A Love Letter To Life
‘I am not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to.’
— ROBBIE WILLIAMS, “Come Undone”
In four days’ time I will receive some news that may affect the trajectory of the entire rest of my life.
Accordingly, I thought I’d provide you — having fallen silent since writing this nearly 3 months ago— with a quickie update of the state of the union, now that the New Year has well and truly begun…
After a delightful family Christmas in Denmark, with all six of us in one place for the key days, and my two brothers Michael & Chris — plus my 89-year-old Uncle Patrick — all able to make pre-Christmas trips over to us too, I resumed my chemotherapy in Copenhagen, then repaired for a week to Kathmandu, where my wife had already been back at work after the new year. (As many of you know, my wife is Danish. As perhaps only some of you know, she is also a four-times Ambassador, working tirelessly for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs now for over 32 years. Currently, she is Denmark’s Ambassador to Nepal. Which is why we live currently in Kathmandu.)
The 4,600 ft-high city, founded nearly two thousand years ago in AD 185, worked its customary restorative magic on me. Add to that: sun, classical music played loud throughout the house, the smiles of the schoolkids in the streets, my library, my desk…and you have all the tools a feller needs for proper (if rapid!) mental and physical restitution.
Just as well — the rapidity, I mean — since just a week later I was already back in Copenhagen being moved back and forth inside a CT scanner.
That was yesterday. The results of that scan will help me with determining a very difficult choice. Difficult, because the side-effects of the past 6 months of chemo treatments — even after just eleven 2-week cycles — have now increased in their ferocity to the extent that, if the coming scan does not show some kind of minor miracle, then I think I am going to need to say “Stop”. There are only so many days of your life that you can spend throwing up ten times a day, and experiencing 24-hour pain intense enough to have my two supervising oncologists suggesting between them everything from Methadone to weed!
The nausea that now accompanies the treatments sucks (and debilitates) to the extent that, to be frank, I think I’d rather die of the cancer than of the chemo.
Which all means that very soon I might well be in physiological freefall. But that doesn’t scare me. I am willing to take my chances. Fifty years of sport still gives me some considerable competitive advantage in the survival stakes. :) Besides, when the Japanese mend broken objects, I am told that they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.
Well I certainly now have a history. Bring on the gold, I say.
Best of all, naturally, would be if I weren’t to die in 2016 at all…nor even before 2020, by which time my beloved daughter would have graduated from university, for example…
There is a made-up piece of jargon among cancer survivors, it’s the word scanxiety — defined as ‘Uneasiness waiting for one’s scans after cancer treatment’. None of us gets out of here alive in the end, of course, and if my time is going to be shorter than I have either wanted or expected for the past 58 years, so be it. It has been quite the rocket-ride, my life.
On Friday we shall learn whether the @jg21 capsule has enough forward momentum still to achieve escape velocity from the killer cancer that is once again stalking me. The six months chemo may have been gruelling, but I have finally stabilised, and may even be able to outrun this thing…not forever, clearly, but for long enough maybe to get a ton of things finished that I am still itching to see through.
Including the simple pleasure of running.
Today, for example, I shall most certainly go (conspicuously slowly!) round all inner Copenhagen’s wonderful lakes — on legs which have lost significant muscle mass in recent months, as have my arms. Not yet skeletal, perhaps, but I am still not 100% certain you’d necessarily still recognise me for sure, without my Conference Chairman ‘uniform’ on, at least.
That is something I can do something about, the loss of lean body mass, I mean. I managed it before after all, in the wake of seven months’ chemo back in 2011. On the occasion of the CT scan yesterday, for example, I decided right afterward to treat myself to a brand new pair of Asics, my trusty foot-companions now for over a decade. (The Danes have a wonderfully stoic saying, ‘Nothing is so bad that it’s not good for something.’ My wife has schooled me well!)
Those new running shoes are my declaration of hope, if you like. Because I am not done yet. I fully intend to go on riding my tricycle until the wheels fall off.
Or, as Hunter S. Thompson said:
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
Amen to that.
