GOING IT ALONE AND BLAMING IT ON THE BEER
2900 words / 14 minute read
Admittedly it may be my imagination masquerading as a memory, now we know I had a Trojan Horse sitting in place and pilfering my nutrients - but I think I can pinpoint the day that I first noticed something “was up” because it was a very different type of bellyache to anything I'd had previously, and the beginning of a pattern that would repeat every time there was progression in my symptoms.
I was actually here in Sinville believe it or not, and it was most likely February or early March 2011. I was with a group of friends one evening at a local-style open air roadside eatery and I remember having a nasty ache in my gut, no appetite and my girlfriend offering to go and get me some tiger balm “to make me feel better”. It may well have done (I should try it again come to think of it) but now we know what we're dealing with, it might be a bit like bringing a knife to a showdown with Kim Jong Un.
Because I was so far from home (in every way), the sudden emergence of my symptoms and the fact that they persisted wasn’t as troubling as you might imagine. I was enjoying a very different climate, diet and lifestyle to what I was used to, so I figured changes in bowel habits / sleeping patterns etc could be expected, or at the very least explained away.
Although I have never been someone who craved fruit, in normal life I feel I made up for it with a love of vegetables – unfortunately that's harder to achieve here when you don’t have the means to cook for yourself, don’t find salads particularly satisfying and it's all too easy to order food from the junk end of the nutritional scale.
Of course this meant that I was eating a diet with far fewer of the good things than I was used to, washed down with far more beer and, to top it off, wasn’t doing any exercise - when you add these factors together, it's almost no wonder that my insides weren't themselves.
That changes of course, when you get back home “to civilisation” and find your relationship with the water closet hasn’t improved. Mild alarm bells should be ringing for even the most oblivious male when he finds himself called to visit the lav much more frequently than he really should (and particularly when those calls are sometimes “urgent “ in nature).
(NOTE - although I admit that I am an oblivious male, I didn’t ignore things and went to see a doctor almost immediately on my return. Unfortunately it didn’t go as planned and I wasn’t diagnosed for a further two years, which I shall detail in a future post).
NO CANCER BOYS HERE
Throughout my illness, I have been lucky that neither the cancer nor the treatments inflicted on me have “taken their toll” on the outside and have managed to avoid the hairless, jaundiced look of a cancer victim.
Of course, there have been periods during which my weight has dropped and I have been weaker and more “poorly”. The month or two before I made the Bucket List Business Class trip home certainly qualifies for that category (detailed here) but after the George II surgery, I could fully embrace the “Doughnut Diet” to recover the lost pounds and stones (I took no pleasure from this you understand, when I went back for seconds or shook the empty bag to release all of the sugary goodness trapped within, it was purely at the behest of the doctors who wanted me to regain my strength. The same goes for every ice cream, slice of cake and visit to McDonalds or KFC - all on doctors’ orders).
The ability to gain weight is one of the ways I can use to guess just how deeply Olga has her claws in me - if she was sucking all of the goodness from my food and leaving me looking more like a follower of the “Death Camp Diet” (the Doughnut Diet’s companion book), that would be cause to worry.
Likewise as they discuss here, another sign that we are heading into the endgame would be if my appetite disappeared completely, although (to continue the Chess analogy) despite knowing that she is already victorious, I’m not about to concede and make it easy for her - I'm going to drag the game out by forcing the bitch to make as many moves as possible to get her checkmate.
DON'T BLAME IT ON THE BEER
Very early on, when I was first showing symptoms, they were easy to ignore and the decline was so gradual that I just got on with things and didn't allow it to slow me down or get in the way of living my life. The symptoms in those early stages were relatively gentle, so it was very easy to blame how I felt on what I’d been eating and drinking.
In fact I actually thought it was the brand of beer that I had switched back to on my return to the UK that was the cause of my “runny guts”. This is despite also feeling that way when I was abroad - conveniently easy to forget such facts and make excuses instead.
This didn't change anything of course - like the creatures of habit we all are, I carried on doing what I'd always done, working, partying, exercising and eating and drinking just the same, totally unaware that Olga even existed and was working against me (literally) from the inside.
I had joined a running club that autumn and really got the bug, growing progressively more committed throughout 2012, training constantly and dramatically improving both the length and speed of my runs.
I would enter races, giving me the chance to get out of town and into the English countryside for some self-administered weekend fresh air and punishment. But much like the occasion when I was in pain after an op (but didn’t complain), only to find out later that the morphine drip wasn’t connected properly, I was not aware that running didn't have to be as hard as it was for me, thanks to Olga.
Anyway, I was as new to long distance running as I was to bowel cancer, so as far as I knew these gut problems were normal and something that everybody had to put up with when pounding out such excessive mileage week after week.
One race morning I had woken up with trapped wind thanks to my uninvited house guest, which didn’t improve despite taking pills and remedies as well as numerous WC visits whilst still in civilisation since I knew that there would be no facilities out in the woods at the start line, and I sure as hell wasn't going to stop once the race had started.
This meant I was forced to run the whole 12 miles with evil stomach cramps thanks to Olga, as well as the constant real fear that the gas that finally seemed to want to find its way out of my abdomen might bring some liquid with it.
Thankfully this was no London Marathon, so I wouldn't have been subject to the embarrassment of thousands of spectators seeing the brown streaks of evidence left behind if I'd risked it and my worst fears had been realized.
But running up and down hills in a competitive fashion for a good hour and a half or so is hard enough without Olga and my own bloody-mindedness conspiring to force additional pain and suffering on me - although it did give me a theory about my competitors: the reason that people pull such alien and bizarre pained faces when they're running is that, like me that day, they’re also struggling with whether to risk letting out the fart. Adding brown streaks to your shorts is not a good look on anyone.
But alas, whilst I'm sure it's true on occasion, it's sadly unlikely to be the root cause of all those gurning faces. And that I thought that my cancer symptoms could be a side effect of long distance running or my choice of beer shows how long it took me to start accepting that I was no longer a normal person.
Anyone who has ever tried to control their thought processes, for instance resetting their “internal monologue” to remove negative self-talk or being habitually reminded of a past situation you’d rather forget, will know that it’s tough (but not impossible) to break down those triggers.
By consciously reminding and resetting yourself when you catch yourself thinking those thoughts, you start to form a whole new habitual unconscious train of thought, bit by bit, in place of the old one.
Of course, the more deeply ingrained the habitual thinking is, the more work that has to be done to remove the old programming. And this is not some weird brainwashing technique or anything like that. The aim here is to substitute a path of thought which doesn’t help you with one that does.
This is equally true when coming to terms with any kind of change in circumstance. This doesn’t necessarily have to be anything as dramatic as my situation - say your knee flares up for the umpteenth time from overdoing it at the gym, that’s your body telling you that you are repeatedly requesting something that it can't deliver - or, as someone once wittily remarked, “your ego is writing checks your body can't cash”.
Why has the conscious brain not caught up with the body? Probably a combination of the pain in the ass of having to replace your gym programme with a new regime, combined with the fact that by doing so you feel like you are giving in to whatever it is that ails you.
The good news is that most changes in circumstance only require your acceptance followed by a small change in behaviour and you should be back on the right track. Keep doing what you’ve always been doing and you will be repeatedly and masochistically punished.
I had no idea of this of course when I started out on the Odyssey. As I’ve written elsewhere, throughout my treatment I continued working and partying as normal and all this “normality” meant people treated me just the way I wanted by and large: those that were aware of my situation reacted to me as they would anyone else, as did those that had no reason to suspect there was anything wrong.
Sounds like a win/win? Yes and no: by wrapping myself in this self-deception and projecting it to the world as effectively as I did, it was like I created a weird “Body Snatcher” situation - outwardly I was a “normal person”, with a full time job and a life outside work, but shadow me for a day and you’d have seen me leading a double life.
You’d have found that as well as the 50 hours a week I needed to spend at the office to be effective at my job, I had taken on an additional part time position at the hospital (or may as well have, the amount of time I was there).I was also managing the daily pain and discomfort of my symptoms and to top it all off, spending a whole day every two weeks stuck in a comfy chair being pumped full of drugs that made me feel worse.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that no one saw what I had to do each week and the pressure I put myself under. By my own choice, no one was making the dash to the hospital with me, only to wait around for an hour past my allotted appointment time for a ten minute consultation before running back to the office to pick up where I left off, so how could I expect them to understand?
The same could be said for my girlfriend at the time, who was very supportive in the early days of my illness. We had only been together for a couple of months when I was diagnosed and she was fantastic at first, coming with me and my parents to early oncology appointments, and even took a day's leave to spend with me when I went to my first chemo.
But this arriving mob-handed to appointments really doesn’t suit a selfishly independent soul like me, so once I was happy that my girlfriend and my parents were comfortable with the setup and knew what I was looking at in terms of surgery and chemo I was more than happy to go it alone.
That seemed like the ideal setup at the time, but we had no idea just how often I would be expected at the hospital and the repercussions of removing the reality of my time there from everybody in my life.
This meant that no-one had any idea of the level of plate spinning that had to go on for me to maintain normality.
What I thought was being "strong" and "independent" was really turning away from the world, which meant I created an extra-masochistic "cat o'nine tails" style rod for my own back.
On the face of it, I was coping just fine - and I really was, because I bought into the charade, though at a cost to my stress levels and then in turn, my relationships.
Had I been willing to feel and show vulnerability, people would have been much more comfortable to offer help and support.
This would have been a big change to make for me - the shields that cover any vulnerability have been there for a long time and, though they have perhaps become more translucent in recent years, they are still strong and difficult to break through.
MOANING IS A FORM OF COMMUNICATION TOO, IT SEEMS
Instead, I was taking it all on alone and not even sharing any frustrations with colleagues or my girlfriend since I’m not a “natural moaner”. This of course means unfortunately that when the mask slipped, the pent up stress would affect my dealings with others.
If on the face of it, everything's normal and then I behave in a manner that's incongruent, expecting you to understand the reasons behind my actions, be able to grasp immediately what the real issue is before moving straight to handing me a free pass is somewhat unrealistic.
This is particularly true when it came to the relationship with my girlfriend. She also had a stressful job but she struggled to leave it behind when she left the office. It always used to surprise me that she would allow that to negatively affect her mood when she was with me, as you would imagine she would want to be supportive, considering the extra stress that I was under - but now I realise I was expecting too much, since that part of my life was effectively hidden from her.
As I keep saying, the world can only respond to you based on the clues that you give it, since nobody can read minds. And since I don’t naturally moan and complain, so wasn’t even sharing my day to day stresses with people, how could they be expected to keep up, let alone offer help and support when I needed it?
In a perfect world, once we have an epiphany (or even have some kind of breakthrough in therapy, if that’s your thing), then that would be the end of that negative chapter of your life and everything will be effortlessly different going forward, now that you’re aware of your issue the destructive forces are no longer a threat.
Unfortunately for us real world dwellers, this is harder to put into practice - there’s a reason for the many idioms to pick from to describe our issue - leopards and spots, tigers and stripes, old dogs and new tricks etc but as I wrote above, by consciously making the effort to change our thinking we can make use of this new knowledge to adapt our behaviour when faced with that challenge in the future.
I wanted to feel and be treated “normally”, so part of the reason for keeping the mask in place was to maintain the self-deception of normality. It would have been scary to accept the reality, but on the plus side, I would have gained the sympathy and support of those close to me, which in retrospect would have easily made up for that.
But I didn't know this at the time and it's wonderful what the space and time coming to a place like Sinville can do for one’s perspective.
This new “wisdom” could lead to beating myself up for not working it out before - but I didn't have the luxury of two years of seaside navel gazing to draw on back then. And that's the important thing to remember: any decision you ever make is based on the information that you have at the time, so don’t regret those choices later when you have the benefit of additional info.
In other words, don't beat yourself up if “Present You” would make a different choice from the one that “Past You” made - you're just better informed now, that's all.
Thank you as ever for reading and keeping up with my musings - much more on the way so do check back regularly (or have the email alerts do it for you!).
Much love
Stage-4-In-Sinville
theccconline.blogspot.com
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