Instead of the oncologist’s APRN, I saw the oncologist yesterday. She explained planned changes to my treatment regimen, beginning with next week’s chemo injections. The negative side effects of the drugs used thus far were largely behind the change. Once I go through the cycle with the new chemo drugs (taxotere and cyramza), options may include clinical trials with other treatments. Because my cancer cannot be cured, the path forward probably will involve ongoing treatments as part of an attempt to keep the disease at bay for as long as possible without making life miserable in the process. I am resigned to that reality, though I am not especially thrilled with it. The certainty is that, ultimately, cancer will win the war; the uncertainty is that the process could take years and years of skirmishes…or it could happen much sooner. Or, of course, I could be killed beforehand in a decisive battle of the Second Civil War or in a grocery store parking lot hit-and-run incident. Predicting the future gets increasingly difficult when there is no reliable guarantee there will be a future. Death is not a purely personal thing; it is a tear in the social fabric, a disruption to the peace and comfort of those who must cope with its aftermath. Life is a temporary eternity, an endless cycle of pleasure and pain whose finish is the permanent erasure of experience. It is hard—maybe impossible—to imagine one’s own death because there is nothing to imagine. These thoughts are not morbid; not in the least. They are simply expressions of a curiosity we can never satisfy.
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Acceptance does not equate to hopelessness. Acceptance acknowledges reality; hopelessness attributes sinister motives to reality. There must be better—and more precise and correct—ways of differentiating between the two, but trying to think of what they are is akin to swimming in a pool of cold molasses.
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Will early November this year bring with it a new Morning in America or will we experience Mourning in America, instead? Or will November ripen into December and rot into January? Will decisions we record at polling places be accepted and respected, or will corruption taint the results? This is the sort of gut-wrenching worry that keeps me awake sometimes or wakes me from fitful sleep. If I were to heed my own advice, I would make plans for responding to circumstances, whatever they are. But when I try to decide what I should do, I get caught up in a battle between fury and fleeing.
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With every episode of Shetland, I am overcome with fernweh. The rugged coastlines, steep cliffs, rolling hills, rock walls along lonely country roads, and relative absence of some of the more hideous examples of greed combine to make me want to be there. I realize, of course, that the series does not accurately depict the islands, but it’s not accuracy I’m after. It’s fantasy. I read that Shetland has had only two murders in the past 50 years, versus at least one per episode on the series. Sometimes I prefer reality to fantasy.
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The morning has grown old; it’s getting close to 8. Hours have slipped by without my notice. Hmm.
