Cancer Journal 32, 2019 and Mindless Rage

I’ve still not gotten my bearings with respect to when, after my chemo treatments, I will crash. Perhaps every post-treatment regimen follows the same pattern, but my chemo-brain can’t seem to discern and remember the pattern. This time, it seems that I was pretty beat on Wednesday after the Monday treatment. Or was it Thursday? Or Friday? Or all the above. Yesterday, Friday, I felt pretty decent for at least part of the day. I got out and about a little. A trip to the grocery store and the post office and Walgreen’s (the latter to get a passport photo made). But was that an “up” day after a “down” day? I don’t know. I just don’t remember. Today, though, I started the day decidedly “down.” And I ended yesterday the same way. By 9:00 p.m., I was absolutely wiped out; I went to be and went to sleep quickly, awakening only around midnight and 4:00 a.m. to pee. Then, I was awake around 7:00 a.m., but only enough to crawl out of bed and into my recliner, where I stayed in a state of semi-consciousness until 10:00 a.m. I’m awake and up now, but not entirely alert and conscious. If I continue to feel halfway decent, we’ll go to our church’s St. Patrick’s Day dinner of corned beef and cabbage, starting around 5:00 p.m. If I’m still feeling worn to a frazzle, my wife will go with her sister, instead. And I will vegetate. We’ll see. We still have five hours left before I have to decide whether I can remain upright and alert during dinner.

Once again, my oncologist apparently failed to post the results of my most recent blood work on her company’s health portal. So, I have no idea what the blood work from a week ago last Thursday revealed. I wonder whether the doctor looked at it. Oddly, when I had my chemo treatment on Monday, the nurses didn’t take blood. Normally (the three times before), the did. Oh, well. I’m just placing my life in her hands and I’m sure she would not neglect to do her work. Hmm.

“My life in her hands” seems so utterly meaningless this morning, as I think of yesterday’s monstrous mass killings in Christchurch, New Zealand. The idea that a madman, a racist xenophobe, could decide he had the right to take the lives of dozens of people he didn’t even know, simply because of their religion or their culture or his perception that they were “taking over” his culture is nothing short of mind-numbing. I have no trouble this morning thinking people like him should be sought out, put in chains, and beat until their brains spill onto the ground next to their lifeless bodies. That’s not the solution, obviously, but it might quell the likelihood of such attacks. If “decent” society were to simply rebel against this madness with an equal or greater degree of madness, it might put a stop to such killings. If nothing else, it might satisfy the thirst for revenge I know I should not feel but, nonetheless, do. I cannot even imagine the horrible agony going through the minds of the families and friends of the people who were killed and injured in yesterday’s attacks. Ach! I have no sympathy, no empathy, no compassion for the guy responsible for the attacks. I don’t care how he felt, I don’t care whether he felt his precious white culture was under attack. He deserves to be stabbed repeatedly with a pitch fork, the person doing the stabbing taking great care only to injure him badly, not to kill him. Rage bubbles up like a fountain.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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2 Responses to Cancer Journal 32, 2019 and Mindless Rage

  1. I will try to have a little more than my usual patience, Bev. Come to think of it, I may need to try for even more, since I rarely have any!

  2. bev wigney says:

    It may take awhile to begin to get rid of the fatigue. You’ve just finished a pretty aggressive regimen of concurrent radiation and chemo. The general thinking in concurrent treatment is that one actually boosts the effects of the other, which is why it is considered to be more effective, but also more difficult to slog through. The other thing is that it takes awhile to begin to rebound as the “work” of the treatments is still going on days after a treatment. Then your body has to heal – make new “good” cells that got blasted along with the bad ones. The best thing you can do for yourself is to rest, eat well, and when you’re up for it, begin to work on rebuilding your strength. The fatigue you are feeling is just a sort of external manifestation of what’s going on inside. I liken it to being a battlefield. Anyhow, I guess all I can say is “have patience”.

    And, yes, I hear you on the NZ massacre. Such a terrible event and makes me feel rage toward who are egging on the kind of hatred that infects the minds of the xenophobic racists. We can’t do that much about individual nutcases, but we *can* do something about those who whisper hatred into their ears.

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