L’appel du Vide is a French phrase which translates to ‘The Call of the Void’. It refers to the tendency we have to entertain self-destructive thoughts, like wanting to jump off a cliff when standing on its face. The phrase doesn’t refer to the act of doing so, but the way that we are inclined to think about doing so when facing such a situation. Another example is the thought of ploughing your car through the barriers at the side of a bridge when driving over it. I frequently experience it when I am waiting for my train to travel into the office in the morning.
The train station has 4 tracks running through it. The outer ones stop at the platforms on either side but the inner ones are for the mainline trains which go between London Bridge and Brighton. I usually get to the station at about 07:03 for my train scheduled at 07:09. Whilst waiting for it, I always see one of the mainline trains fly through on one of the inner rails. There are no barriers sectioning it off.
Sometimes, as I stand there in my morning daze, I think about what everyone would do if I just took a running jump in front of the fast train as it flies through the station. It isn’t because I want to do it, there’s just a fascination with the idea. I wonder what other people on the platform would do, how easy it would be to execute the jump and whether I’d feel anything at all, or whether the rush of adrenaline would be the last thing I ever experience. I wonder if the ‘l’appel du vide’ phenomenon is somewhat related to the negative feelings I get around scan dates…
On Wednesday, I felt my phone ringing in my pocket whilst at work. Upon looking at the screen, I saw the dreaded ‘No Caller ID’, which is almost always the hospital. The woman on the phone told me that she was from The Christie’s imaging department and that they needed to book me in for a scan. Due to it being very busy over the next few weeks, she asked if I was able to attend on Sunday of this week. I was a little flustered but I agreed, always giving precedence to any cancer-centric plans over any non-cancer-centric plans, even if they are last minute. In the hierarchy of needs, cancer care trumps most other things, perhaps even eating. Once you have been admitted to the hospital a few times, you start to realise that not eating is actually encouraged by the medical field in a lot of cases. ‘Null by mouth’ they call it, and it absolutely sucks. It gets written on a little whiteboard next to your bed so you can’t even lie to the person going around the ward offering out hot drinks. You get to watch everyone in the other beds enjoy their morning coffee and toast whilst you aren’t even allowed a cup of water. It’s torturous, but I’ve normally been jacked up on morphine at the time, so I’ve gotten over it.
Once I had agreed to the short-notice appointment, I went about reorganising my diary to fit it in. I realised that I had plans for Saturday that needed to be rearranged, and then realised that there were train strikes on, meaning that I couldn’t get back to my parents for the scan via train. That meant factoring in the 5-hour drive from London too… not too bad but not ideal… Eventually, I managed to figure things out well enough, and it sort of fit into place… well, things were forced into place, but whatever, I had a plan to see my friend earlier on Saturday, then drive home that afternoon ready for the scan today.
At the start of the week, I already had a few symptoms that I was worried about. From one perspective, having a surprise scan flung on me felt helpful, as it would allow me to address any worries I have that these symptoms are alluding to another tumour growing inside my abdomen. On the other hand, it could confirm these worries to be valid, and by confirming them, it also makes them real. Once they’re real, I’m back in the world of dealing with an active cancer again, if dealing with it is even possible anymore. Dealing with it might mean “making peace” with it, to use a euphemism, which isn’t something I want to have to do, if I can avoid it.
The cognitive dissonance at play here is obvious – just because an oncologist hasn’t identified a tumour in your body yet doesn’t mean that it isn’t growing inside of you. Not having a scan doesn’t mean you don’t have cancer. It would be great if that was how the world worked, but it doesn’t. In actual fact, if you have a cancerous tumour, it really is in your interest to have it identified, preferably by someone who dedicates their life to trying to cure people of that type of issue. Still, when it is officially identified is when you officially have to deal with it, which sucks. Notice how foreboding I am being here? Welcome to my head… please don’t slam the door on your way out. Thanks.
The recent symptoms have been more of the same really, but they’ve got more intense. I’ve started to get the exact same tightness in my abdomen that I was originally trying to get diagnosed when I first realised that something was wrong with my body. It’s especially bad in the mornings which was also a key characteristic of it before. This isn’t the first time that I’ve had this problem since I was first diagnosed, and I even asked the surgeon about it after my operation as I was experiencing it a lot then. He reassured me that whereas before I had problems because of a tumour, now I will have them because of the trauma from major surgery, and that they may never go away.
Although this should bring me some comfort, this symptom mostly went away for half a year. Now it’s back and feeling worse than it has since it originally surfaced, which is disconcerting. No matter how many times I remind myself of what the surgeon said, it doesn’t fully satisfy me. If my experience over the past few years has taught me anything, it is that we know our own bodies better than anyone. Why is this feeling resurfacing now, if nothing has caused it? I’m sure there are other things that could be causing it, but I’m also pretty sure that it could be a tumour, so I can really go round and round in circles with myself on the topic forever. And believe me, I do. Round and round and round and round and round. The only positive is that it makes getting out of bed in the morning very easy, as the pain seems to lessen when I get up. If I stay in bed, I just worry about it, then worry about everything else, and then feel terrified that I’m going to die. I’d rather drink coffee on the sofa than contemplate how painful my inevitable death from cancer will be.
Then there is this random stabbing pain that I’ve started getting in the left side of my abdomen… Guess what else was in the left side of my abdomen? My pancreas! What was on my pancreas? My big fat Greek wedding pancreatic tumour! It’s hard to shake it off, especially when the oncologist told me that the most likely place the cancer will return is on the lymph nodes in the area around where the tumour was. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it would feel like a stabbing pain in that area, and I spent a few months after I got the all-clear worrying that my neck was swollen, only to find out that this wouldn’t be a symptom of my type of cancer returning, which made me feel nice and stupid. When I say I was worrying about it, I was seriously worrying about it. I kept getting paranoid that my neck hurt, which it probably did, but more from me tensing it due to me worrying about it all of the time. This should serve as proof that I have no idea what I’m talking about, need to stop generalising that everything means I have cancer again, and should just get on with my life and be grateful that I’m in this situation at all. It isn’t so easy, though. There’s also the issue of occasionally shitting an alarming amount of blood, but that’s totally fine, right? Yeah, I’m sure that’s totally normal. Cool. Anyway.
L’appel du vide really summarises my feelings towards my cancer at the minute. I feel like I am being pulled into a void. When I hadn’t had a successful operation and things weren’t looking good for me, I feel like I had some extra level that I could go to which comforted me. There was an element of knowing that I might not have too long left and that I need to do all I can to enjoy it which felt empowering. Those feelings of helplessness don’t just dissipate overnight because treatment went better for me than anyone was expecting it to. Instead, those feelings seem to float about in the ether, binding to any insecurities I feel and infinitely multiplying them. I’m still not in a position where I believe that things are actually going to end well for me, I’m just waiting for them to go wrong. The fact that I can’t put a timeline on when that will happen anymore just makes it all the more daunting.
Now that I’ve had another scan today, the same thing is happening. I’m certain that they’ll come back and it’ll be bad news. But even if that doesn’t happen and they’re all clear again, I feel like I’ll just be letting out a sigh of relief that I’ve got away for another few months before the next scan, where THEN they’ll surely be negative. I even started entertaining the thought that even if the scan is clear, it must be because the tumour hasn’t grown enough to be picked up by it yet. Then I am convinced that WHEN it comes back, I’ll be dead in a matter of weeks; all I have backing that up are a few stories I’ve read on the internet, but every cancer case is notoriously different. I’m an expert at being an inexplicable expert on cancer, apparently, considering I know nothing about it whatsoever, other than the experiences I’ve been through.
I need to just stop thinking about it so much, but it’s impossible to do. Stopping yourself from thinking about it is almost more difficult than just letting the thoughts come when they need to, and doing what you can to deal with them. It is so easy to read about someone dying from cancer, seeing that they fought it for a year, 2 years, 5 years etc, but that doesn’t do any justice to what they went through. Every minute of every day it is there, whether it is an explicit symptom that they’re suffering with or just the knowledge that they have cancer. Every. Fucking. Minute. How do you counter that?
I had a dream that I was locked in a room, and all I could hear was this incredibly loud screaming, but I couldn’t stop it or get away from it. I woke up and my blood sugar was 18.9, which is insanely high, and I had a horrible pain in my stomach. It all felt relentless, and then I spent an hour wondering what would even kill me if I died of pancreatic cancer. Would I stop eating? Would my body just give up? They’re all questions I don’t want to answer, but I find myself falling into the details of them anyway. Perhaps it is necessary to feel these things and navigate these thoughts if that is what is going on in my life, but it can all feel so counterproductive and unhelpful.
So, the scan was fine but I don’t know when I’ll get the results as I haven’t received an appointment yet. I’m sure in the meantime I’ll find ways to perpetuate the symptoms and reassure myself that everything means I have cancer again, yet also feel disproportionately invincible on the days when I do feel good. Whether it is the l’appel du vide phenomenon or not, it is nice to read about something that I have thought about a lot in life. Cancer is, after all, a huge void, mercilessly dragging millions of people into it every year and decimating their lives. Whether standing on a real cliff or a metaphorical one in the form of cancer, it is difficult to not entertain thoughts of falling over the edge. In those thoughts, there probably is some relief, and I know that writing this has provided me with some catharsis, but I wonder how others deal with this. Some people just have an unrelenting positivity about life – what a gift that must be!