Where do I start? Do I talk about the operation and how a team of people tirelessly slaved away, working on my body for 13 hours, making sure that none of the tumour could remain? I wasn’t there for the surgery, so I can’t talk much of that experience, only the fallout afterwards. Do I talk about the stories I gathered as I was taken from room to room, doctor to doctor, fighting infections and numbing the different types of pain that were coming and going? Or do I talk about none of it at all, choosing to look forwards in my life for the first time since last November? “You will go and live your life now,” my surgeon said to me. Were the painkillers numbing my positive emotions too? I can’t even be happy about it; it just doesn’t feel real. My cancer hasn’t necessarily gone – I have to wait for the histology results to find out what comes next. I’m likely going to be back to chemotherapy soon.
It was hard to even think on it all too much for a few days, and I just burst into tears in the middle of the ward when I did. How has this actually happened? There was no version of events in my head where I actually survived this thing. I thought that my role in the world was to be that insignificant statistic who insignificantly died at the hands of a statistically significant cancer. You don’t boil yourself down to a statistic. Neither will your friends and family. Extend out a few more branches in the tree and you are in territory where you are a statistic, another name on a page. It’s how humans process information. It’s how we understand how good or bad something is. It’s how we make arguments about pancreatic cancer being one of the deadliest to have and how you have to be old to even be eligible for consideration. Yet, my surgeon sat and said to me in the most serious of ways, “We aren’t going to perform miracles, Dan. We can only do what we can with what is presented in front of us.” It seems that he has performed a miracle here, or has started the progression towards one.
So I haven’t been told I’m cured yet. Removing the entire pancreas is a good start, and I’ve only ever been told that I have cancer on my pancreas, so maybe it’s a really stupid thing to even suggest that I’m not. I’ve learnt not to assume anything with cancer, so I’m not going to assume anything. I’m almost certain there will be mop-up Chemotherapy, scans, and other bookmarks in the calendar that same carry a familiar type of anxiety. It sounds like the only objective is to get better for a good while though. Another surgeon who was looking after me for a while on the Sunday told me that the tumour would be cut apart the before performing some tests on it. That would help to indicate what the best next steps are in terms of treatment, as well as helping future research.
The headline really is that I don’t have a pancreas anymore. No more ripping on Dan Pan, Penny Pan Pan or Pan Can. This means that I am fully diabetic now and have been learning to interject insulin over the past few days. Alongside my pancreas being taken out, 3/5ths of my large bowel was also removed. Some major arteries were then reconstructed before I was finally put back together again.
I had a strange sensation on the Tuesday morning after the surgery. I’d been struggling to sleep and was overindulging in the pain relief button. It was about 4:30am. As I lay there; watching the nurses walk between their stations and the various beds, checking temperatures, replacing dressing and sitting on their computers reviewing data, I felt like I was in a game. They walked around with lights in their hands and shone them at exact spots for different reasons; because an alarm went off here, because they knew that they checked this this thing every 10 minutes. I started trying to learn their patterns and understand their movement, I was trying to figure out if I could fit in with them. Somewhere in the process, I alienated myself from them, and I sat there listening to the ‘moody’ playlist on Spotify and feeling lonely instead. My bed was in the corner and had a load of equipment next to it.
A few minutes later, the nurse surprise me and came over to get some equipment from the shelves next to me. I hadn’t predicted it. Damn it. “You do a lot for people you know,” I said to her as she filled up a box of various things from the drawers next to me. “We’re just here to take care of people, dear,” she replied with a smile. “It’s 4 o’clock. You need to sleep,” we were back to the games. I told her that I’d lost my headphones a few minutes prior after taking them out to talk to her. We found them together a few minutes later. It was a long night, why not waste a few minutes of her valuable time on my pointless games.
Stories are abundant in hospital, that’s for sure. My dad used to obsessively watch 24 Hours in A&E on tv here in England. It’s a show following the Accident and Emergency department of a hospital for 24 hours. It has everything that a compelling story might have – twists, tribulations, trauma. They don’t need to seek the stories out, only place the cameras in the buildings and wait. They knew that the stories would come from there. We haven’t been watching it so much these last few months. It isn’t so fun when your family is currently suffering from an ailment which affects you, very much centred around hospitals. My dad probably still does, but not when I’m around.
I don’t have enough energy to really speak at length about everything right now. Eventually, I’ll talk more about hospital and all of the challenges that came with it. For now, I wanted to think you all for the messages of support, and let you know that I’m doing well. I’m getting stronger every day and can walk outside the hospital when my family visit. I’m going stir-crazy on the ward and am hopeful that they will discharge me tomorrow so I can continue my recovery at home with my amazing family, fiancée and Lucy dog. The hospital want my insulin levels to balance before taking this final step, and we seem to have achieved this over the weekend.
I’m trying to do my best to remain grateful, but there is a lot of change on the horizon. It’s all very intimidating. I know that being diabetic will just be another thing that I’ll grow accustom too, but combined with the future threat of cancer, recovery from surgery and lack of any pancreatic enzymes in my body at all, it feels daunting. The next few weeks will be an interesting journey through these facets of the illness.
This is also the 100th post on the blog! What a momentous post to coincidentally fall into this milestone! Here’s to plenty more Ebb and Flowing (preferably without all the cancer, but we’ll see).
‘You wanna move mountains, go ahead I think I’ll suffocate instead A change of scenery won’t tame The endless earthquakes in my head So I’ll suffer through A means to an end, it’s all I can do’
This will be my final post before I go into surgery on Friday. I would imagine that it will be at least a week before I post again, if not longer. I’ve been told that I will be on a high-dependency ward for the first few days. Once I am cleared from that ward, I will be moved to a more routine one for around a week. Of course, it all depends on what is done during the procedure, how well I recover and whether there are any complications along the way. If a Whipple procedure is possible, the impact will be much greater on my body than the NanoKnife.
As the dietician told me, the Whipple involves the surgical team creating 3 new joins in the digestive system. Hearing the phrase ‘new joins’ in relation to your digestive system is a little unnerving; I can’t say that it is an attractive prospect of surgery. The fact that the Whipple would probably be my best chance at getting rid of the cancer however, makes the concept of having new joins in my digestive system a very attractive thing indeed. Join me up, doc… that felt a little weird to type.
Cancer is always pulling you in a million directions. Your standard of life changes so much that you find yourself feeling grateful to be eligible for major surgery, strangely looking forward to potentially having your digestive system rearranged like a hamster run. Of course, the alternative, to not have an operation and allow the cancer to grow inside your body unabated, is most definitely not better. Imagine telling myself a year ago, “Hey Dan, in 12 months you’ll be eight months into treatment for stage 3 pancreatic cancer and looking forward to an operation,” I’d probably have replied with a laugh and a “Who would look forward to major surgery?” I also thought I was immune to things like cancer 12 months ago because nobody in my family has had it. I thought I was invincible so long as I was either training for an ultra-marathon, or actually running one. Turns out that running ultra-marathons doesn’t actually make you immune to cancer. It probably makes your body a little bit better at fighting it, though, so it was still worth something. Hopefully. I enjoyed it anyway so it was worth every second.
I say that I’m looking forward to surgery. I’m not. That probably isn’t a surprise. It would be short-sighted to not acknowledge what a privileged position I am in to be offered this opportunity, though. There are people that read this blog regularly who are not in the position I am in, some who have been definitively told they are inoperable. My surgeon told me that to the majority of oncologists/surgeons, I may have been deemed to be inoperable given the circumstances, but luckily I am with a forward-thinking and optimistic team who do see opportunity here. I am grateful for that, and thus, am looking forward to being afforded such an opportunity. Am I looking forward to going through it, though? Hell no. Am I looking forward to putting my family through it? Hell no. It isn’t good for anyone involved, but it has the potential to change everything.
With a Whipple procedure unlikely to be a possibility, it’ll probably be NanoKnife. Although that carries a smaller recovery time, it still requires the surgeon to cut into my abdomen and play around with the organs there. Clamping this, cutting that; the scene doesn’t inspire a lot of enthusiasm in my brain. Then I remember that one of the things being cut is the tumour itself, and all of a sudden I get all evil and masochistic. “Do your worst, surgeon! Make him pay!” I feel like rubbing my hands together and snarling as I grin, staring at my own stomach. I’d only be cursing my own body, though, and I will eventually pay a price for whatever is done to the tumour. Whether that price is recovering from a successful removal, or recovering from electric pulses being applied to my pancreas, is yet to be seen. Either way, I’m sure it is going to suck at least a little bit in the days, weeks and possibly months afterwards.
I don’t like the war analogy when talking about cancer, but it can be hard to ignore. It’s hard not to liken yourself to someone fighting against an enemy force, even though you feel like a bystander in that war the majority of the time. You attend appointments, anticipate scan results and cower whenever the hospital calls you, but you don’t do a lot else to contribute to the process. Your war is usually with yourself – keeping your head up, finding a way through the painful days and doing your best to sleep well at night. It’s a war of attrition, but the cancer doesn’t have a brain to disadvantage it. Your brain will do everything in its power to attack you. Mine has been telling me that my neck is swollen, that it’s got in my lymph nodes and that my abdomen hurts more than usual. Sometimes, I wonder who’s side it’s really on.
It doesn’t help ignore the war analogy when you find yourself packing your bag the night before, knowing you have a critical period ahead of you. Last night, I was packing my bag and responding to all the lovely messages I’ve been sent. The war analogy felt real. Now, as I write this, I sit in the car on the way to hospital. It’s mostly silent… anticipation hangs in the air. I get the feeling that people feel more anxious than they’re letting on; you can sense it as we sit listening to the music playing from the speakers. Everyone is a sitting duck in their own head.
Anna has the password to the blog’s Twitter account, so that’s probably the best place to find an update soon on how things have gone. Thank you to everyone for the support. I will get back to all of the blog comments once I’m feeling well enough post-surgery! Thank you for continuing to read and I hope I’ll be coming back with some positive things to say next time I’m writing.
I was meant to be in surgery last Friday but it was postponed by a week. Part of me wishes that I had not uploaded a post informing the audience of that fact, then uploaded a post in the middle of the day on Friday talking about being in surgery. That should have pulled in some views! I guess you can schedule posts on here, so if my audience knew about the WordPress functionality, they may deduce that it was all a ruse. Also, everyone that knows me personally already knew that it was postponed and they probably make up 50% of the audience of this blog, if not more. It would have surely fooled some people reading, though. Maybe I could have sat Tweeting as if I was in surgery throughout the Friday. ‘The surgeon is just clamping my stomach out of the way so he can access the pancreas. Still no eyes on the tiny twat of a tumour. Painkillers doing a good job but all the blood and organs are making me a little queasy #Hemophobic #ThatsSoSurgery’, the first Tweet could have read, to the dismay and disbelief of my followers.
All of a sudden it feels like I have cheated time. I got a similar sensation when I used to travel from the UK to America for work. It always felt like I had gained a few hours back for my travelling, with the time difference allowing my watch to jump back 5 hours upon landing. Of course, you lose that gained time when you make your way back to the UK, assuming that you ever go back. In a similar fashion with the surgery, I will lose another week further down the line recovering, where I would have felt better if I had been in surgery last Friday. That is probably worded a little confusingly, but hopefully you get my point. Now that I seem to have perfected the art of time travel, I may as well use some of my meaningless time to write another blog post, after a mini-hiatus.
I was shocked to read the news about Japan’s former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, being shot on Friday. Even more shocking was waking up to the news the following day that he had died. I spent a good 30 minutes in bed looking through articles from every news outlet I could find asking one simple question of them – why did it happen? Why did this man decide to shoot the prime minister dead during what seemed like a routine campaign speech? Further to this, why did he go to such lengths, creating his own firearm, just to carry out such a malice act? I couldn’t find anything provocative in the topic of speech, or even in the prime minister’s history in office. If anything, it seemed that he gained a lot of respect during his time in office, both domestically and on the international stage.
The answer to the question regarding why he created his own firearm seemed more straightforward – Japan has tight gun laws, so guns are hard to come by and gun crime is extremely low. Hence, if you want to shoot someone, you will struggle to get hold of a gun, so making one may be easier. Creating your own firearm requires a lot of planning, providing the potential perpetrator more time to get some perspective on what they are preparing to do. This person really wanted to kill this man, and no amount of time was convincing him otherwise. He followed through with the heinous act until the very end.
In the most human of ways, I was yearning for a concrete reason as to why this man decided to do this, as if everything is that simple. We humans like to organise the world into stories – they provide us with structure and allow us to better understand an event. In understanding the event, we can put it to bed in our minds, by providing an ending to the story and feeling that it was concluded. Sometimes we don’t find out the ending and it bugs us, but that also makes it an effective technique in storytelling – leaving it down to the interpretation of the audience, allowing them to create their own ending based on what they have learnt of the characters, events and mood of the piece. On other occasions, we may not like the ending of a story, and we find it jarring to accept what happened. By not agreeing with the ending of a story, we may discover more about ourselves and why we don’t accept the ending. Sometimes it may be obvious, like when our favourite character is killed. Other times it is less obvious, and we debate with friends over it, arguing that this or that should have happened differently.
I’ve been reading an interesting book recently called The Loop which talks a lot about human behaviour. One of the most interesting points that I have read is about how the brain processes information to ease the load on our cognitive functions. There are so many things occurring in the world around us that if we tried to perceive all of them at once, we would never get anything done. We would be overwhelmed by information, unable to make any meaningful decisions in response to it. To solve this problem, the book states that our brain takes all of the data from our senses and processes that information into a ‘story’ which we can process quickly. This allows us to make decisions quicker than we would otherwise be able to, which was critical to our survival when we were not organised into societies like we are now. If you are about to be attacked, you don’t have time to pay attention to the ambient bird song around you, or the storms approaching in the distance, you need to make a decision about the main threat as quickly as possible to better guarantee your survival. Will you run or will you fight? You’re usually already doing one before you have consciously made the decision.
I’m not sure how accurately I am describing these things, and whether they are mere theories, as opposed to things that are properly ‘proven’. To an extent, I think some of these theories are hard to conclusively prove as 100% correct, other than presenting evidence which seems to back them up. It makes sense to me, though. The fact that we seem so predisposed to enjoy stories and find predictable patterns in the world makes me believe it even more. Those things satisfy our brain because they make us feel safe, as if we understand that to be the natural order of the world. We like to think that things are predictable and follow a plot – it helps us drive our cars every day without worrying about the prospect of crashing, and it allows us to go about our lives without constantly worrying about having a heart attack at any random moment. We struggle to comprehend when a study is done, and the results tell us that our behaviour is irrational. Instead, we choose to believe that if we were in that study, we would have behaved differently, beating the odds and being one of the few that saw past the tricks. When we put a bet on a football team to win a game, they lose. When we decide to save the £5 we were going to bet on them winning, they do win. We curse the universe. Why does this always happen to me?
There are now theories about why the gunman carried out his heinous plan to kill the Japanese prime minister. Apparently, his motive centres around a political movement called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church for short. The gunman claims that his mum made a huge donation to the Unification Church in the 90s shortly after she joined, which put a huge financial burden on his family. He claims that Shinzo Abe has ties to the Unification Church, due to him speaking at an event (or a few events, it isn’t very clear from the reading I have done) organised by the them. Police have said that upon searching his house, they found other handmade guns. The gunman apparently attended a few other events that the ex-prime minister had spoken at, indicating that he has had a fascination with the prime minister for a while. It is certainly unwinding to be an interesting story, one that almost sounds too unusual to be a feat of real life as opposed to fiction. Perhaps I am simply overindulging in the story.
I have been creating a few of my own stories these past few days; I wish I could say they were happy ones, but they aren’t. It has been much tougher this week compared to last. Last week, I felt good until I woke up on Wednesday. From that morning, I felt tense, stressed and worried about the upcoming operation. The call then came on Thursday morning informing me that the operation was having to be moved, and it took me another few hours to fully decompress. I did, though, and I spent the weekend enjoying the nice weather, seeing friends and family, watching the Wimbledon finals and generally enjoying the impromptu time which was afforded to me by the operation being moved. Sunday night brought an end to that luxury.
Things have been hard since. A few things stick out in my mind which demonstrate where my head has been the last couple of days. At some point on Sunday, it struck me that I should have been in a high dependency unit at that very moment, with a wound across my stomach and tubes going in and out of every part of my body. It then occurred to me that all of this will still be happening to me exactly a week from that moment. That thought didn’t sit well with me. I wanted it to just be here so I could get on with it and deal with it. No matter what I did, my mind went back to that place. It is still frequently going there. Last week it hadn’t bothered me as much – even in my tenseness, I was eager to get the operation done. It wasn’t due to me fantasising about what state I’d be in this time next week. Now, these thoughts are haunting me quite frequently.
Next, my mum’s dog Dexter has been hunting in the garden this week. He is a spaniel, so has strong instincts to sniff out and dispose of other smaller animals that he regards as inferior to him. Monday night he found a hedgehog and was running around the garden with it in his mouth. My sister eventually got him to drop it and put him back inside. The poor thing was curled up on the soil, blood speckled on its wood-brown spikes. It was breathing heavily. We weren’t sure if the blood was from Dexter’s mouth, wounds on the hedgehog, or both. We hoped it was from Dexter, but doubted it all was. After standing over it with a phone light for 10 minutes, we decided to go inside and return a little while later to see if it had left. 20 minutes later we returned and it had left, leaving only small blood stains on the strands of grass next to where it had been cowering. We couldn’t find it in the garden anywhere, and Dexter hasn’t run around with a hedgehog corpse since, which would have certainly happened if it was in the garden. I’ve convinced myself that the hedgehog is still alive somewhere as that ending makes me feel better. Unfortunately, I know that it is probably unlikely to be true, and the poor thing probably ran off to take refuge somewhere else away from the danger, only to suffer and die. That thought isn’t nice.
The next evening, last night, I was soundly asleep with all of the windows open. There is a heatwave in the UK at the minute and it is incredibly humid, especially during the night. I woke up to the sound of my dad shouting at Dexter. Earlier on in the day, we noticed a baby bird hopping around on the ground in the garden. My sister said that this is normal when they leave the nest as it takes them some time to learn to fly. We watched it hop around before it took refuge in a small corner of the garden. It was incredibly cute. Knowing where it was, we kept the dogs away from that spot. My sister had then let the dogs out in the front garden that night to go to the toilet before bed. She thought that the front garden would be safer than the back, as the back garden was where we had seen the baby bird and where the hedgehog had been the previous night. Dexter had apparently made some unusual sounds, and she had rushed over to find that he had the baby bird in his mouth and was shaking it. I’d been woken up by my dad shouting at him to drop it. He eventually did, and the bird was still alive, though my sister doubted it would be for much longer.
That happened at about 00:30. I lay awake for a while afterwards. In my head, I watched as the bird’s bones and feathers were compressed by the dog’s jaw. It bothered me that I lay there peacefully in bed, but outside there was a young creature probably calling out for its mother; the last gasps of helplessness before it succumbed to its injuries. All of a sudden, I felt a strong connection to it. I saw myself laying there during the operation. I felt the surgeon saying the words to the other specialists in the room – “It’s worse than we thought. What can we possibly do to save this young man’s life?” I felt the void open in my mind as I sat there in the hospital bed days later, listening to the news that they have tried what they can, but that the tumour is more established than they could have anticipated. At some point among this noise, I fell asleep, putting an end to the bleak safari that I was taking myself on.
It was short-lived, though. I woke up at 03:00 with a bad indigestion-type pain in my abdomen. That was familiar – it was the original symptom that I had tried to get diagnosed for over a year during the Covid lockdowns. The familiarity provided no comfort, quite the opposite. My body was mimicking my dark fantasies from a few hours ago. It was writing the story for me, telling me that something has changed, that things have gotten worse. I rolled over every few minutes. Each time I closed my eyes and told myself that I was being stupid, but that voice was quieter than the other one. “It’s spread,” it screamed. “You know that it’s spread!”
As I lay there, I started obsessively thinking about the tumour surrounding the artery. I thought about it strangling it, spewing the cancer throughout my bloodstream and forcing tumours throughout my body, wherever it cared to devise them. I felt like I could feel them. It’s the most sinister feeling I’ve ever had about the cancer. I’ve felt scared before, but I’ve never felt so inwardly disgusted by own my body. It felt like the enemy. My mind was wandering; I wasn’t viewing this story as one with a hung ending, providing the potential of different endings, some good and some bad… I was viewing it as a conclusive story – the cancer is spreading, the surgery will be unsuccessful, I won’t recover from this.
Today, as I drove back from an appointment at the hospital, I noticed a single raindrop land on the windscreen of the car. It felt pronounced, yet inconspicuous. I sat waiting for another rain drop to hit, but it didn’t come. “Did you just see that single raindrop?” I said to my mum. It fascinated me. Then, another single raindrop hit. A few seconds passed, and the storm came. A flood of thin rain dotted the windscreen. I smiled to myself. “That was so strange,” I announced to my mum, wondering if she knew what I was talking about, or was just entertaining me as a show of support for my deteriorating mental state.
For whatever reason, I seem to be finding a lot of stories in the world around me at the minute. A lot of those stories are not going in a good direction, probably influenced by the stresses of the looming surgery, and a return to that tense state that I found myself in last week. The raindrops on the screen left me in suspense – what was going to happen? Why did a single droplet reveal itself right in my line of sight? When the rain finally came, I felt a rush of adrenaline as the story concluded before my very eyes. I had been scanning my mirrors to see if the raindrop could have come from any trees by the road. There weren’t any. For a few seconds, it baffled me. Then, when the rain came, I felt relieved.
Maybe there was a chance that my story could end with a positive outcome. Maybe the tumour will be different to how it looked on the scan; maybe they will even be able to remove the whole thing in the surgery and carry out a full Whipple procedure. Even if they don’t, the NanoKnife could do a serious number on it. NanoKnife may even get rid of it, even if the surgeon was reluctant to emphasise this point, due to a lack of evidence of NanoKnife being used to treat pancreatic cancer. I just don’t know the end of the story yet and I need to stop trying to predict it based on my negative thoughts. I’m here for the ride either way so I need to focus on enjoying it… It just seems impossible, sometimes.
Nothing is straightforward with cancer. I was driving in my car with my brother Alfie this morning when I got a call from an ‘0161’ number… Manchester’s area code. “Oh no. That’s probably the hospital calling,” I said to my brother. My jaw was already tensing up. What is this going to be… My surgery was scheduled for 7:15am on Friday 8th July – tomorrow morning.
I answered it on the hands-free system in the car and immediately recognised the voice to be that of the surgeon. My brother was sitting next to me and could hear everything as we drove down the dual-carriageway heading to the shops to pick up an online order. I always find it hard to recall the exact wording of conversations, especially ones which give me so much anxiety that I worry my stomach may pop out of my mouth. I’ve spoken to my brother about the exact wording a few times since and have landed on what I think is an accurate account of it.
After the usual pleasantries, I approximate the first sentence from the surgeon’s mouth to be this: “We’ve been reviewing your case this morning and we have some unfortunate news… your surgery can not go ahead this Friday,” he said. The brain has an amazing capability to run a million scenarios in a millisecond when it concerns something of high severity. My life is ultimately in the balance here, so I’d consider this to be of pretty high severity with regards to how important it is to me. In that split second that he paused, I had concluded that they had finally reviewed my more recent scans, that they had seen a spread, or determined something was worse than they originally thought, and that I was now destined to die within a week (the last part may be a slight exaggeration).
“There is a national shortage of the NanoKnife needles. We can’t get any in time for the surgery tomorrow. We’re looking to move your surgery to next Friday,” he continued. He was really apologetic. At one point, he even said “I know you will have been looking forward to the surgery, and I was looking forward to it too.” I can’t remember what my response was to this, but it has made me laugh a lot since. I love the idea of my surgeon sitting at home, excitedly reviewing his calendar for all of the different surgeries that he has going on that week. Upon seeing his next Whipple, the procedure I may be having, he gets giddy and says to himself “Yes! I get to do a Whipple on Friday! 10 hours of surgery to kick off the weekend! Woohoo!” He carries himself in such a professional manner in real life – I think that’s what makes the image so funny… and the fact that he described himself as ‘excited’ for the operation, of course. I’m sure that he was looking forward to it for the life-saving potential that the operation could present for a fellow human-being, but it is more fun to pretend that he was looking forward to it because he just loves scalping away at people’s organs. It sounds quite sinister when put like that.
Sinister seems to be an accurate description of the pancreas more generally. Ali Stunt, the CEO of Pancratic Cancer Action, told me that surgeons need a lot of experience before being allowed to operate on the pancreas. Her reasoning for this was that the pancreas is a fleshy, buttery texture, which makes it awkward to operate on. It also has a major artery around it, the one which my tumour has befriended and continuously hugs (to my dismay). As if all that wasn’t enough, it is also in a really awkward place to access during surgery, sitting behind other organs. The head of the pancreas is in a particularly awkward place so, of course, that is where my tumour decided to set up camp.
Ali then described it as a ‘weird’ organ. After hearing what she had to say about it, I thought it was a bit of an understatement. I decided in my head that I hate the pancreas even more than I did before. Not only is it a spiteful bastard, which once inhibited by a tumour stops you from digesting fat or regulating your bloodsugar levels properly, but it is also a creepy texture. Sinister. Creepy. Spiteful. All words that I hope no one ever uses to describe me, and I’m sure you hope no one uses to describe you either.
Most people probably don’t think about what their pancreas is up to even once a year; I wonder if mine is bothering to do anything about once every 5 minutes. I constantly have to assess my own stools to determine whether they are floating or beached, both indications that my body hasn’t absorbed the oil from the food. It is all very undignified. If they are either of those things, I have to think back to what I had eaten the day before and how much of my Creon supplement I had alongside it. I then have to increase it the next time that I eat that food, or something similar. Nothing makes food more enjoyable than constantly wondering how much fat is in it, how many Creon that fat translates into, and whether it’ll be enough to make my stools not float the next day. Perhaps I should start talking about this in detail every time I am eating, with everyone sat in close proximity to me. That’s one way to get yourself scratched off the invite list to every dinner party that you may have been invited to that year. I’d probably still get invited until after my wedding at least – no one wants to start a tit-for-tat invite war when there is a wedding on the horizon… it makes far more sense to stop speaking after they’ve drained me of all the food, booze and good times that they can; before the cancer potentially gets too serious and they have to ‘be there for me’.
Anyway… the surgery has been moved to next Friday, July 15th. It was a relief to hear that there wasn’t any bad news about my cancer spreading or surgery not being a possibility, but it was hard to calm down from the tense, anxious-filled state that I had found myself in since Wednesday morning.
Tuesday evening was the final plan I had before surgery. Me and some of my good friends went out for a meal at a local Italian restaurant. The table was set out awkwardly, making it feel a little like The Last Supper. I’m not suggesting that I am Jesus here, but I guess I would be in these circumstances. That means that someone in attendance was the snake who gave me cancer, if I am remembering and applying the story accurately. I’m probably not.
It was a lovely evening and we all laughed a lot. That night, I struggled to sleep. It was all over; nowhere left to hide. The next thing in my calendar on my phone read ‘Operation Day’. Finally it was coming, but I had another 48 hours to wait before it would. If I could have sold away those 48 hours until I was laying on that operating table and counting down from 10, I would have. All I wanted was to be knocked out. Every minute until then felt like torture if I gave myself enough time to think about it. I was trying to keep myself busy with work, baking and relaxing with family, but it was getting harder. Surgery was on my mind and my mind was on surgery.
Backing down from that place today was hard on me mentally. The tenseness did not go for a few hours. I needed to amp myself up as the surgery was approaching faster. Now I had to deflate myself again. The surgeon knew that, I’m sure. That is probably why he was so apologetic on the phone. It seemed very sincere. Now, I have to reset the clock in my mind. Another 7 days which I need to fill with more plans to distract from the surgery… I’m sure I can have a good go at that. The thought occurred to me that it is another 7 days where my cancer may spread, unabated by any treatment. I’m getting better at fighting those thoughts, but they still come sometimes. Worrying about it spreading won’t make it any less likely to happen, though, and I’m sure the risk of that happening in an additional 7 days is low… if I was warned that the chemotherapy side-affects can last for 3 months after the treatment ends, I’d hope that means that the chemotherapy is still doing something for that time too. Hopefully…
I wanted to keep this post short so all those that I haven’t spoken to personally know that I won’t be in surgery tomorrow, without having to read 3,000 words of me chatting my normal nonsense. Of course, I had to indulge in a little bit of nonsense – 1,600 words of it to be exact. It is disappointing that it was delayed, especially so last minute, but it can’t be helped. There are plenty of bumps in the cancer road; this is just another one of them. At least I get another week to run, weight train and eat as much as I physically can. I made the below white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake to help my weight gain last night, and it should definitely do that.
Thank you for all the lovely messages today and over the last few days – I’ve felt the support coming from so many places, and in so many different forms – from thoughtful hampers to heartfelt messages. They all mean the world to me and I really mean that. If this means that I get a whole second round of lovely messages and hampers next week, so be it. I am a true martyr, I know.
Me and My Brother Celebrate Finishing Our 5K – 07.07.22
Another day, another appointment. Today it was with one of the dieticians at Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI). It was extremely useful and I recommend to anyone who has a Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary (HPB) disease, such as Pancreatic Cancer, to get in touch with a dietician from their hospital as early on in the treatment process as possible. I feel like I have had drips of information from other parts of my treatment, but nothing like the level of help that I received today. A lot of the strategies and knowledge I have utilised so far have come from research that I have done myself, or through discussions with other cancer sufferers. There was a really useful call that I joined with Pancreatic Cancer UK which lay out the fundamentals of Creon and why I need to take it, but that was a group call; having a 1-2-1 with a dietician allows you to dig deeper into the specifics of your individual case. No two cases of cancer are exactly the same after all.
Not only did I learn more about diet whilst suffering from pancreatic cancer generally, but I also learned a lot about diet when approaching a major surgery. Want to know the good news or the bad news first? Let’s get the bad news out of the way first… My assumption that getting as healthy as possible before surgery, by eating healthy foods and losing some weight, was totally wrong. Solid stuff, Dan – typical know it all idiot deciding that you know everything about the world and jumping to conclusions.
It turns out that the average person who has had a Whipple procedure will lose about 10% of their body weight post-surgery. That means that you want to put on weight before surgery to try to minimise the impact that this has on your body. Even if you are not having a Whipple, you will still lose weight after a major surgery due to the abundance of drugs and suffering appetite during recovery. Of course, I am assuming that you are a healthy weight before surgery; if you are overweight, I don’t think the advice would be the same. Then again, I’m not sure – I’ve had a single meeting with a dietician, so you probably want to take everything I say with a pinch of salt (and a whole trough of full-fat cream if you are trying to pile on weight before your own Whipple procedure, like I now am).
The good news is that I now get to eat whatever I want for a few weeks! Success! I’ve been encouraged to give away absolutely none of the cakes I bake and to eat them all myself. I essentially have a doctors note telling me that I NEED to eat as many calories as possible. Not only that, but I was given a leaflet which instructs me to eat pizza, cheese and crackers and fatty snacks like scones. It’s unusual to find myself praising surgery or cancer, but I have to give them both a tip of the hat here. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard medical professionals advising me to eat pizza; it feels like a trap.
My goal is now to turn up to the surgery, step onto the scales, and see the nurse’s eyes widen as she records my weight. “Two seconds sir, I just need to check something with the doctors,” she says, trying to hide the panic in her face. I’d stand there with a smug smile smudged across my face. Next thing I see is the doctor running around the corner – “Hello Daniel. It appears your weight has doubled in 10 days – how on earth did you manage such a feat?” He’d ask. I’d proudly reply “I started to blend scones and cream together to drink alongside my 16″ pizzas… and that is just my breakfast routine.” They’d praise my ingenuity before informing me that they can no longer proceed with surgery as I have eaten myself out of qualification… you win some you lose some, I guess.
In my case, though, I have been warned that I am unlikely to have a Whipple procedure. Due to where my tumour is, at the head of the pancreas and surrounding a major artery, it is unlikely that it will be possible. The fact that the pancreas is already in a difficult place to operate on, alongside the fact that the tumour is in an awkward position on my awkward pancreas, means it is near impossible to operate on in a conventional way (conventional being the Whipple procedure, which is anything but conventional; it essentially involves removing various organs from the digestive tract before attaching it back together in a new order). Further to this, today I learned that having a tumour in the head of the pancreas is more damaging than having one in the tail as the head is where the main pancreatic activity is; it is the part of the organ which produces insulin, as well as the part which creates the enzymes that break down fats. A tumour in the head of the pancreas may also physically block the enzymes from getting into the stomach.
I’ve tried to explain it all a little better in the following paragraph, which I wrote over a long period of time and with great effort. I ensured I did plenty of research before writing it, and am confident that it clearly demonstrates the functions of the pancreas, and why having a tumour in the head of the pancreas is so damaging to your body. Not only does it clearly demonstrate these things, but it does so in a way that the layman can understand, like you and I. Whether the mainstream medical journals choose to praise me for achieving what they never could, is up to them; if it is too edgy then so be it, not everyone can take my raw and direct approach.
The reason that the Whipple procedure is so difficult is because your stupid pancreas is behind your stupid stomach, so it is already hard to operate on in stupid surgery. The pancreas produces stupid insulin to control your stupid blood-sugar levels in your stupid body, but it also creates stupid enzymes which help break down stupid fats in your stupid stomach. When you have a stupid tumour in the stupid head of the stupid pancreas, it disrupts all of this stupid activity because the stupid head of the stupid pancreas is the part which is stupidly responsible for producing and releasing these stupid enzymes and stupid insulin. That means that if you have a stupid tumour in the stupid head of your stupid pancreas then your stupid body starts struggling to supply the stupid enzymes to the stupid stomach which help it in breaking down the stupid fats. That is why stupid Creon, a stupid tablet that you have to take a stupid amount of with meals, is so stupidly necessary when you have a stupid tumour in the head of your stupid pancreas. Further to all of this, the individual who stupidly allowed a stupid tumour to grow in the head of the stupid pancreas has an increased chance of developing stupid diabetes because of the stupid pancreas not producing enough stupid insulin anymore. Capiche? Good. Glad I got that off my chest. Probably some of my best writing, if I may be so bold.
Seeing as a Whipple procedure is so unlikely in my case, you may be wondering why they are going to be slicing my entire abdomen open and spending hours operating on me. This is where Irreversible Electroporation (IRE), also known as NanoKnife, comes into play. I’m not sure why it has two names, which seem to introduce it as two quite different things, at least linguistically. Irreversible Electroportation makes it sound technical and cutting edge. NanoKnife makes it sound like the surgeon requests the extra small knife for this part of the procedure, before grasping it with the thumb and finger and delicately shaving the tumour away. Although the second is far more entertaining to imagine, I believe that the first far better describes the technique. A small electric shock is applied to the tumour, attempting to kill the cells. Its success in treating pancreatic cancer is little documented and not really understood, so we are in “uncharted waters,” to quote the surgeon in my first meeting with him. They do not commonly agree to do a major operation, only to use an experimental form of treatment with little documentation over whether it is likely to improve the situation or not. The treatment does seem to have good results with prostate cancer, though, so I really am positive that it is a good alternative if a Whipple cannot be done.
What I don’t like is the use of the word ‘Irreversible’. I can’t think of many medical contexts where you want to hear the word ‘irreversible’ used. Perhaps if there was a procedure called ‘Irreversible Cancer Killer’ which irreversibly killed all cancer cells in your body, I’d be on board. I haven’t heard of such a procedure, though. In this case, the word ‘irreversible’ just makes me think that I’ll be sat in a meeting in 5 months time, reviewing a new batch of scans of my pancreas. As the doctor explains to me that the electric shocks have irreversibly damaged my pancreas, I’ll sit with a confused look on my face. “I thought this was meant to help? Is there nothing you can do?” The doctor then smugly laughs and says to me, “I’m sorry Daniel, do you understand the definition of irreversible? The clue is really in the name.” I absolutely do not believe any of my oncologists would speak to me like this, but it is fun to have a bad guy in a story. I hope none of them read this blog… Who am I kidding, they’re far too busy to read this nonsense.
Anyway, this all relates to diet because a Whipple procedure takes a lot longer to recover from. The dietician told me that they make three new ‘joins’ in your digestive tract when doing a Whipple. I’m pretty sure I cringed when I heard her say the word ‘joins’ in relation to my digestive tract; it makes me view my abdomen as a kitchen sink, and the surgeon as a plumber rearranging the pipes. There’s something disturbing about it. I don’t like it. Those new joins make digesting food difficult for a long time, as the area is tender.
The nurse told me that a Whipple procedure would probably take 2 – 3 months recovery to even be eating normally again. NanoKnife would be considerably less than this. When I asked the anaesthetist yesterday how long I’d have to wait to find out which procedure they had done after waking up, she told me to check the time on my phone once I’m awake and sitting up. “If it’s 18:00 or later – they’ve done a Whipple.” I guess I’ll be waking up and grabbing my phone straight away, like the modern-day millennial I am. The nurses will probably think I’m Twitter-mad or something.
I know that in reality, it does not matter, though. The surgeons don’t know what they are doing yet; it is all about what they see when they open me up and what is deemed possible. Either way, I’ll wake up and will be forced to deal with the consequences. I need to let go of wanting to understand both scenarios and how awful they may be for me in terms of recovery. What I need to focus on is what the dietician told me to do before the surgery – do more strength training in the gym, keep up the running, and EAT EAT EAT! Alongside this, I need to keep good dental hygiene; this is to try and prevent myself from getting any chest infections or bugs during or after treatment. Apparently, most of these bugs are transmitted from your mouth, so the better your oral health, the less likely you are to develop any of these issues.
I also learned a little more about Creon use. The nurse seemed to mostly praise my use of Creon but did tell me a few useful things. Mainly that you should only be taking Creon when there is food in your stomach; taking any before or after is pointless. You should take your first one just after starting to eat, and your last one just before the last few mouthfuls. Alongside this, if you suffer from acid reflux, you need to have an anti-acid prescribed to you to ensure that the capsules travel through your body without the enzymes being damaged. I suffer from acid reflux badly, so this is a key problem for me. I have Omeprazole prescribed to help with this issue, but my GP in Alsager, my home town, keep saying that it is not on a repeat prescription, despite being on my medication list whenever I pick up prescriptions from there… very unusual. The dietician said she would send them a letter and resolve this issue. Another reason to see the dietician as early as possible – they get shit done (or mine did, at least)!
So, another day and another meeting at MRI. Today’s was good. I left it feeling positive. It is good to learn new things about managing your cancer better and I felt empowered by the whole process. Any directorate to eat everything you want is good in my book – I’m going to go baking mad and not feel any guilt for any of it, not that I felt that much guilt anyway. I just didn’t eat too much of it myself before. That’s about to change…
Lastly, as I finished writing this post, I saw a headline on my phone stating that Dame Deborah James has died at the age of 40. She was truly defiant in the face of her diagnosis, raising millions of pounds for charity and raising awareness, with courage, wit and openness. The image of a beautiful woman fighting a deadly cancer is powerful in itself, disbanding the common idea that cancer sufferers are older, weaker and frailer than the rest of society. It surprises people to learn that I have stage 3 pancreatic cancer, and although I am charmed by these remarks, they demonstrate the fact that many expect your cancer to be visible; they expect you to be worn down by it. Of course, there comes a point where the cancer will get the better of you if you cannot get rid of it, and you will change physically, as anyone does when they near their end. Life is not infinite, though. We fight to stay with our families, friends and loved ones, but we grow ever more aware that the fight may be in vain. Deborah chose to use her position for good, channelling tremendous energy into that fight, as well as the one against her cancer. I’m sure both fed into the other, making her an even stronger person. She’s an inspiration to me as I write these blog posts, and knowing that she was originally a cancer blogger makes her even more inspiring.
Rest in peace, Deborah. Your suffering is over now; I hope that your loved ones take some comfort in that fact. I know I’d want mine to.
You’ll have to excuse the constant posting about surgery, but it is a bit of a hot topic at the minute. The headline is that I have a surgery date – Friday, July 8th. I need to get to the hospital nice and early – for 7:15am that morning. Upon hearing the time, as the scheduler spoke to me on the phone, I briefly thought to myself, “I’m going to be shattered,” but then I realised that I am going to the hospital to be put asleep/knocked out for approximately ten hours during surgery, followed by days in intensive care recovering from whatever they manage to do to me to improve my cancer. I’m pretty sure I’ll find a way to not worry about how tired I may be after my 5:30am wakeup on that first day. That was a thought that certainly didn’t age well in the five seconds it existed in my head; I travelled from an innocent thought about being tired, to tyrannical thoughts about surgeons playing Operation on my real-life body. Come to think of it, the Whipple procedure may have been thought up as a surgeon was playing the board game Operation considering the aim of the game is to remove all of the organs out of a body; that doesn’t sound too far away from what the Whipple procedure aims to do to your digestive tract.
The surgeon told us in our first meeting with him that the best-case scenario will require about ten days in the hospital. The worst-case scenario that he has experienced with someone he has personally operated on was two months in hospital, where there were many complications. Luckily, he has never had anyone die on him, but he did say that a colleague in his team has. I think that was a veiled dig at his colleague; these surgeons are a competitive lot, even in the most serious of circumstances. I left the hospital thanking the universe that it was him performing the operation and not his colleague, even though I’m sure his colleague is a very skilled and diligent individual. I just don’t want to chance it, really. Although, given that it is such a long procedure, perhaps they work it by tagging in different members of the team like a wrestling tag match. Damnit. Don’t think of it, Dan. It won’t matter to you no matter what happens, you’ll be out like a light.
Specific complications that the surgeon called out included the pancreas leaking pancreatic fluid, the patient needing blood transfusions and I must have blocked out the rest of the list because I can’t remember any more examples. Leaking pancreatic fluid sounds pretty gross, I know that much. I remember him telling me that Nano-knife works by applying a small shot of electricity. The shock is supposed to be small enough so as not to produce too much additional heat, but I think he said that there is a risk that the heat could damage my organs. Maybe I’m remembering that wrong, I’m not sure. The meeting is a little hazy now, so trying to piece together the specific things that were said, and why they were said, is difficult. He definitely spoke about how the Nano-knife technique produces a small amount of heat and spoke about why they wanted to minimise this, but I think that I was high on adrenaline at this point and simply nodding my head and smiling, in a picture probably reminiscent of Christian Bale in American Psycho. For some reason, I always find myself being more upbeat in these meetings; I’ve probably creeped out every oncologist, doctor and surgeon that I’ve met who has been involved in the process. During my diagnosis, I actually started laughing when the doctor said “it’s bad news I’m afraid.” I couldn’t help but feel like I was in a drama on TV and couldn’t believe the news was actually being delivered like this. I was waiting for the Eastenders theme tune to start playing, but it didn’t.
There are a few questions that the surgery has raised, but the most important one is this: is five weeks enough time to recover and go on my stag do? We’re assuming so because otherwise a lot of plans have to be changed. What plans specifically, I’m not sure, as I wasn’t invited to the sleepover where they all drew up the sinister blueprints for the weekend. Luckily, I have literally centimetres of cancer in my pancreas (2.1cm to be exact), so they aren’t allowed to physically or emotionally traumatise me too much. That is how it works, right? Surely I’m not expected to join in with the Frosty Jacks boat races or anything. If Frosty Jacks boat races were not on the agenda already, I’m certain it will be after my best man Luke reads that sentence. He’ll kick himself for not putting it in the schedule already.
For those of you who don’t live in the UK, or who lived a much healthier teenage life than me and my friends, Frosty Jacks is a cheap cider which has an alcohol content of 7.5%. When we were younger, you could buy a 3-litre bottle of it for about £3.50, which is absolutely crazy. It has something like 22.5 units in a bottle and we drank them quite religiously from the age of 16 to about 18. If I tried to drink it now, it may actually kill me, both because it is almost certainly 99% chemicals, but also because the amount of alcohol in it could last me six months with my current drinking habits, or lack of. The thought of actually drinking a 3-litre bottle of Frosty Jacks over the course of six months is so sad, come to think of it… And for those of you who don’t know what a boat race is, it is where you split your group into two teams who compete against each other. The two teams face each other on either side of a table. Starting from the same side, both individuals start to down their drink. When they finish, the person next to them can start drinking. That means that everyone focuses on the one member of their team who is currently drinking, making it quite a high-pressure situation, especially when you’ve already had a few drinks and are getting competitive. The winning team is the one that finishes their drinks first. A truly remarkable game to be discussing in a cancer blog, I’m sure you’ll agree. I haven’t played it in years and have no desire to, but we have to keep the blog content fresh somehow – it can’t all be ‘cancer this’ and ‘cancer that’!
One thing that my best man has shared with me is that he has started baking bread over the weekend. That got me riled up, as I’ve been meaning to start baking bread for a while. So yesterday, I baked my first wholemeal loaf. It actually went pretty well. Today I did it again to test whether it was a fluke. Another success. It’s actually quite easy and makes eating it far more rewarding. Tomorrow, I’m going to try and bake a wholemeal spelt loaf. I know what you’re thinking, “that’s got an entire additional word in the name!” It’s a crazy thing to dare to do, but I’m going to do it. Replacing the wholemeal flour with the wholemeal spelt flour might just be the downfall of my entire bread baking career. If it goes well, though, it’ll mean that I have two types of wholemeal loaf to make in future. High risk, high reward!
‘The First Bake’
Half way through making some banana bread this afternoon, I received a call from Macmillan at Manchester Royal Infirmary. After my meeting with the surgeon last week at the hospital, I had spoken to the nurse about how I was feeling about things. I mentioned the financial concerns I had, which have been ever-present for months now ever since my employer made it impossible for me to return to work, yet only paid me a month’s full salary. Very nice of them. I truly believe that their HR department could receive ‘Worst HR Department in the UK’, which would be nice for them; I’m sure it is the only way they’d ever win an award.
Anyway, bitterness aside, the nurse had told me that she will get one of the Macmillan representatives at the hospital to call me and chat to me. Every time I see an ‘0161’ number calling me, my heart stops a little bit as it is the area code for Manchester, where the hospital is located. I’m always assuming it’ll be someone telling me some new development about my cancer. It was a relief to hear that it was Macmillan. The representative I spoke to was incredibly helpful. She spoke to me about all of the things that concerned me, offered to speak to my mum to further support her and said that she would get the financial advice team to call me after I have been discharged from the hospital, after the operation.
There was something in particular that she said which has really stuck with me and has given me such a lovely perspective. She stated that surgeons won’t decide to do something unless they see value in it, and that they believe that the pros will likely outweigh the cons of doing it. After all, it isn’t only my life at risk, but their own reputation (and pride too, probably). These decisions are highly calculated and scrutinised by an entire team of extremely skilled individuals. Not only that, but this is an expensive procedure to perform, requiring a complex surgery with a lot of equipment, and a long period in hospital afterwards for aftercare. Going ahead with it must mean that they perceive it worthy of that cost, which could be used elsewhere, for another patient.
Although I had thought of it in many different ways to help me process the news, I really hadn’t considered this one. It made me reconsider so much of the conversation that the surgeon had with me. He is always going to focus on the risks, concerns and potential issues – all of this information is incredibly important. If a patient walks out of that office not understanding the full extent of the consequences of agreeing to such an operation, they could end up agreeing to something that they, in fact, do not consent to at all. It is, therefore, the intent of the surgeon to ensure that the severity of the situation is communicated in the clearest of terms – that there is little evidence of how successful Nano-knife may be, that the operation is a major surgery and carries a lot of risk, and that my general diagnosis is a damning one, especially statistically. He also pointed out that most people in my position wouldn’t get an operation at all, but I am getting one, so they must see something different in the situation. Whether it is my age, health or diagnosis that they see as ‘different’, or a combination of those things, I don’t know. I don’t care, of course. I’m grateful that they made the decision that they did and I need to remind myself of that when I am fearful or anxious about the surgery. Surgery is what I wanted, and it was not guaranteed at all. It does create a strange dichotomy between the excitement of achieving that goal, yet knowing that it means I will be having a big operation, but that’s ok. Life is full of situations which leave us emotionally confused, being pulled in multiple directions at the same time. We are complex beings; we cannot expect ourselves to always feel certain we understand how we feel about a situation, especially where it is complex.
There is one last thing which I saw today that I thought was worth talking about. As my Twitter account is for the blog, and the primary things I follow on there are cancer-related accounts, I get a lot of cancer posts in my feed. Today on my feed, I saw the below post by the actress Mindy Kaling, who was put on my radar by the series The US Office, but has had her own show since, and has been in various big-budget films.
I’m joining advocates across the country during @PanCAN Action Week 2022 to ask my members of Congress to increase the federal investment in #pancreaticcancer research. You can make a difference for patients by texting PANCAN to 52886 and taking 3 easy actions. #PanCANactionpic.twitter.com/S0QMdMUU4Q
I thought that I was glad she was posting about it to her 11.5M followers. It has to be good for pancreatic cancer, I’d think. Spreading awareness on such a big platform is a great thing. Being nosy, I went to the comments. That’s where I found an …interesting… take. The following comment had been posted:
“What you’re doing is great but children with multiple malignant brain tumors with so much treatment that they suffer a stroke and end up paralyzed and still tumors in the brain that cannot be removed to cured.“
I’m honestly not sure what the central point even is here, it is so confusing how it is written. It seems to continue adding new ideas as the sentence drags on. What I do know is this – it may have been written with the best of intentions, but certainly doesn’t come across well to me at all. Why do people find a way to apply some form of elitism to every topic? What benefit is there to treating cancer like it is a new edition of Top Trumps? Mindy posting that she supports pancreatic cancer gaining funding from the government does not mean that she does not support more funding going towards children with cancer, or any form of brain cancer research. Why this person thought that this was a helpful or mindful thing to say, I do not know. The two things are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps they actually know more than I do, and the additional money would be allocated from brain tumour research, in which case it may make more sense. They have not said this, though. Sometimes I really wonder what people’s intent is – I’m sure this person came in with the best of intentions, but what help does it really provide? Is it really an appropriate place to raise such an argument? So, I want to make this clear – when I say that I believe pancreatic cancer needs more funding, given it has the top mortality rate of any common cancer, it does not mean that I want money diverted away from any other cancers necessarily, or that I don’t value the struggle that other cancers bring. Having said that, pancreatic cancer seems to be low down on the priority list, due to an average diagnosis age of 72 and difficulty diagnosing it early enough to do anything about it (in most cases). Of course, the second issue is also probably that way due to a lack of funding, which I believe to be because it has been designated as an ‘old person’ cancer, which relates it back to point one. It is a vicious circle.
No one will say the words ‘it’s fine if old people die’ publically, but that is essentially what is happening in terms of pancreatic cancer, and I do believe that it hurts the attractiveness of the cancer in terms of research funding. I understand that having such an old average age of diagnosis is a genuine consideration when dealing with cancer and research grants, as it is much harder to save people who fall ill at this age, but it seems to be becoming unjustifiable. I regularly see pancreatic cancer charities sharing posts stating that the survival rate has not changed in over 50 years – how is that acceptable with how quickly our technology seems to move? I’m sure that the other common cancers have experienced at least some improvements in this period, if not significant ones.
The overall lesson is simple, though. Think about what you write online. It may feel like it only matters to you, as you sit alone on your phone and decide to voice your opinion on something, but by writing it, you are throwing it out into the online ether for anyone and everyone to consume at their will. I’m not sure if this comment was trying to imply that so long as children get brain tumours, no other cancer is worthy of consideration, but if it is, that isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to make people who care about pancreatic cancer feel bad for doing so, and it isn’t fair to take away from the message of Mindy’s post. No one would disagree that the things being described by them are horrific, and if that has happened to someone this person knows then I feel even more sympathy, but it is not the only consideration at play. It is also not the place to make such an argument. Would they be happier if Mindy took the post down, choosing to only post about brain tumours instead? Will she see your comment and repent, or simply ignore you? I believe the latter is more likely.
Rant over (until the next one). One day closer to surgery!
Ebb and Flow 