TheBanyanTree: Cancer Lessons

[Monique Colver]

First of all, I have never had cancer, or anything remotely similar. I have
had my share of owies and sinus infections that won't go away, but none of
that is on par with being told I have something that's incurable, something
that can kill me sooner rather than later. But just because I don't have
experience with such a thing doesn't mean I can't offer advice to those who
do. I'm quite good at giving advice on subjects I know nothing about.
Fortunately, there are far more subjects I know nothing about than subjects
I do know anything about, so that still gives me a world of possibilities. 
	One of today's lessons was: When you have cancer and you've been
told there's nothing they can do to fix it, there are certain social
obligations and rituals that no longer apply. For example, say our patient
was being called repeatedly by a quasi-friend. She means well, this friend,
and she was upset that our patient hadn't told her sooner, but left it to
his ex-wife. Whatever. She got over it. But this friend is a naturopath and
keeps pushing a plethora of life saving natural products at our patient when
she calls him. In theory, we're not opposed to life saving natural products,
and she's certainly welcome to send along anything she might want, but he's
not stopping chemo to go on a natural health mission. I asked him if he
minded her natural pill pushing, and he said, "Not really," but then said he
was being polite, listening to her spiels. I then informed him that being
polite is not something he needs to worry about. 
	"It's not?" he asked. 
	"Certainly not," I replied. "There are advantages to your current
condition, one of them being, you don't have to be polite to anyone at all
if you don't want to. You just do whatever is best for you, and anyone who
doesn't like it can go jump in the lake." (I didn't specify which lake
because there are numerous lakes to choose from, and we don't really care
which one they choose.) 
	"Oh," he replied, as if he'd never considered such a notion. Of
course he hadn't. He's very polite, and hasn't yet realized that now people
should be doing whatever they can to make him happy, and he can forget about
making other people happy. 
	If I had my way, cancer patients would get to do whatever they
wanted, which would of course result in chaos and the downfall of
civilization, but everything else seems to be driving us in that direction,
so why not?
	Anyway. I also instructed him today that though he feels like he's
doing nothing because his time is spent, well, not doing anything but
resting because he's so exhausted all the time, or nauseous, or something,
he is doing something, and it is the one and only job he has right now, and
it's a very important one.
	"Oh," he said, "What?"
	"Taking care of yourself and letting other people take care of you.
That's all that matters right now, and it's a full time job, so just do that
and don't worry about what anyone else is doing. Unless it's infringing on
your rights to do whatever you want, of course." 
	"I guess I'm doing it right then," he responded, which I thought was
a good sign.
	We talked about chemo for a bit. Wednesday he starts his IV Chemo -
so far it's just been pills. "What if I get really nauseated and vomit, they
say that's what happens," he asked.
	"Then the doctors will come up with Plan B, because there's always a
Plan B."
	"They didn't tell me there was a Plan B."
	"That's because doctors are silly, and didn't want you to move on to
Plan B while they're still working Plan A."
	He doesn't want to be sick and vomit because frankly he's had quite
enough of that over the past several months, and it's grown quite old. I
told him my theory, which is that since everything else he was consuming
that was supposed to be safe made him sick, perhaps the opposite would
happen with chemo -- unlike other people, he wouldn't get sick. It's just a
theory of course, but I like the sound of it.
	He said his mom doesn't like to talk about the future. I said I was
sure not, the future's a scary place at the best of times, and some of us
are just holding on to the present as tightly as we can. "But you can always
talk to me about anything you need to," I told him, because my belief in the
importance of being able to talk about all the icky things that must be in
his mind trumps any discomfort I might experience. He can't be expected to
keep that stuff inside because it might upset someone. If it stays inside it
just becomes another corrosive, another type of cancer that eats its way out
from the inside. If his parents can't talk about it, (and this is no
surprise -- they couldn't deal with the mental illness either, at its worst,
and at its best they disregard it, as if it's cleared up on its own, as if
it were no more substantial than teenage acne), I will. Besides, I'm kind of
smart, in my own weird way, and I make a good sounding board.   
	Our lessons for today can be summed up as follows: 1) Politeness is
not something a cancer patient needs to think about, 2) a cancer patient's
job is to let everyone else take care of him or her, and 3) there's always a
Plan B. 

M