Well, the unexpected has come in my life, yet again!
This time the news is a little more pleasant than last time. Instead of being told I have only a few months to live I have now celebrated one more birthday than I had any right to expect.
I have no idea how others cope with having a terminal illness. My own bizarre way is to accept that I have no choice about it and to hope that God's administration is as faulty as most of the administrations I have worked with here on this planet.
Let us assume for example that there really is a golden book in which all of our names are inscribed when we are born and into which all of our exploits in our lives are added so that on the Day of Judgement our record can be interrogated and an appropriate judgement made.
Now let us assume that the clerks in God's domain are as efficient as those who are here on earth. In that case there is a high probability that his record keeping is less than useful and he has actually discovered that the day of my demise (no doubt written into the book at the very beginning) was somehow overlooked. Like any good functionary he wants to keep his job and so has utilised one of the time honoured tactics of all good bureaucrats and found a way to "cover his arse". In short, there is a good chance that his error may not be discovered for some time. This means of course that my being alive at present is merely a clerical error and I hope that this is ONE clerical error that is not discovered for some time.
Alas, I suspect that God also has auditors and so one day it is likely that the error will be found and I will be for the high jump. Of course there is the remote hope that I can have an opportunity to plead my case and suggest that since I was not dispatched at the correct time it is the clerk who should be punished and not me - so could I please have a new demise date set?
My next hope then is that as on earth so it is in heaven and the bureaucracy will grind exceedingly slowly and I will have yet more time on this mortal coil.
One of the advantages of having reached the status of a sound middle manager in a large bureaucracy I know how to make it function for me. It can be speeded up if you know how and of course it can be slowed down.
In my case it is painfully obvious that what I want to achieve is for the first time in my life to make the bureaucracy as slow and useless as possible as this will be to my advantage.
Let's hope that I succeed, because then you can read more of my diatribes on this subject over time.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Monday, January 03, 2005
Penumonia
One of the most dreaded possibilities that can arise in the treatment of cancer is the possibility of pneumonia.
Advice is provided to patients undergoing radio and chemo therapy that in the event that they feel even the slightest rise in temperature they should get to the emergency ward of nearest hospital.
With chemo and radio-therapy there is a lowering of both the white blood cell levels and also baby white cells called neutrophils. The count can reduce to very low levels which means that the body is really defenceless against even the most minute infections.
In my case I know that I stayed at home between treatments and rarely ventured outside the home to minimise the possibility of catching something. Visitors were restricted during and in between treatments for the time that white cells usually need to recover a ten day period generally.
In spite of this I was silly enough to venture outside into the garden and lay out feed for the wild birds that abound around our home. This simple act of charity during the winter months in a four year drought proved to be my undoing. I managed to get a spore from a bird feather or something that infected my lungs and I was taken down with a rare form of bird pneumonia.
With temperatures fluctuating between 38° and 42° Celsius, ice packs applied to the neck and forehead to reduce the temperatures I spent around ten days hovering between life and death with doctors frantically pumping me full of antibiotics to help me beat the infection. All treatment for the cancer was stopped while we dealt with the more immediate threat to my life.
I have no advice for anyone about what they should do in their own situation. All that I can say is that the realisation that the body is completely defenceless should be known and taken into account in a conscious way.
In my own case - too late of course and with the benefit of 20/20 vision in hindsight, all of the things that I normally take for granted have to be examined with a view to assessing the risk in the new circumstances.
Hopefully there will not be a need to do this again. However a lesson learned is better than one that is forgotten.
Advice is provided to patients undergoing radio and chemo therapy that in the event that they feel even the slightest rise in temperature they should get to the emergency ward of nearest hospital.
With chemo and radio-therapy there is a lowering of both the white blood cell levels and also baby white cells called neutrophils. The count can reduce to very low levels which means that the body is really defenceless against even the most minute infections.
In my case I know that I stayed at home between treatments and rarely ventured outside the home to minimise the possibility of catching something. Visitors were restricted during and in between treatments for the time that white cells usually need to recover a ten day period generally.
In spite of this I was silly enough to venture outside into the garden and lay out feed for the wild birds that abound around our home. This simple act of charity during the winter months in a four year drought proved to be my undoing. I managed to get a spore from a bird feather or something that infected my lungs and I was taken down with a rare form of bird pneumonia.
With temperatures fluctuating between 38° and 42° Celsius, ice packs applied to the neck and forehead to reduce the temperatures I spent around ten days hovering between life and death with doctors frantically pumping me full of antibiotics to help me beat the infection. All treatment for the cancer was stopped while we dealt with the more immediate threat to my life.
I have no advice for anyone about what they should do in their own situation. All that I can say is that the realisation that the body is completely defenceless should be known and taken into account in a conscious way.
In my own case - too late of course and with the benefit of 20/20 vision in hindsight, all of the things that I normally take for granted have to be examined with a view to assessing the risk in the new circumstances.
Hopefully there will not be a need to do this again. However a lesson learned is better than one that is forgotten.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Not a good day
Yesterday was not a good day. It was time to go to another funeral.
A work colleague from Ghana had died over the Christmas break. He had been walking around a shopping centre no doubt engaged in the most normal of activities like that of buying food for the family when he suddenly had a major heart attack, collapsed and died. He was fifty four years old.
He leaves behind a young wife and two children from his current marriage as well as the kids from an earlier marriage and of course other grieving relatives.
This is the second funeral I have attended in recent times and both colleagues were actually younger than I was.
When I developed oesophageal cancer, I thought that I would be one of the first to die and that others would be traipsing out to the cemetery to see my mortal remains being placed into the ground and then go and have a coffee or a drink and perhaps share a few memories about me and then get on with the business of talking about the things that they were really interested in.
It is difficult to attend a funeral when you know that you only have a one in 5 chance of remaining outside the graveyard yourself. As you see your colleague, friend or loved one being lowered into the ground, as you see people gather around the lip of the grave site and pick up and throw the handful of earth onto the coffin, as you hear the kind words of the relevant clergy commenting on the goodness of the person who has passed away, there is a sense of déja vu. This could well be yourself and your attendance just a dress rehearsal for the event to come in your own life when instead of the other person being the focus of attention it will be your own turn.
At the end it is a simple ceremony. The guests all mean well, they all show respect for the deceased by being there and participating in this final farewell. Yet what is there really for them to do? They are merely participants in the conclusion of a journey which ends with a front end loader and a tip truck dropping earth back into the hole into which the corpse has been carefully, reverentially, placed.
"Ashes to ashes, earth to earth, dust to dust" these words are conjured into the memory as yet another person goes and joins the great carbon cycle. Someone, a real person who walked, talked and interacted with you until recently, has gone, to be no more. He has been reduced to the 98% water and a few chemicals from which we are all made and been returned to the cosmos from which he came.
Whether you believe in an afterlife or not, whether you have one form of faith or another or none, the one feeling which steals over you at a time like this, guilty and secret, is contained in the words that you have flippantly stated in the past: "every day above ground is better than one below it." How true those words are, you think. This guilty secret is then carried from the graveyard home. As you hug your loved ones on returning from the funeral you do tend to wonder when it will be your turn and when someone else will have the mixed emotions of being sad about your demise and glad that he/she is still alive.
A work colleague from Ghana had died over the Christmas break. He had been walking around a shopping centre no doubt engaged in the most normal of activities like that of buying food for the family when he suddenly had a major heart attack, collapsed and died. He was fifty four years old.
He leaves behind a young wife and two children from his current marriage as well as the kids from an earlier marriage and of course other grieving relatives.
This is the second funeral I have attended in recent times and both colleagues were actually younger than I was.
When I developed oesophageal cancer, I thought that I would be one of the first to die and that others would be traipsing out to the cemetery to see my mortal remains being placed into the ground and then go and have a coffee or a drink and perhaps share a few memories about me and then get on with the business of talking about the things that they were really interested in.
It is difficult to attend a funeral when you know that you only have a one in 5 chance of remaining outside the graveyard yourself. As you see your colleague, friend or loved one being lowered into the ground, as you see people gather around the lip of the grave site and pick up and throw the handful of earth onto the coffin, as you hear the kind words of the relevant clergy commenting on the goodness of the person who has passed away, there is a sense of déja vu. This could well be yourself and your attendance just a dress rehearsal for the event to come in your own life when instead of the other person being the focus of attention it will be your own turn.
At the end it is a simple ceremony. The guests all mean well, they all show respect for the deceased by being there and participating in this final farewell. Yet what is there really for them to do? They are merely participants in the conclusion of a journey which ends with a front end loader and a tip truck dropping earth back into the hole into which the corpse has been carefully, reverentially, placed.
"Ashes to ashes, earth to earth, dust to dust" these words are conjured into the memory as yet another person goes and joins the great carbon cycle. Someone, a real person who walked, talked and interacted with you until recently, has gone, to be no more. He has been reduced to the 98% water and a few chemicals from which we are all made and been returned to the cosmos from which he came.
Whether you believe in an afterlife or not, whether you have one form of faith or another or none, the one feeling which steals over you at a time like this, guilty and secret, is contained in the words that you have flippantly stated in the past: "every day above ground is better than one below it." How true those words are, you think. This guilty secret is then carried from the graveyard home. As you hug your loved ones on returning from the funeral you do tend to wonder when it will be your turn and when someone else will have the mixed emotions of being sad about your demise and glad that he/she is still alive.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
