A few of the things that cancer taught me
Eat right, exercise, and die anyway.
Hey, folks,
It’s the penultimate day of 2023, an arbitrary mark on the calendar that reflects the very real truth of time’s great spiral. The wheel turns, the seasons change, the galaxy spins on its mighty axis across the sky—
One is prone to waxing philosophical at this time of the year, and to compound the problem I’ve been going through a series of very frustrating side effects (pain and malaise and fatigue) that are linked to side effects of my anti-cancer-recurrence drugs. And sadly, all the other drugs I might possibly take have the same side effects but even worse, so other than what my rheumatologist, massage therapist, and acupuncturist can do for me (which is something at least) I’m just stuck with it for the next three years, which is the minimum course of treatment on top of the two I have done already.
On some level it’s good to know that my sense that I have been gradually turning into a toadstool for two years and that I feel like I’m getting through my days in cement shoes isn’t just me being lazy, but I would be lying if I said that the prospect of three more years of feeling like crap most of the time wasn’t just a little daunting.
Anyway, I am feeling better than I was, which is something, and I’m hoping that the general positive trend with my current treatment plan continues for a while. It’s hard when all the things one used to do for fun become onerous obligations you kind of have to gut your way through because they need to be done.
Anyway, year-end musing and all these doctor appointments led me to realization that because of cancer and all the post-treatment sequelae I’ve been dealing with, I have lost the sense that I have much control at all over my body, how it functions, or what I can and cannot do in any given circumstance. Eat right, exercise, and die anyway—to quote another t-shirt. It’s arbitrary what happens to one, and every morning when I take the pill that (hopefully) keeps my cancer from coming back, I am confronted with a medieval-style memento mori. Remember that thou art mortal.
Trust me, brother, I know.
The body needs nearly as much maintenance as the old house we live in. Which is plenty, and new maintenance needs keep piling up on top of the old ones. Life is a tower defense game, or something.
The thing is, of course, that coming face to face with that lack of control and the arbitrariness of it all doesn’t remove the need for me to take care of myself. I still have to eat well, exercise, rest, brush my teeth and cut my toenails and the rest of it, because the undeniable fact that life and death is arbitrary doesn’t remove the equally undeniable fact that we have some agency over outcomes. Just not as much agency as we would like, or that the American cult of personal accountability for health care would like us to believe. (See previous rock about judging because we are scared.)
There’s roughly a 50% chance any given sixty year old will live to be 90*, apparently, and it’s a complicated emotional equation to balance the sense of one’s own mortality with the need to plan for another forty years of existence. Just in case! Pretty good odds! But don’t count on it!
So that’s one of the things cancer taught me. It taught me that I don’t have control—but I have to act like what I do matters. Because it does matter.
So I have to drag myself out for regular walks to keep my blood pressure down even if I’m fucking exhausted all the time and it feels like the clock is ticking away on the years I could expect to be in reasonably good health while I, a toadstool, take my pills like a good little cancer survivor who doesn’t want the fucker to come back. Anyway, three years isn’t that long. The better care I take of myself now, the better shape I will be in to stage whatever level of comeback I can in 2027.
Most of life is fighting entropy, it turns out. Kicking the old can down the road, until either you run our of road or you stop kicking.
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*a cursory google did not turn up the stats for a fifty year old but let’s assume I have a decent chance of making sixty, because I have pets to take care of.