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The Cancer Diaries, Part 7

I don’t want readers to think I’m being narcissistic in writing these posts about my cancer or how it has affected me. Sure, I can be accused of being all sorts of things for writing my other posts, and a narcissist is the least of them. I’m sharing these because I felt — I hoped —others might benefit from my experiences: men and their partners. I think partners (be they men or women) should be as fully informed and engaged about what happens and what to expect as the patient.

I found a lot of medical and pseudo-medical (read: quack) advice and descriptions online about prostate cancer, symptoms, and its treatment, but not much of a personal nature. Maybe I didn’t search far enough, but what I wanted to read was what it meant to the person who received the diagnosis and the treatment. How does it feel to wake up every day and look in the mirror, knowing you have cancer? What goes through a person’s mind as they get wheeled into surgery? Or sit for hours in a thin hospital gown, among strangers, awaiting treatment? How should I prepare for these events?

Knowing the technical details and the biology was, of course, important, but how it affected a life in progress mattered equally or more to me. So I decided to post my own.

I’ve tried to document my experiences and emotions in these posts as honestly and openly as I can. It isn’t easy: I’m unaccustomed to writing for the public about myself and the details of my life except in a somewhat removed or neutral manner (like my posts on shaving or my reading). I am normally a very private person when it comes to my body and was reluctant to even mention the diagnosis to close friends and relatives at first. I was raised with the typical inhibitions of a suburban, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon family, and we didn’t talk about body parts, especially those related to sex. Admittedly, that was a long time ago — the Fifties and Sixties often seem like another world, imagined in a book or movie, rather than lived — but the reluctance to do so now remains.

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The Cancer Diaries Part 1

I should have started this a while ago. Perhaps when I received the first news something as wrong. But it took a while to really sink in. And then it was upon me. Although this is personal, I wanted to share it, in the hope others might find it useful.

There’s a psychological process called the Kübler-Ross model, or the Five Stages of Grief, which is often applied to cancer and other diseases, but at least for me, it didn’t work that way. Her stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. But for me, the first thing was a sense of betrayal.

Yes, betrayal: how can my body let me down like this? I have treated it well for all these decades – okay, not I haven’t been worshipful, but reasonably respectful. I haven’t smoked or eaten mammals for almost 50 years, and I watch what I eat and drink (little junk or processed foods). I don’t drink alcohol to excess, don’t drink liquid sugar (aka soda pop), don’t do drugs. I walk a lot – several kilometers a day usually – and keep my mind active. I keep my teeth in good condition and get a checkup annually. Surely all that should have counted for something.

But the tests don’t lie. My PSA was elevated. Frighteningly so. My body, or at least on part of it, betrayed me.

Not that I really should have been surprised. My father and his father both had prostate cancer. I am third generation and the likelihood of me getting it has always been very high if not a certainty. In hindsight, I wish I could have spoken to my father about it, sought his wisdom, but by the time I learned of it, he was already dying of another cancer.

I had a warning about it several years back when I had non-cancerous prostate problems and minor corrective surgery. I didn’t go through denial after that, or any of the stages as I recall, just hoped it had cured the problem. After all, modern medicine cures so much else.

Apparently not everything.

After betrayal came resignation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Of dictionaries, memories, and friends

Johnson's DictionaryWhen a copy of this selection from Samuel Johnson’s famous dictionary arrived last week, I was delighted, and immediately reminded of my late, and well-loved friend, Bill. He would have appreciated the book, chuckled over Johnson’s witty definitions, delighted in the words at play. We would have sat around the kitchen counter, alternately reading random definitions from the book, in between sips of wine.

Like every good writer I’ve ever known, Bill loved words, puns, wit, and the interplay of language.

Sadly, Bill died of esophageal cancer late last year, the same cancer that took my father a few years earlier. A nasty, painful, flesh-wasting disease.  Because of that, Bill and I never got to sit down and share our thoughts about this book over a glass of wine, as we had done many times over many different books, before. I saw him a couple of weeks before his death, as he lay, bedridden, in palliative care. A thin shadow of the man who used to come up for long weekends to spend time with us.

Bill was a passionate reader and we shared many books and interests in common; especially those on Napoleonic and English history. He had a passion for British naval history, and Jane Austen’s life and times, and he was a fount of knowledge about the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He could quote Shakespeare, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Austen. He introduced us to numerous BBC dramas, comedies, and specials, and he was generous in lending his DVDs of them. He had a musical streak and we played guitar and ukulele together. And, of course, he loved words.

I was reading through this book the other night, and wondered how Johnson himself felt about friendship and death. James Boswell was his biographer, friend and companion late in his life, but did they share the same sort of closeness as I had with Bill? Boswell went off on a trip to Scotland when Johnson was sick, and was away when the latter died, in 1784. How did Johnson feel about Boswell’s absence, or Boswell and being so far away when his friend died?

Boswell’s comment on hearing of the death was, “He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.” I felt similarly, when Barbara, Bill’s wife, called to tell me of passing, last year. And I felt relieved, not that he was gone, but that his suffering was finally over. I am not ashamed to admit I cried at the news.

I’d known Bill since the late 1970s-early ’80s, back when we both worked on InfoAge magazine, years even before I met Susan. Many the evening back then we stayed up late and talked, sometimes argued, and drank our wine while playing chess, go, or some wargame – at which he almost always won. He was the smartest, funniest man I ever met and my time with him – our time, really, since he was a friend to both of us – was precious.

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Rest In Peace, Mary Chadwick

Mary Chadwick and Hannah, 94th Birthday partyMary Mabel Bernice Chadwick passed away quietly in the morning of April 13, 2015 in her room in the Tony Stacey Veterans’ Care Centre. She had awakened that morning, and spoke briefly to staff, but nodded off shortly after. She never awoke.

She was 95 years old and lived a full, rich life, one of remarkable resilience and strength.

Mary was born shortly after WWI, and grew up in Canada during the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and the years of recovery that followed. But then war came back.

Mary Chadwick, veteran, 89She was a young woman when WWII broke out. She soon followed the family tradition of service. In 1942, she volunteered, and served the rest of the war as a Wren (WRNS – Women’s Royal Navy Service, nicknamed Wrens) in Halifax; a nurse in the naval hospital. Her wartime experiences would build her character and help her survive her own life’s tragedies.

Mary was always proud of her veteran status. Her father was a naval veteran of WWI, and her two brothers, Billie and Doug, had joined the Canadian navy early in the war. Twenty-two-year-old Billie died at sea in 1943 when his ship, the destroyer St. Croix, was torpedoed while escorting a convoy in the North Atlantic.

Mary had a framed picture of them both, young men in their Navy uniforms, on her wall in her room, each adorned with a red poppy. She never forgot, and she attended Remembrance Day ceremonies every year.

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