Blood test for new PSA numbers is done (last Monday) and the results won't come up until probably next Monday. I've got an appointment set with the Main Doc for Tuesday the 30th, but maybe he'll give me a call when the results come in. Maybe not. Waiting for someone to tell you what's going to be next in your life is a large part of cancer. Test results -- blood tests, scans, x-rays -- you get through all this by learning not to focus on things that will determine the immediate and long term course of your life because to do so is not good for your mental health.
And that's what I've done for four months now -- try somehow to balance intensively working on my health every day with actively trying to not expect to have any outcome from this activity. Because it's the expectation of results (any results or especially particular results) that drives you nuts. Of course, this strategy also involves a certain amount of mental dissociation from what's actually happening in your life and this is not healthy unto inself either, but this is part of the balancing act that is called "Living with Cancer".
I'm learning that the mental health part of this cancer thing has more parts and layers to it than just dealing with the fact that you might die a horrible messy death in x number of days or weeks or months or years. You also get to do all sorts of mental gymnastics just to keep yourself functional enough so that you can avoid collapse and this particular end won't happen before it's really time to go. This is all part of the fun.
Lately, friends response to my expressions that this whole cancer thing has put a new spin on my thoughts about mortality has been that they totally understand that we all have a limited time because they have been touched in some way by death. It's true that you can't really get though life without confronting death of others if you're paying attention, but it's qualitatively different when it's your condition that you're focussed on day after day and the pressure of this never goes away. Or when you have to constantly and actively put your health out of your mind as much as you can because you're waiting for the next test or scan results and to focus on things that you can't do anything about, even things that will determine the immediate quality of life or if you will actually have a life at all, will just drive you over the edge of place where you've camped out living your life every day -- waiting and trying to make the most of the time that you have, however long that is.
This is one of the great lessons that cancer drives home -- the focus on waiting and not waiting for death and trying to make the most of the fact that it hasn't shown up yet. I can write about it here and we can philosophize about it. But can we actually do it?
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