After eight years, surgery, radiotherapy, hormones etc, I believe I have now reached that stage, if not quite yet, when my walk is downhill but without the pleasant breeze one usually feels after having worked so hard to get up the hill in the first place.
My PSA has doubled in three months to 23.78, having been relatively symptom free since 2010 when I had my surgery, I have now been beset with a conundrum of pain symptoms which makes me feel like I should, as the great Spurspark once told me, look death in the eye and if not a dual at sunset, at least look it four square in the eye and contemplate my fate.
Three weeks ago, I suffered from excruciating kidney pain but a scan revealed no infiltration. My lymph nodes have all been busy increasing in size and last night, I felt what I believed to be the start of bone metastasis - massive debilitating, tear-inducing pain in my left hip. I don’t do pain very well and feel ill-equipped, despite having lived with the spectre of PCa for almost ten years, to deal with what I inevitably must.
I now read with a morbid interest, stories back home of people who have stood down on the rails and let a speeding train end their respective misery. I, like Spurspark, have investigated Dignitas but have quickly clicked off the page when loved ones are near. Ive looked at overdoses, Googled “how to kill yourself painlessly” on the Internet and deliberated over all the possible ways I can, like a coward, avoid the pain that is a coming my way.
What have I deduced From all this? Well, nothing really. Each pain-free moment has taken my thought processes away from my reality and it is only in the throes of deep pain do I travel down these dark alleyways. Perhaps my dad was right when he told me many years ago after first diagnosis, that all I am is a coward. And so I have looked too at religion, prayer, begging departed loved ones for some respite, taken to mindfulness, imagined flowing with the pain - but nothing works. I am in a whirlpool of despondency, doubt, fear and mistrust of my future with worse to come. Just what can a man, a coward like me do?
These immense, albeit incremental changes in my life blight my day, cloud my night. I lay awake, either in pain or not, staring at the moonlight seeking inspiration, but inspiration’s cup has run dry. I have talked to the fairies, Jesus, Yahweh, Buddha and even Allah to seek some strength to deal with what the painkillers seemingly cannot do. This place. This place where I now reside is one full of regret and ironic thanks for the years post surgery that I have enjoyed - and terror of the unknown road to come. Nothing is lit with joy any more, just dark clouds of uncertainty Awaiting the next episode of pain. I am scared of pain. I do not like it. Who does? And I know of many, many braver men on this forum in much darker, more painful places than I - but this is my experience and experience tells me that I do not, will not and cannot handle pain at all well.
I feel a burden to my beautiful new wife. I feel unable to function as a normal happy go luck person who I once was. I feel pessimism for the day and week and month ahead. I feel hatred in my heart for what has taken so much energy and time trying to battle against. I feel the wheel of fortune has stuck on a black segment, permanently, and that the wheel will never turn for me favourably again.
I am not scared of dying, for we all will die. What I am scared about is the path dictated for me to get to that point. I am scared of losing my independence, my joy for life, my life itself. I am the ultimate coward. As a man of words, eloquent many have told me, I find myself speechless in how to convey to you all just how rotten and unfair and horrible and painful this all is - Spurspark, Alathys, Barry and many others I have known well and conversed with have been much braver, more eloquent than I - yet I feel I must put digit to keyboard to let you know this is the new bus stop I am waiting at on my inexorable journey to the afterlife - and it is not a good place.
This post is rambling. It mirrors my mindset, my thought processes, my every waking moment. It mirrors the black hole of fear that cowards like me domicile. In the early days when my PSA was undetectable, I felt I could take on the world, that this blight called cancer could not and would not get me. That my body was somehow impervious to the effects of cellular division - but deep down, years down the line, all I realise is now that it was a false dawn, a false illusion and that my cowardly body is as frail and as weak and as vulnerable as the next man’s. I do not know what the immediate future holds for me. I know not the speed at which my particular prostate cancer will claim me. All I ask, as a coward, is that it is as pain-free as possible and as brief, with interludes of peace, tranquility, normality With the woman I love
Thank you for listening. Thank those who reply for being there.
Edited by member 26 Aug 2018 at 13:06
| Reason: Not specified