Cancer

It’s a scary word right? It has all of these connotations straight away. It’s one of the biggies, one of the things we are scared of. My brother has cancer. In fact he was similtanously diagnosed with two separate, unrelated cancers. The first one was bad but fixable. The second one is bad. It’s aggressive and it’s rare. Only a few patients get this type of cancer in Australia each year. It’s in his lymphatic system. Before this I couldn’t have told you anything about the lymphatic system. Now I can tell you where it is, what it does and what goes wrong when cancer is found there. I can tell you how they treat it. I can tell you what happens to your body when they treat it. I can tell you about the side effects of chemotherapy and the possible risks involved in having you immune system intentionally decimated. None of this is knowledge I ever wanted to have but it’s amazing how quickly you can learn about something. It’s amazing how motivated you can become to understand words like neutropenic, haemoglobin, and methotrexate and mabthera. It amazing how familiar a place can become – like a hospital you didn’t know the address of before becomes a place you visit every day. And the people you meet there, the doctors and nurses and other patients, become this strange little community to you – like people thrown together on a cruise ship, only without the drinks with umbrellas in them! And it’s strange how even though you feel tired and don’t know how you will summon the energy to make the journey in again, you still find yourself looking for a car park, or at the train station because you cant bear to think of your brother lying there by himself in a hospital, unable to do the simplest things like brush his teeth because his mouth is full of ulsers. And you get there and he is relieved to have the company and be reminded that he is not going through this alone.
And then you find yourself agreeing to be the one who stays with him in between treatments, because somehow you are the natural person to do that. And even though that means checking his temperature every four hours and making sure he takes his medication when it is due and worrying when you see him pale, or sweaty or lethargic, you do it because you can do nothing else. Because it is the only thing you can do to ease this journey he is on.
And I am sure in a few years, when he is well, and we look back on this time it will not feel as scary or as tiring or as unfair as it seems now. Am I sure? I am hopeful