I receive a lot of compliments about how I managing to stay positive and active during my cancer treatment. I am variously described as a trouper or an inspiration, and I suppose it makes me feel good. I am not sure how much of the praise is truly warranted. Is this a chicken and egg situation? Am I able to stay positive and active because I feel good physically? Or is the feeling good a consequence of staying positive and active?
No doubt the reality is a bit of both, but on balance I am on the side of the chicken on this one. I have been amazingly fortunate that my cancer symptoms have not been too debilitating, that my medical support has been excellent and that my treatments have generally been effective. That is the primary reason that most of the time I have been feeling fine, and that leaves an opportunity to live life close to its prior normal manner. Most cancer patients do not have that luxury, at least not for very long, and I certainly have no intention of crowing that the difference is my positive attitude. That certainly helps but is simply unattainable for many sufferers.
As so often, the biggest difference from attitude may come on the emotional side of the equation. Given some level of physical comfort, there is still a challenge to the emotions, that at times can be vast. In this sphere the egg might have an answer to the chicken. But even here, I am one of the lucky few to have had the possibility of keeping most of my emotions largely positive or at least not too dispiriting.
How is it that I have been so blessed so far? Again, I start with purely physical aspects that are largely beyond my control. I have been no health paragon through my life, though I suppose I did OK to avoid the blights of smoking and other addictions. Looking back, my smartest, or luckiest, move was to notice the minor symptom last summer and to do something about it. That led to the misery of diagnosis and treatment, but if I had not noticed or stayed quiet, the tumour would have been free to grow for longer and may well have become untreatable.
So, if this blog is to take the arrogant stance of offering advice to people without cancer, point number one is to look out for possible symptoms and, as they say in New York, if you see (or feel) something, say (or do) something. Hypochondria is not a great route to follow, but being aware that our bodies are fragile and looking out for early warnings is. Great plan.
Then I suppose point number two would be about avoiding a lifestyle that makes us prone to ill health. I am a poor role model for this one as a stranger to the gym and a sucker for sweet foods, but perhaps we don’t need to be exemplary, it is enough to avoid asking for trouble from drugs, tobacco, alcohol, obesity and the like.
Those obvious points are all I can think of about physical preparedness, but emotional preparedness is something else, and something that we generally have more influence over.
When we are young we all think we are immortal. That is probably a good thing; everything is a balance between risk and caution and if all of us favoured caution then there would be a lot less innovation in the world.
But negative health surprises can happy at any time, and become more likely as we get older, no matter how strong our physical preparedness. If indeed our attitude is important in determining how well we respond to such a challenge, then some emotional preparedness becomes a sound investment.
The most important way to be emotionally prepared for a health setback is to maintain our key relationships in as strong a state as possible. This starts with who we choose to live with. A life partnership always involves challenges, and that makes many of us cautious about commitment and sometimes to finding solutions when difficulties arise.
Such behaviour is not all that risky while we are young and healthy, and it can even be beneficial to build some experiences and derive key lessons from ditching or being ditched. But wow, does it help to have a. strong partnership once major health problems arise? A lot of trust and other relationship capital can make all the difference when it is really needed. Consider that next time you are tempted to strike out at your partner or moan about a widening waistline or some other triviality.
The same applies, albeit to a slightly lesser extent, with our children, siblings and other close family members. It is not necessary to live in each other’s pockets; we are all different and must find our own paths. But a bond of emotional support from an extended family can really help when the going gets tough.
Another opportunity for emotional preparedness comes from how we spend our free time developing hobbies. For about half of my life, my primary hobby was playing bridge, the card game. It helped me build a social network, challenge my competitive spirit and travel around the UK and Europe. It also became one half of the glue that bound my marriage together (our daughter formed the other half). In the end there was still not enough glue, but our shared hobby gave us more happy times than we would probably have been able to enjoy otherwise. My first concession when we separated was to give up bridge completely, so that she could retain her hobby without bumping into me all the time, which I judged would be emotionally important to her.
What followed after bridge? I rediscovered singing, something I had done in my youth and largely neglected since. Singing has turned out to have all of the same benefits that bridge had before, including providing some glue to my second marriage when we sing together and travel together for singing holidays.
Before diagnosis, I did not consider for a moment how fortunate a hobby singing would be once I became sick. I am so lucky that my cancer so far has allowed me to keep singing as fervently as before. If my greatest handicap is that sometimes the word or note on the left side of a new line of music seems to be absent, I can put up with that. Over the last nine days, I have enjoyed fourteen sessions of singing in ten different places, including three concerts, three other church services and even four pay checks. Few cancer patients can be as fortunate as that. And, going right back to the beginning and the claim that I may deserve compliments and even derive stronger health for my positive attitude, singing is no doubt the primary cause after my life partnership.
My luck is that I stumbled into a hobby which was not seriously inhibited by my cancer. And therein lies the last lesson I would like to share, one I followed myself purely by good fortune. As we reach middle age and the possibility of serious illness looms larger, we would be smart to think about our hobbies and perhaps to take up one or two that are more robust, and ideally which contain a social element.
If I were a passionate skydiver, or explorer of exotic places, or even a builder of model aircraft, I would have had to largely give those things up, and the emotional acceptance of my disease would have been much more challenging. Graham the skydiver would have been consumed by his vertigo, the explorer by his nausea and the model builder by his loss of competence at close work. But Graham the singer can still perform, just about, and furthermore to retain an active social life and a close life partnership. He is grateful to have chosen that hobby. What will tyours be?
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