After I went home on Saturday, things seemed normal – whatever counts as normal these days. I felt weak and spent most of the time in bed, only appearing occasionally for some meals, to meet certain physiological needs, and to watch an episode of Sherlock on Sunday night. When I had lived in London, I had followed Sherlock, but the last three episodes aired after I left, and I have never had the chance to catch up. Neither the fever nor the shivers returned. It seemed that all was good, or at least on its way toward improvement.
On Monday morning I got a call from the hospital. They had identified the bacterium in my blood. I needed to fight it with intravenous antibodies. The ones I was taking, big pellets not unlike what Maria and her friend are made to swallow in Maria llena de gracia, were no good. I went, on the bus this time and with the bag for seven days. There was not much action in the patient storage area that I had first encountered in February, but things took long. At least the bed was comfortable. Eventually, I was wheeled up to the eleventh floor and then through a door ominously labeled palliative care unit.
The unit was nice, a bit more pleasant than a regular hospital ward, with pictures of flowers on the walls. Everything was calm and relaxed. I got a room all to myself. The nurses are even more attentive than on other wards. They always ask if they can do anything good for me. This sounds almost like a piece out of paradise, but reality is graver. I had just crossed the threshold from being a very sick patient to being a dying man.
For me, this was only a confirmation. It didn’t shock me. I had come to the same conclusion on Saturday. The CT results, the morphine, the hasty release from the hospital left no room for interpretation. Lonsurf was the last drug on the treatment list. Now that it has failed, there’s nothing more to try. I’m out of options.
I had been in a funk about this while I was at home, guessing the number of weeks left to me. It was one more reason not to leave the bed. This is all of no use, obviously. The episode of Sherlock we watched on Sunday made some good points about this. In The Lying Detective, John Watson comes to terms with the death of his wife who died when saving Sherlock from a bullet shot at him. By the end of the episode, Watson accepts that “it is what it is”, and there really isn’t much more to say.
What holds true for the death of your most loved one, holds true for your own death as well. It is what it is, and there is no reason to whine. For me in particular, there’s no reason to whine. I have a privileged life, better than most, with two children who are wonderful, and with a wife who always makes me strive to be, another snippet from the screen, the person she sees in me. (I always fall short.) What if it all ends now?
Everybody has to die. There’s nothing to do about it. Some people die early after short miserable lives. Some people would probably like to be freed from their baneful existences, perilous, drab, without reward. I feel I’m about to go too early. I could fill many more years with exciting activities, and I could continue guiding the little ones in the right direction. But early or late are just details. Everybody has to die.
This was the state of mind I found myself in this morning. Unexpectedly, it turned out a nice day. I finished all of my meals. I spent half the day on a chair and not in bed. I felt better than at any point during the previous seven days or so. Maybe there’s no point blowing the horn of doom too loudly. After all, I’m still alive. The cancer is eating me up from the inside, but there’s still plenty left of me.
0 comments:
Post a Comment