Hello again.
Well, as might be expected, I'm very fucking scared right now. The reality is all hitting home about surgery in Germany and I know it's something I have to go for but, well, I'm scared. They've emailed me and I've replied with a few questions but the price wasn't silly so this really is a goer. I know my liver doctor won't approve but if he finds out what the problem is with my liver and gets my levels down to let chemo start there's still absolutely no guarantee that chemo will do anything at all. If they could say that chemo would at a bare minimum hold the cancer then yes, it would be the preferred option to try and shrink the thing and make surgery safer. But there's a high chance it will do nothing, and that will mean 12 weeks where I can't be operated on and the cancer would be progressing making the chances of surgery slimmer if not totally go. And then where would I be, well, then I would be fucked, to put it bluntly. So I have to gamble with this surgery I think. He's a very high up spod, he runs a whole department at this big medical school and seems to have had papers published in related fields so he obviously knows his stuff. And in a silly cultural stereotype way it's almost a comfort that he's German, something I was having a laugh about with my old mate last night. They want me across there ASAP so I have little time for pondering I just have to go with what I believe is right in what is the biggest decision of my life. I'm gambling with my very existence here but the alternatives are as much as, if not more, of a gamble. My head is just bursting, all I want to do is sit and watch shit TV to try and get some of this stuff out of my mind for a time. I've had a tough old road during life but this really tops everything, I can't think straight and I just feel petrified. I used to have this bit of text from Edgar Allen poe's The Fall of the House of Usher printed out and stuck behind my desk at work:-
"I shall perish," said he "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate on this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror. In this unnerved - in this pitiable condition - I feel that the period will sooner arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR" |
