It's going to be a long road ahead

I have been working my backside off over the last couple of days to try to catch up on all the work I was not doing in Israel because of the shuttling back and forth to my parents. Yeah yeah, good excuse.

Right, so I suppose I will start with the important news, which will follow into the rest of this post:

We have to postpone the wedding/civil partnership thingy. My dad, who about a month ago, agreed to come, has now asked me to push it back indefinitely, as he does not have the "physical or emotional strength" for it right now. The theory is that, come April or so, my dad will have his surgery (we hope). Then one of two things will happen. First, they could open him up, remove the tumour and then he has 6-12 months of recovery and then remission. But it would put him at post-op in August, which would be bad. Second, they could open him up, see that it has metastised everywhere, go "holy shit!", close him up and then we have approximately 6 months to plan as fast as we can.

We are disappointed, obviously. And it's all well and good saying we plan and cancel, plan and cancel (my mantra for life right now) but weddings are difficult things to plan and cancel. So we are in much more indecision than ever. We will know more next week.

"We will know more next week" is starting to drive me up the wall, by the way, as it is always answers that come with many more questions.

However, what I really wanted to talk about was adapting and complacency. It's been about 4 months since my father's diagnosis. In the beginning we were upset, panicked and searching for answers. However, you can't keep up that state of panic for long. It is simply unsustainable. So you have to adapt. You get used to chemo and doctors always being around. If you are like me and are not the person with the cancer, you accept that you are not going to know every medical update and stop worrying about that too much. And you also stop worrying about death too much, I suppose. Que sera sera, while we can't predict any better. I know that my father is getting the best possible care and all the rest is up to the Fates. There is nothing I can do more than I am doing and continue to do.

But this means that, with my own resettling into something of a routine, so has the rest of the family. When you are not worrying about Cancer all the time, the old life worries come back. And suddenly you remember that you never really liked a certain member of the family or that you were having a problem with this and that area of business. Slowly life creeps back on you and you realise that you cannot stem the Tide of Life with the Dam of Cancer. It just won't hold it back. But you still feel like Life owes you something in return for the Cancer, so you still expect it from the people around you. And you suddenly find yourself in a Jesus-like position, where you are expecting the Tide to stop (with the help of the Dam, of course) and the water is welling up all around you and you don't know why. "What do you mean, you can't do that for me? Don't you know that I have cancer?"

I suppose, in my own oblique way, what I am trying to say is that things were easier when my only job was to acquiesce to what my father wanted. But I have found that, in matters of daily life, cancer, like love, does not conquer all, regrettably.

And we are nowhere near done. I expect that, for better or for worse, this will follow us for the whole of 2010. And that seems like a really long time to stem the Tide.

It's my cancer, and I'll cry if I want to

My parents went to see an acupuncturist and a nutritionist and my father is on a new diet. Great. Nothing very physically significant has happened, but, emotionally, it's a whole other ballgame.

This has been bugging me for a couple of days. The optimism. How people keep saying, "you must keep strong and keep him strong and fighting". There is something deeply unnatural to me about being told that you have cancer and your only thought being "bring it on!" It my heart, I believe there is a process and, personally, if it were me, I would not want to see anyone at the moment. I would want to close the door on the world and cry for a little while. Not because I was giving up, not because I was facing death, but just because I am entitled to cry and feel shitty for a little while if I goddamn want to!

The strain of fighting and maintaining the "positive thinking" for the sake of everyone else must be exhausting. And as soon as he stops, people accuse him of giving up. And then the guilt comes. "you don't want to get better. You aren't even trying. You don't love me enough to try". This is speculation, but I am thinking that my father is not the man to give up. But he is the man to take a breath and think for a while. But while he's thinking, people get hysterical. "you're giving up! Stop giving up!"

Again, I am only hoping this is the case. If my mother is right in what she told me as she cried on my shoulder last night, and the light really has gone out from under him, then that's bad. But I am hoping that it's more like the former. "You are allowed to cry, then I am going to goddamn cry!"

My mother asked me about the grief cycle, which I have written about here before. I gave her the list: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. She said "that doesn't seem right. Where does the fighting bit come in?" I said that I thought that came under Anger, but that this model applied to grief, not to a non-terminal prognosis. But I actually thought, my god, I never realised the very strong genetic thread in my family: The need to fix.

I am often accused of trying to fix everything, even things that either can't be or do not require fixing. I have worked to try to get better at accepting situations that are out of my control. I am not saying that it's not great that my mother sent me out to get enough health food for an army in the belief that a proper diet will aid my father's treatment. What I am saying is that this, perhaps, is a symptom of denial of the situation rather than a reaction to understanding it.

"If I do enough things to try to fix this, I won't have to face that it's happening, because it will just go away, thanks to all the marvelous fixing that I have done". It's cancer. It's not just going to go away.

On the other hand, my father is feeling pain in his pancreas, but, we believe that this is the "good pain", the pain that says that the chemo is doing it's job. So even though he spent most of the afternoon in bed, I see this as a good thing.

All the rest is bullshit. Is it just me, or do I keep saying that?