MARCH 18 — I had my latest echocardiogram yesterday.
My immunotherapy drug Herceptin has a known side-effect of increasing the risk of heart failure, causing cardiac issues in every one out of four patients.
It is why taking regular heart scans is part of my cancer treatment protocol.
The good news is that my heart seems to be ticking steadily on, with no marked reduction of heart function nor were any abnormalities detected.
It is my last hospital appointment in the Hospital Kuala Lumpur specialist building.
I can’t deny I’m relieved because it means I no longer need specialist care for my cancer.
After this, it will just be regular monitoring and checking-in with the oncology department so if recurrence should happen (pray it won’t) I won’t be caught off-guard.
The Lord of the Rings films are screening again and last week I watched The Two Towers and again, Bernard Hill’s turn as King Theoden still moved me as much the first time.
“No parent should have to bury their child,” he said, playing a king recently woken from madness to find his only son has died before he could say goodbye.
It was a line that wasn’t in the original script, as the trilogy aficionados will tell you — Hill had heard it from a parent who had lost their child during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I have not been a particularly good or attentive daughter; too wrapped up in my own personal struggles and hampered by the distance between where I live now and where I was born.
What I will not do is let my parents bury me; as imperfect as I am if I can spare them that one sorrow, to at the very least outlive them both I don’t think that is too much to give.
I say this not because I think I am particularly “strong” or “special” in surviving cancer.
It is because not long ago I said I wouldn’t bother seeking treatment if I had it because I knew it was tedious and expensive.
Yes, it certainly was.
The whole cancer experience is like being taken apart and put back together, beaten down to the point you don’t think you could get up again.
Yet you learn you can.
Being confronted with life’s fragility means you get a little less hung up on hypothetical futures.
Five-year, 10-year plans? I only think about short term plans and bucket lists.
Like watching the final movie in the LOTR trilogy later this week.
One of the interesting bits in Tolkien’s lore is that death is considered a gift bestowed upon humans; and yet humans resent the elves for being immortal.
Elves live long lives but that also means eternities to mourn, grieve and suffer. In JRR Tolkien’s mythos there is a weariness and sorrow where being an elf means that while you remain (mostly) the same, you watch the world and its people change around you.
That uncertainty of how many days you have yet to live and knowing that all things, including your life, must end makes each day more precious.
These particular lines from Tolkien’s Two Towers are particularly poignant for me these days:
“Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the harp on the harp string, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
The world is burning and war festers, children dying if not from hunger, from shelling.
Would that I could with one giant hand destroy all weapons of war but that is a fantasy — in this reality all I can do is bear witness.
So I will live because my heart has refused to give up on me, as have the people in my life, I will live, because life is not guaranteed, not even for a millisecond.
Death will come when it is ready without even the courtesy of setting an appointment.
So in the meantime I will be busy with the business of living a full life, with a full heart.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
