Control, Time and Hope

Control, Time  and Hope

Cancer has a way of leading you down a path where being poked, probed, stuck, examined, tested, and stripped of privacy is normal. When you purposely set about to poison yourself in order to kill something living inside of your body, "normal" takes on a meaning of its own.  However, other than "chemo brain" the disease hasn't affected my mind and losing control over that would be far worse than a disease that takes my body first.

There are so many other diseases that are far worse than cancer that I feel guilty chronicling in this blog. I'm in no pain and chemotherapy is a viable treatment for a long time. Research is being done all the time and there are clinical trials for which I might qualify. While I have no idea how or when this will all end, there is still a great amount of hope in me. The inevitability of what will happen to me is still nebulous whereas a diagnosis of dementia or Alzheimer's almost always involves losing mental faculties before physical faculties.

I just read a memoir of a woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's who was determined to take her own life before she could no longer make the decision to do so. I couldn't take my own life which would add helplessness to hopelessness to total lack of control.  While I wouldn't be opposed to someone else causing my death if I were mentally incapacitated or in a lot of pain, I'm just too Catholic to do it myself.

Losing hope is a strange phrase. We don't lose hope of living forever, we all know we are going to die sometime. We just lose hope of being able to pretend that death doesn't exist in our near future. It's a matter of time. We like to pretend we will live forever and therefore avoid dealing with our mortality. The hope that death won't happen for a long time diminishes with terminal illness but never really goes away. We hope for more time, we hope for a cure, we hope for a miracle, we hope for insight to make sense of the absurd.

Hope is the vehicle that ties control and time together.

May 19, 2015
Lori Patton