels that seem to have burst at some point thus creating the effect of stretching a crinkled film of plastic over the lens of that eye so that vision is actually distorted. This does of course produce some weird effects and unpleasantness. Still there have been millions of people who have managed full and productive lives with only one eye so the fact that I have two both of which still operate to some extent is a really positive plus.

I also seem these days to suffer from a form of migrane headache that does not cause pain but does cause loss of vision in one or another eye for some time. I am told this is stress related - gee what a surprise!

In combination though the four elements combine to reduce my perceptions about my levels of functionality and so create a psychological state that heads towards despair if allowed.

I have been on the edge of this for the last few weeks and I suspect that as I head towards more of the treatment that caused me so much anguish last time I am likely to become depressed and have all sorts of thoughts about the meaning of life and the future.

I hope that I will be able to resist the pressures of all of this an have some sort of attitude that is able to put all this in perspective.

On the one hand I know that I am alive at present and frankly, better off than millions of others around the world, in spite of the current situation. At least I have access to medical treatment and with any luck it might actually work provided I can get through the side effects and the period of time it takes making me sick and vulnerable.

Assuming that I can get through the next relatively short period, the question remains what will I do from then on?

I have no real idea of the answer at present, but I know that I will have to find ways to cope with the 'new reality' that becomes my lot in life and in the process, maybe, just maybe, by writing down some of these thoughts and some of the experiences as I go through them - someone else will be able to benefit or at least not have the fantasy that they are in a position of being someone who is alone and experiencing something new but be assured that others have been down this path before them (probably millions of others over the years) and that by adding their experiences to the common data base of human knowledge, maybe, just maybe, someone else can at least benefit from knowing that they are not alone.