End of the world

How preposterous is it to wallow in one’s own misery, misery that is not particularly painful or particularly acute?  How preposterous is it to contemplate self-pity when others have clearly got it much worse.  Does any one cancer register in the grand scheme of things?  Does it deserve any attention, even from the patient, when children die of hunger or cities of millions are quarantined to contain a poorly characterized but rapidly spreading virus?

I’m not particularly driven towards introspection, but sometimes I think more questions – and a record of the answers – would be quite helpful.  As I near the end of my seventh chemo session, the symptoms, weak throughout, are further receding.  Tomorrow morning, I expect them to be gone.  But what reason do I have to expect anything?

Two weeks on, I cannot recall details of the previous session.  Fatigue is the only thing that comes to my mind.  The session before that, anchored in my memory by the coincidence with Christmas, appears equally blank.  I was dead-exhausted, but don’t remember any suffering.  I slept everything off, though it took a few days.  Were there other symptoms?  I keep a blog but quickly forget what I write, and what I write is highly incomplete.

This session, I didn’t feel exhausted but just a little bit tired.  It didn’t hold me back in any way.  More serious was the digestive turmoil.  It kept me close to the toilet and alert to signals from my gut.  I ate all right and with an almost normal appetite.  The extraction of nutrients probably worked fine, but the ejection of waste products proceeded rather inconsistently.

Tonight, the upheaval seemed over.  Time to sit down for a movie and eat some treats.  I turned on Netflix to find a program to match my patchy health and the current state of the world where panic starts to be deemed a sensible response to outrageous events.  The Plague, a Spanish show, isn’t available in Switzerland yet.  Contagion has lengths in its third quarter that rule it out for a workday evening.  All other pandemic films and series seemed just a tad too dispiriting to merit consideration.  What good is the end of the world if you can’t have a good laugh?  Might as well read the news.

In March, I’m supposed to travel to China to visit partners, customers and leads.  The new coronavirus out of Wuhan doesn’t seem particularly virulent, and we have no business there.  And yet, I’m having second thoughts.  The virus pounces on people with weak or weakened immune systems – children, the elderly and the sick.  I might not like it or even believe it, but this puts me squarely in its target.  Given the current situation, this trip would not be wise and will probably not take place.  Another two chemotherapy sessions, with unspecified side-effects, seem much more appealing, even though all I do is expect nothing at all.