AUG 6 — I thought my radiotherapy treatments would have started by now but alas, as The Rolling Stones song goes, “You can’t always get what you want.”
Called up KL General Hospital and was told they don’t have me scheduled yet and even worse, the treatment machine is broken.
I am mildly unhappy about it because the ideal timeframe for my radiotherapy to begin was within 8-12 weeks post-surgery and now it looks like I will miss that window.
Still, I can count my blessings.
I’m continuing my immunotherapy, have already started hormone blockers and those treatments should be enough to reduce my recurrence risk and keep microscopic cancer cells in check for a while.
Doing the numbers on paper I’m still in a good place especially as I did get a pathological complete response (PCR) after surgery and my lymph nodes have also tested negative.
In other news, I tried to pay my bills online last week.
For all of a few minutes I found myself terrified as I had forgotten how to do it.
This was something I did every month or even every few weeks, for decades, but somehow I had forgotten how to do an online transfer.
“What do I do? Where is the button?”
For a very brief moment I understood just why some people get meltdowns over tech, especially if it’s new.
The reality is also this — that a lot of tech, web design included, is just not intuitive.
As someone who learned to use an IBM PC from a very young age, have an IT systems degree, briefly taught IT applications and used to assemble my own desktop PCs, to not know how to do a simple online transaction floored me.
One of my “cancer friends” (as I call them) reached out online and told me this was fairly normal with the disease.
Something people don’t realise is that the mind needs just as much exercise as the body.
I was trying to memorise a list of traditional Chinese characters and could feel my head getting hot.
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s still my being in recovery from a chronic illness, but things that didn’t seem like they needed conscious effort now need more of it.
I’ve gotten a little more mobile in the last couple of weeks but going up and down stairs still involves a lot of hissing and not-so-silent cursing.
Perhaps this delay could be a blessing in disguise.
It does give me time to do more rehab exercises and when I do start radiotherapy perhaps I’ll be less exhausted.
There are still two immunotherapy sessions as well as an echocardiogram to look forward to in August so I guess it’s time to get started on weight training now.
As weakened as my mind and body seem to be I can still hold hope that they will get better and all I need to do is keep waking up, keep trying and getting on with the wondrously mundane business of life.
