FEBRUARY 11 — Next week is my final immunotherapy treatment.
Annoyingly as I write this I am ill; nothing serious, just my sinuses and immune system colluding in making me miserable.
The sensation of feeling like I am drowning in snot is unpleasant.
Yet there is still so much left to do — a kitchen that needs reorganising, racks that need assembling (once a broken part replacement arrives), a backyard that needs tending, a guitar that needs refurbishing and restringing — and my to-do list grows ever longer.
Lunar New Year is also around the corner; I tend to spring clean three times at the beginning of the year, once at New Year, before Li Chun (the coming of Spring) and before Lunar New Year.
Then for the rest of the year I let the dust bunnies form secret societies in every corner of my house before I begin the cycle anew.
I am also doing some long-form writing in my spare time but it seems I must take a break from that as well and spend more time walking and napping instead.
The body will make demands and I would do well to listen even if there seems to be too many things that need doing.
Satan, or the annoying stray ginger tom that heralds his arrival with loud yowls multiple times a day, has learned to quiet down a little.
He no longer screams at midnight or right around when I am about to fall asleep so I have been dozing a little better.
My body is aching and stiff, things I could remedy by moving more and gasp, exercising, but being ill puts a dampener on things.
I fear the Universe is conspiring to turn me into a gigantic angry marshmallow.
While I write this in good humour now, just last week I was drowning in as much sadness as I am now struggling with phleghm.
I thought I was coming into my cancer journey with my eyes wide open.
Yet no matter how much I read, prepared or how I steeled myself for what was coming, there was always something that caught me off-guard.
I’d seen so many stories, heard them personally from my “cancer friends” about the toll the disease can take on your mind.
Glibly I thought that I’d endured so much already in this life — how different would this sadness be in comparison?
I learned that this was the equivalent of standing on the edge of a beach at high tide thinking that you can easily take the waves coming at you just because you know they’re coming.
You can dig deep into the sand, close your eyes, brace as much as you want but you won’t know how you will endure until the water finds you.
Yet the paradox here is that this raging sea of emotion that is called grief is inside, not out.
You can no more run from the waves of your own feelings than you can reach into your chest to take out your still-beating heart.
I tried to fight the sadness and yet it came for me anyway, unrelenting and inescapable like the waves when you stand at the meeting of sand and sea.
As I near the end of my cancer journey you would think I would be overjoyed.
Instead the sadness finds me over and over again.
Perhaps I am grieving, belatedly, for all the things that have changed.
I remember looking at myself a day or so after I’d had my head shaved and thinking, “Oh, I am so ugly.”
These days I still look into a mirror at most once a week and take a selfie once a month because it’s hard looking at the face and body ravaged by age and the indignities of chronic illness.
Yet I am thankful that my body did its best despite having such a melancholic and easily tired master.
I am still at the end of it all more grateful than I am grieving but for now I’d just like to stop coughing, please.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
