Half Life - 62 - coping

Half Life – 62 – coping

January 7th, 2021

Yet another urgent set of internal pictures. It’s almost as if when not sucking blood there has to be another form of mild torture applied just in case the patient gets too comfortable. This one is important, denying that would be foolish. Worries about another compression on the spine is real and serious and demands attention. Pain in the hips and lower spine became unbearable and was stopping the nerves from carrying the instructions to one of my legs, making it necessary to move it manually into bed or the car.

Cancer is a process of endurance. Treatments, scans, monitoring and tests all take time and are deeply intrusive. The impact is never quick, even recovering from operations takes time and patience. Time is measured in weeks and months, seldom days or hours. Each person in their fight needs ways of coping, of dealing with not only the whole idea but also each event thrown at you day after day. It’s rare there isn’t another appointment somewhere in the diary, looming in the future.

Having bored almost everyone I know with conversations about karate in the past I tend not to talk too much about it. As part of my life, one way or another, for over forty years after being taken to a karate dojo when ten years old it is deep inside me. The lack of interest it holds for non-devotees has been drummed into me over all those years. However, the connection between karate and cancer has proved invaluable.

Lying still on the narrow slab, my head gripped by hard foam preventing even the slightest movement, earplugs shoved in to help with the MRI noises, it is a trial in pain management. Mercifully there is no insistence on a mask, but the proximity of the narrow tube above my face makes the claustrophobia cloud hover a few moments away from mild panic the whole time inside the scanner. As the electric motors buzz and slide the MRI platform I am fixed to into the scanner, I start to count in Japanese. Memories of training sessions, with punches and blocks, press-ups, sit-ups, kicks and catches all come flooding back. Eyes tight shut, breathing managed and controlled, I move on to kata, the set patterns of movement in which all the knowledge of traditional karate is buried. Not only practicing the moves without moving but searching, thinking, wondering what else is hidden within distracts me away from the head-splitting thumping and grinding the machine generates to do its job.   The fight, as always, is mental. Pains in the hips and spine start to build up as movement is forbidden and wriggling would mean re-starting all or part of the scan over again. The mental kata and the training sessions push back the pain, as it would have in any training session. You know it will end and allow that to become the focus. It’s a way of coping.

It’s not only those with the cancer who have to find ways to help them not just cope but also push away its endless desire to dominate. Taking up a new activity such as drawing, writing, pottery, sewing, poetry, baking, cooking, or anything else they want to make a TV programme about to humiliate members of the public desperate for fame, works. What matters is to stop it becoming the only story in the house; if it does, then it starts to win. Losing yourself into the cancer, with the fast and frequent hospital and clinic visits, is only too easy. Before you know it you, and all those around you, find that it is all there is and all you talk about.

The banging nightmare ends, the MRI slides me out, and I yank the earplugs and neck brace off as fast as I can and move my legs to try to ease the agony from my screaming hips and back. Kata and karate helped me get through it again and will again the next time it is called on, probably a needle attack to drain blood or a canula to drip more drugs into my arm.

Mental martial arts, whether in a scanner or not, is not for everyone, although it’s remarkable how good I get in my own head these days. Coping with the pain as it happens and finding ways to beat back the bloody disease into its subservient place in life at other times is what matters. It was three years ago to the day (7th January 2019), at about 10.30 in the morning, when I was given the diagnosis of advanced and incurable prostate cancer. Finding the way of coping through the treatments, and when not having them, has forced Nobby back to being part of life, but not all of life. It ensures I, and everyone touched by the cancer, doesn’t become just cancer.