The Old Farmer with Cancer

Sometimes I fantasize/hope that there is a grain (or more) of truth to stories I've read of folks who get dire cancer diagnoses, are told they have only a short time to live, are advised to do a bunch of treatments that will make them ill and gobble up everything they love about their lives until they die, who stare their doctor in the eye, say "Thank you," walk out the door, and proceed to go right back to living their lives the way they've always lived them.

I'm talking about people like the old farmer who isn't about to NOT do what needs to be done on the farm. It's unthinkable to him...nonsense. He doesn't really even ponder the dilemma or think of it as a dilemma. For him there is no choice to be made. He's going to keep right on working, and that's that. End of story. And guess what? He doesn't die as predicted. He lives for several more years, workin' away.

Maybe he does a few things to try and fight the cancer. Folksy things. But he doesn't go for the conventional treatments, doesn't get sucked into the bizarre scenario that has been laid out for him.

I look back, now, on my months of going to the doctor's office three times a week for intravenous IV infusions of Vitamin C. Not a conventional treatment, not chemo, not fraught with awful side effects. BUT the veins in my arm got totally blown out, it became more and more painful every time the needles went in, and on top of that (worse than that) was how my life began to revolve around those visits to the doctor. I became A Patient. I became The Woman Fighting Cancer. I began to lose my sense of myself, who I really was in the world and also in my own heart and mind.

Everything felt surreal and out of joint. I tried to move through it gracefully, tried to enjoy my new relationships with the other people who shared the infusion room with me, tried to accept how my life was so changed.

But in retrospect, now that I have "only" been taking these new creepy drugs at home, I see how disruptive all those IV treatments were. How much I didn't want to make those thrice weekly trips, be there for all those hours, go back home exhausted, my day all messed up. When I try to imagine ever doing that again, every part of me balks. It's almost as if some sort of behavior modification has been done on me, so that whenever someone utters the words "IV infusions" I get sick, like the guy in Clockwork Orange. Only instead of getting violently, physically sick, I get mentally/emotionally sick.

I know that the farmer story probably sounds stupid and unrealistic. Delusional. But I do think there's a grain of truth in there too...somewhere.

 

 

 

Comments

[Jeff]

Thanks for sharing this, Jane -- a good reminder to not become our challenges. I think I've been doing that.

[harlan lewps]

I think the truth is that you never know. And since you don't, you try what seems logical to you at the time. The infusion place seemed a bit sketchy to me but if the situation were reversed I'd have been right there in the chair next to yours. Finding that right piece to the puzzle is a crap shoot but there is a winner in every game of craps so it may as well be you.