Friday
There are so many different doctors and nurses here. It seems like I meet at least one new one every day. "My" doctor is Dr. Jiang, and I see her most days. But she's not here every day, so sometimes I get a substitute. And the huge team of nurses seems to be on constant rotation. I'm trying to learn all their names, but it's pretty hopeless. They don't seem to mind at all; I expect it's a common problem.
Every member of staff who sets foot in this room asks me how I'm feeling. At first I found this mildly irritating and would give a stock response like "Been better", "Not too bad" or "Okay, I suppose". But some of them, Dr. Jiang in particular, would follow up with more specific questions. Dr. Jiang would even go so far as to stop whatever else she was doing, sit down next to the bed, and wait for me to answer.
She was gently and persistently teaching me something, and after a few days I got the message. The lesson was simple: these people really do want to know how I'm feeling. Talking about it makes it easier for them to do their jobs, and helps me to feel... well, better than I otherwise would.
It's as if they've all somehow found the time to take a crash course in counselling. Maybe they have. Or maybe it's that sincerity thing I started noticing a couple of weeks ago. Maybe they just innately care.
So now I talk about how I'm feeling every day, often several times a day. I appreciate and value it much more than I would ever have thought possible. It's such a load off that I don't really feel the urge to unload negativity into this book so strongly any more. I mean, I'm not just going to abruptly stop writing...
Well, actually I am, I suppose. But I mean...
Ah shit, crying again. This one really blindsided me. Didn't see it coming at all.
Saturday
You've probably noticed that, prior to being admitted as an inpatient, I didn't write very much at all about hospitals, doctors, nurses, tests, diagnoses, treatments and that kind of thing. This wasn't because there wasn't an awful lot of that kind of thing going on. It was because it felt like that kind of thing was all that was going on, so I was using this book to focus on anything else I could think of. I still am. Although now I'm in hospital all day, every day, you can except a bit of a shift.
The fact is that when I was diagnosed, the technicalities just washed over me. I didn't understand what the doctors were telling me, and I didn't want to try to. What difference did it make? The one thing I did understand was that there was no way out of this. The potential benefits of surgery or chemotherapy were minor, and both had a pretty high chance of killing me prematurely. So all that could be done was to use a carefully balanced cocktail of drugs to minimise my suffering while nature took its brutal course. I'll never know how successful it's been. Even the doctors have told me that while the research is pretty robust, there's a lot of guesswork when it comes to dealing with individual cases. Still, I'm willing to believe that without any treatment at all, the last few months would probably have been considerably worse.
Without the people who prescribed the drugs and monitored my condition too. Not because of the tests and treatments, you understand. Because of the people. Yes dear reader, it seems that, among many other things, imminent death makes you a cheesier writer.
Not so long ago, I thought doctors were just doing their jobs. They were doing their well-paid jobs at the same nominal level of incompetence as almost everyone else. Sure, I thought, there are some truly exceptional individuals in the medical profession, just as there are in all professions (commercial copywriting, for example). But even in the private sector you're lucky if you can find one.
They're people though, right? They're all more human than I've ever been.
And it's not just doctors. My final few months on Earth would have been worse without all of the people I know. Those I've known forever, and those who I've only just met.
How can I make this even cheesier? I know...
I'm one of those people. And it's like I fit into both categories. I've known myself forever but... fuck, I'm only just really getting to know myself. And it's too late. It's too fucking late.
Sunday
Sometimes I wonder what this situation would be like if I had a wife and kids. Certainly, the immediate and intuitive response would typically be to be much more emotionally affected by the idea of a woman and her young children losing the man to whom they are devoted, and on whom they likely depend in many ways. But isn't the fear of dying alone one of the most pervasive of all human neuroses? That must count for something. It is of course crass to even begin making these kinds of comparisons, but I'm living through one of the kinds of death I'm talking about here, so I'm going to go ahead and compare the real me to an imagined "family man" version of myself.
I don't have much more to say on the subject though. It's illimitably bad either way.
I'm crying yet again. This time I'm crying for me, and I'm crying for that other me. The one who's leaving a loving family behind. The one who can safely say that his death is worse for others than it is for him.
Wednesday
Inge finally came to visit on Sunday evening. For once her quietness was not easy to take. She wasn't calm.
Don't get me wrong, I was so glad to have her here, but we just didn't seem to have anything much to offer each other. I'd had a bad day that day, even by my standards, and she could feel it as soon as she entered the room.
Fuck! Fucking tears again.
It felt like it was over. It felt like it was finally time to admit that the whole thing was weird and unhealthy and that it couldn't last until the very end. We hardly know each other and it's cruel to both of us to play at being a couple. Part of me wanted to scream, "What are you doing here!?" into her face, at the top of my lungs. And maybe I would have done it, if only my lungs had the capacity and the strength to do it. Instead I just quietly cried, and so did she.
She cried just like I did, and just like I am, and just like I'll keep doing until my body can't even manage that any more. And then I'll just fucking lie here dying, feeling the seconds tick tortuously by, unable to do anything at all.
Maybe I'll just be able to hold someone's hand.
Ah, I'm crying so hard now. I'm shaking. I can barely type.
She did hold my hand. I don't really know if I held hers back. I just lay there doing nothing, saying nothing. Just fucking rehearsing for the big day.
And the big day is coming, people. It's coming soon. They've moved me to a hospice.
It's the best place for me right now, I can see that. But all I can feel right now is something like an adrenaline rush. This is it! This is fucking it!
(Just going to add a note here. Pretty soon after I typed that last line, I started throwing up. Thought you'd like to know.)
Thursday
I remember thinking as I arrived here that this is not what I want. It's just too fucking London. The outside of the building is old-fashioned and intimidating, and its grounds too rigidly neat and orderly to sit peacefully in or stroll around while contemplating and reflecting and accepting. It looks like a boarding school where terrified young boys are sent to get both educated and emotionally scarred to the highest possible standards.
On the inside though, it's alright. I hate it still. But only because it's part of this situation that I'm in and that I hate everything about.
I'm just going to stop now. This way I don't have to end every entry with "sorry, I'm crying and puking too much to write at present".
Ah, except I did but now I'm not because but quoting myself counts.
They have drugs here.
Friday
I woke up at about dawn this morning and as soon as I opened my eyes, I knew I wanted to live. It's a feeling I wouldn't have noticed if it hadn't been absent for so long.
I rang for the nurse, who came shuffling in within a minute or so. They're not nurses, they're something else. But I can't remember what. They don't really seem to mind being referred to as nurses.
I switched on my bedside light and tried to sit up.
"Are you uncomfortable? Do you want to get out of bed?"
I looked her square in the eye.
"I want to live."
I could see the sadness in her face, although I know she must be used to this. I know she's well practiced at squirreling away her feelings to be dealt with later.
"Please let the doctor know," I continued with a calm urgency. "I've decided I want to live."
As I recall this now, I'm almost amused. Despite the hazy state I was obviously in, I can remember it all with crystal clarity. The nurse remembers too. We talked about it when she brought me my lunch.
It seemed that simple. I honestly thought that all I had to do was decide to live and it could be arranged.
I said it again.
"I want to live." I could see in her eyes that her perspective on this matter was different to my own.
She sighed. Out of tiredness, I think, and not impatience.
"I will tell Dr. Jiang what you just told me, I promise," she put on a sad smile, perfected through years of practice. "But I can't promise that she or anyone else can do anything more for you. I hope you understand that."
Her eye contact was unflinching without being piercing or intense. I remember feeling confused and not knowing what to say.
"Mr. Alexander," she began, "Is this different to how you felt yesterday?"
I nodded. I still didn't know what to say, so I kept nodding.
"It's normal to experience a lot of different feelings when you're going through what you're going through," she wasn't naturally soothing like Inge, but she was certainly a real pro at this. "And you can always talk about them with me, or any of the other staff here. Even if your feelings seem strange or contradictory or wrong. It's okay. A lot people find that it helps to talk."
I looked at her, then I looked at the door. I looked at the window, then I looked at my little bedside table, expecting to see a clock, but not finding one. Then I looked back at her.
"Now?"
She nodded.
So she and I talked about how I was feeling for I think about ten minutes. I'm not sure at what point I realised that I'd been a bit delusional when I woke up. The penny didn't so much drop as dissolve.
I still want to live though.