Low spirits

Another two weeks have passed.  I’m back in the hospital for the fourth chemo session.  When this week is over, the first third of my second treatment program is history.  I have no idea how it is going.

I’m doing well.  I can’t complain.  I still don’t suffer side effects.  Over the course of the last two weeks, there was nothing to report out of the ordinary, which is one reason why I didn’t blog once.  Another reason is that I didn’t read anything interesting.  The third reason was the hot phase of birthday season.  Oma was in town to celebrate the birthdays of the boy and the boy’s father and, quite spectacularly, her own.  It was a busy week, with lots of activities, laughter, excitement and noise.

Throughout, I felt normal, happy, healthy.  With Oma, I hiked through the snow to a lunch spot at 12’000 feet, a glacier under my feet.  Family time was intense, especially when my sister made an unexpected appearance with her family over the weekend, but it was also good.  We don’t do this often enough.  I have no way of telling how I’m doing beneath all this, inside.

Is the therapy effective?  Is it pushing the cancer back?  Without side effects, it’s easy to think that the therapy doesn’t do anything positive either.  A clinical trial where I made the placebo group wouldn’t feel much different.  But I’m also fasting, and there I see clear effects.  Something is happening inside me.  I’m optimistic enough enough to be sure that I’m beating the cancer.

It is curious how my body has adapted to the fasting.  The second day used to be hard.  I couldn’t think of anything besides food.  I wasn’t hungry but suffered constant cravings.  It wasn’t pretty.  Now the second day is just like the first.  I slowly lose energy but that’s easy to accept.  It’s harder to keep the exhaustion from turning into surrender.  It’s a small step.  It would be so easy and so satisfying to just break the fast.  Sometimes I wonder whether, to put it overly dramatic, giving up a week of life each month is worth it.  There are no guarantees.

Another thing that bothers me about fasting is that I get rather irritable and obnoxious by the end of the second day.  I cease to be a pleasant person to be around.  The children deal with this in their lovely innocent way.  They just make more efforts to make me happy and show me their love.  For Flucha, who is also exhausted after work and housework or after dealing with the children all day, it’s more difficult.  She is almost as stubborn as me.  We end up having fights where we shouldn’t.  This drags my spirits down.  I want to eat again and go back to being the person I know.  This is not always the person I would like to be, but immeasurably better than the fasting caricature of myself.

Overall – and no matter how Flucha suffers from it – these are minor issues.  I also have problems with the solidity of my excretions.  Subsisting on water does that to you.  Again, this is not a big deal.  It resolves itself when I start eating again.  What really matters is that I’m beating this cancer.  For this, I’ll do and endure anything.