Have a nice life

When a cancer patient asked her oncologist: when do I see you next, the answer was :You don't. Have a nice life! How easy it is for doctors to make such statements without actually thinking. I have heard so many that nothing surprises me anymore. Doctors of our times seem to have forgotten that they are dealing with individuals, each with their own fears, their unformulated questions, even their idiosyncrasies and they see the men in white as saviours and messengers of hope. But to a doctor a patient is just a series of medical abnormalities, jargon, statistics, acronyms and numbers. You have Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage 2B, your protocol is ABVD, 6 cycles of 2, 3 PET scans and have a nice life. Next please! But that is not quite as it goes.

Even if one is not a control freak like me, I guess every patient realises how shattered his body is after the toxic assault it has been subjected to. Every one wants to know how long it will take for the body to eliminate the toxins. How long will it take for the blood counts to begin their slow ascent to normalcy. How long will it take for the chemo fog to lift, for the fatigue to go, for the energy levels to rise. How long will it take to get back to normal if normal there is.

There will be elephants in the room both for Ranjan and for those who love him, elephants that one will be too scared to address, but that nevertheless have to be acknowledged if one is hoping for a semblance of normalcy. The fear of debilitating long term side effects, the fear of the darned hydra headed monster growing another head, the fear of the immune system never getting back to its good old self. Have a nice life assumes an entirely new meaning.

No matter how optimist or fatalist one is, the fears are real. Just like the fear that got the better of me when I read the words: ? lymphoma. It is human to feel frightened and only if you fear the fear will you be able to conquer it. I remembered  Nelson Mandela's words this morning and realised how true they were: I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. It is only if you experience fear that you find the strength to conquer it.

I have resolved to acknowledge my fears and voice them loud and clear as I know I will conquer them. And if no one gives me the answers, I will find them and accept them even if they are not quite what one expected. The first step is to list down all the questions that are clogging my mind.

The first is of course: will everything go back to what is was like before. The answer is a big NO. There was a life before cancer and there will be a different one after cancer: BC and AC! Will the life after cancer be worse and again the answer is a big NO as it is in our hands to craft the new normal and as I had read somewhere it will take 66 days for this new normal to become a habit and hence 'normal'. So that is not too bad.

You may ask why I say with such confidence that our AC will be better. The answer is that in many ways it is already better than it was. I am not talking about the treatment and its acolytes. What I am alluding to is the quality of our emotional and personal life, the new found closeness, the myriad of well wishers and their love. I can say without an iota of doubt that life is happier and merrier. There is so much laughter, so much more time is spent together doing things we never did before: hilarious carom games, animated scrabble sessions where people with different mother tongues scratch their brain finding English words. There are also intimate moments when we revive memories of days gone by or share stories we never revealed. Skype calls with the grandson who laughs at nana and nanou's new hairdo. And let me tell you that this is and will be an integral part of our new normal. And how can I forget the gentle daily banter over the medicines that I proffer all along the day from the moment we get up to the instant we go to sleep. Not to talk of the brews and potions. That too will be part of the new normal. It looks good does it not?

But there will things to remember and keep in mind. The new normal will have its shades of grey. Ranjan's ravaged body will take its time to heal and we will all need to remember this and learn to live at his pace. He cannot jump back into old routines straight away. So life will have to be a gentle stroll with breaks whenever needed. We will all need to learn to listen to Ranjan's body. Something I have already learnt to do. Every sniffle, sneeze or twitch earlier ignored now has me jumping out of my skin. I will need to continue to do so, with perhaps a little more tact.

I know that in the best case scenario, there will be still be a certain percentage of cancer cells that need to be destroyed and only Ranjan's immune system can conjure that miracle. Hence the big priority will undoubtedly be getting his immune system back on track. I know there are many ways and will do some intensive research and share my findings in another blog. As his immune system springs back to normal, his fatigue will go and his risk of infection diminish. But here again there is no fix time line. Every body is unique and thus its healing is unique too! So many of the questions that disturb me today find their answer in one simple statement: boost the immune system to its earlier glory.

Food and supplements will help strengthen the immune system, but if you remember my one of my early blogs where I talked of jumping on a trampoline or rebounding as a way to boost immunity, life AC will have to include a lot of physical exercise. Walking, stretching and yoga. I tried my best to include as much of these as possible in the last months but chemo played spoil sport. No excuse now particularly if Ranjan wants to resume golf as in the BC days as fast as possible.

Let us not forget that mental stress is by far the most potent carcinogen. This is my strong belief. So the mind has to be pampered and stilled, with meditation, relaxation and happy thoughts. That is one thing I am going to ensure no matter what, even if I make more enemies along the way.

Now to the question about how long it takes to flush the toxins out of the system, a conventional figure is at least 6 months. The challenge is to cleanse the system. I do not see Ranjan embracing a stringent yogic regimen, so we will have to take it slow and easy. And we are talking of one helluva lot of toxins. In addition to eliminating chemical toxins and heavy metals from the body, says the New Hope Medical Center in Arizona, cancer patients need further detoxification support in order to remove the toxic load that comes from the death of cancer cells. Water is the best way to detoxify your body so I will make sure Ranjan drinks his 8 glasses a day and exercise gets the heart pumping, which circulates blood, moving toxins out of the body. It also encourages perspiration, which decreases toxins, and makes you thirsty, so you’ll drink more water. So excuses my darling. Then of course a lot of green juices but will talk of the diet and nutrition plan in another blog.

So I have my plate full and even overflowing. The one thing I want to say hear LOUD and CLEAR: We are going to have a nice life!