From the middle

I am a middle child from a middle class family. I had a job in middle management and after an early mid-life crisis threw it over to teach what’s known as middle school. I listen to middle of the road music. I have a middle name that has made life interesting or faintly embarrassing, depending on your point of view. I have been known to raise my middle finger in a salute to bad manners. And, despite lingering notes of immaturity, I have reached middle age.

This “middle age” is variously defined as having a numerical age between 40 and 60 or 35 to 54. We’re among friends here so let’s confront the symptoms of “middle age” head-on: loss of skin elasticity, greying of hair, accumulation of body fat, reduction in aerobic performance, decrease in maximal heart rate, decrease in strength and flexibility, declining fertility and increased mortality. Ech.

But we don’t have to go gentle into that good night, we can rage, rage against the dying of the light. We don’t have to succumb to the condition of being middle aged: we can deny its mediocrity.

Middle does not have to be the same as “middling”. A quick trip to the dictionary will tell you that the Middle can be the centre of everything, the point around which everything orbits. Middle can be central, the nucleus, the pivot point, the crux - just look at history.

Skulking between antiquity and the renaissance is a period in history that has a pretty bad rap: the Middle Ages.

One author called the period from the 5^th to the 15^th centuries “one of civilisation’s longest winters”. Historians dubbed it “the dark ages” because it was the time in which it seemed all the progress of the Roman Empire was reversed. According to them it was an age of ignorance and superstition. Feudalism. The black death. The chokehold of the church. And wars – lots of them.

But the Middle Ages’ bad rap is not completely justified. This period is overlooked as a time of huge growth and change, of civilisation overcoming war, disease, famine, injustice, inquisitions, witch hunts. Huge traumatic experiences…There’s got to be a parallel here somewhere, if I can just find it.

But let’s think positively: let’s focus on the good stuff that came from the Middle Ages.

For one, there’s the Bayeaux Tapestry. My mum, being a textile freak, would insist on you knowing that it is actually embroidery, not a tapestry. There are nine linen panels, of between fourteen and three metres in length, telling the story of the Battle of Hastings in a magnificent example of history written by the victors. Or at least by the ones with the needle and thread. 

Next, for my Catholic friends, there is Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher and theologian. Much of modern philosophy evolved from standing on the shoulders of giants such as Aquinas, whether in extrapolation or rebuttal of his ideas on ethics and metaphysics. He influenced other philosophers such as Hooker, Locke, Dante and Chesterton, and authored my favourite piece of wisdom, “Beware of the person of one book”.

The Middle Ages was also the time of Arthurian legend, the beginning of folkloric tales of an English King conquering the Saxons. Such historic romances brought us Merlin, Guinevere and Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table, giving us stories of the age of chivalry and spawning one of the world’s greatest parodies - Monty Python’s Holy Grail. But I digress.

I could go on and list all the advances in agriculture and technology (windmills, clocks, lenses, ploughs), architecture (cathedrals, Gothic style, flying buttresses, stained glass windows), art (the works of Donatello and Giotto); I could discuss the advances in thinking and education (which included the separation of science, theology and philosophy and the beginning of the secularisation of universities and scholarly endeavour); I could mention the significance of the codification of laws across European countries, and the rise of vernacular literature through Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer; then finally and most significantly for bibliophiles everywhere, I could drop in the invention of the printing press, the innovation that ensured that we could all have more than one book.

But I won’t.

The salient point here is that all these achievements belonged to an era of tumultuous change and development for Western civilisation.

And so, my middle age may also prove to be a time of growth, of challenge and unpredictable adventures. Perhaps even tumultuous change. After the last few years, that is not at all difficult to imagine. But I will have my own Bayeaux tapestries, Thomas Aquinases and windmills to continue to inspire my hope and thankfulness.

In fact, I can list them for you - the saving graces of my middle age are:

• ·       A collection of friends who are my sanity and my sanctuary, my wisdom, laughter, diversion, education and recreation.
• ·       A family, both immediate and extended, who will go to any length to assure my wellbeing, whether physical, emotional, practical, degustational, metaphorical, sartorial, editorial, psychological, transportational, inspirational, muppetational…
• ·       And a husband whose importance can’t be adequately described in actual words, as much as I have tried.  

Thomas Aquinas gave us the aphorism, “The things that we love tell us what we are.” So you are what I am. 

GK Chesterton, who stood on his shoulders, said,

“The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”

For a middle child who’s middle aged, there’s nothing mediocre about that.

Back in Therapy

How unfamiliar, familiar territory can seem when viewed from a new standpoint. How different one’s perspective can be – like the difference between being in a train and being under it. Here I am back at Sweet Blog Therapy, the blog that tells the story of my experience with cancer and provided an outlet for all my agony. Its familiarity is comforting; I wrote here when I had cancer, so this is where posts belong when I’m fighting the bastard scourge. There is unfamiliarity though too – I don’t recognise the sometimes brave, pathologically honest and occasionally sensible person described in my previous posts. I haven’t learned the lessons described in each post, I haven’t internalised the wisdom I seemed, in retrospect, to possess. I am back in therapy because I am battling cancer again, and it seems it’s because it never actually went away. Hi again.

So here’s the story: approximately four weeks ago I had a routine CT scan and blood test, part of the screening that goes with following up chemo and cancer treatment. Approaching it, I was so over-confident I was almost cocky. I’ve been teaching fulltime (which is something of an achievement given recent history), exercising, living life, eating well and feeling pretty proud to have achieved the level of capacity I had. Not a cold or a sniffle, not a pain or a pang. I turned up to see my usually smiling oncologist hoping only for a good CEA number (I treat it as though I’m getting an A – a hangover from my neurotic school days). I should have known when he wasn’t smiling. Body Language 101 and Cancer Remission – I got an F in both subjects, it seems.

A lump in my liver and an elevated CEA pointed to one thing – carcinoma; the presence of a “met”, the pet name medicos have for metastases (changes in the cells) forming a lump or tumour (for us plain-speakers). So while my brain went into hibernation and everything else went numb, I saw my surgeon and heard about the treatment plan.

Both my oncologist and surgeon seemed pretty sure this “met” had been there originally, eighteen months ago, when the first tumours in my bowel and liver were discovered. This little guy was too tiny to be picked up by CT scans and PET scans, and not strong enough to register in my blood stream. Until now - that is, less than twelve months after chemo finished and six months after my last CEA reading  of 1.2 (very low and well within the range for people without cancer). This is an insidious bastard of a disease.

So the therapeutic approach for this little bugger was surgery, which was approached with every encouragement from those surrounding me. Much was said about how much better shape I was in this time around and how I might bounce back quite quickly as a result etc, etc. All true as far as that goes, and a very positive way of looking at things.

But my GOD! The state of my mind and emotions!! I can’t think of a time when I have been more deeply disappointed, dispirited, heartsick, desolate and afraid, and if you know my story you know that’s saying something (or else what is this blog all about?). Because reading over past posts, this is familiar territory: but now I have a little more knowledge and experience to go with it. How very, very dangerous it can be to already know what you’re up against.

I am glad on one hand that chemo has been excluded – it was on the table for a short time, but has now been vetoed. Here’s why – it didn’t work last time. It was supposed to eradicate the cancer and didn’t. It suppressed this sh*tty little met, which then carried on growing happily after chemo stopped. So, do you go with “Yay, no chemo!” or “Sh*t, chemo didn’t work for me”? So far I’m trying to go with “I’ve had surgery. I can’t do much yet. I don’t know anything more. No one can predict the future.” TRYING.

I have needed more therapy this time around; this has been a serious blow to my hopes and expectations. I’ve seen a counsellor, and it’s amazing how much of what she said was familiar – much of it I have already identified and published in my previous posts (oh, yeah, I’m so smart). But if I know my lessons, I just can’t feel them or live them at the moment. I am too angry. And disappointed. Because all the things I had faith in before don’t work. Not PET Scans, not CT scans, and not chemo. There’s a terrifying sense of a dawning realisation: what they mean by ‘living with cancer’. This is a lesson not yet learnt. Unfamiliar territory.

I would like to be seen as strong, intelligent, brave, practical, realistic and without drama, as no doubt many people would. I am afraid I am none of these things right now. I need more help than I did before, and I hate to ask for it. (Look at that - I still didn't ask for it). Things just got harder for me, even though my treatment is straightforward. Physically, it’s done and dusted. But mentally...? Please help me!*

I have to get my head around my new occupation: Living with cancer. Living with cancer. LIVING with cancer.

They wouldn’t call it a battle if it wasn’t hard.

* It can be hard to know how to help. Encouragement is good. Distraction is good too. Positive thinking is definitely in order. People helping me at all will probably spur me into action to defy my own perception of weakness anyway, if I know myself at all. THERE'S some self-knowledge for you.