Lurching about

My attention's scattered - not sure if I can blame this on my constant awareness of Geoff's gruelling treatment (and a sickly half-arsed awareness it is too, no natural nurturing or a thoughtful thoroughness of care, just twanging lurches of the sudden  - "Oh, I must make some chicken soup"- type, which shake me out of whatever I was about to say or do). On Boxing Day for example I was about to give baby Helen a mielie in a bowl, and after they'd gone I found it in a bowl in the butler's hatch thingie still. (or whatever that shelf between the kitchen and the dining-table's called).
Right now I'm ... well, while I'm typing this I'm thinking I must make a website on Wix (?) for my artwork, I've taken photos and must just set it all up but the notes and painting pics have been waiting in a folder on my desktop for at least two months if not more.
And, there I go again, interrupting myself with something irrelevant to this cancer blog. I'm offtrack, wanting only to write: what do I say to Geoff, how do I help him go through what he is going through, how do I offer concrete comfort? So far I say: I love you. I say I'm so sorry you have to go through this. I drive him to his treatments and I do all the little things he usually did - feed the dogs, walk them (we have Sarah's with us for a while) - pack the dishwasher, buy the groceries. I try and show I love him in the deeds but it's hard. Just adding his few tasks to mine is filling my days with administration frustration! I'm tired of watering the garden, cooking, driving, hanging out washing and so on. Someone fetched the campcot today - I advertised it for free on our chat group and it was scooped up almost straight away.
We saw the oncologist (Dr Holtshausen) on Wednesday 27th December: young, brisk, practical and quite sympathetic. For Geoff's raw burnt throat: Two Stilpayne (schedule 5) every six hours - he can reduce to one every six hours if pain is managed. Will move onto Tramacet if needed. For the white fungal patches in his mouth: Mycostatin or a generic, two drops three times a day. For the burn on the outside of the skin: cornflour and no rubbing. For mouth hygiene: bicarb. For his wounds (two on his head, one on his shoulder) savlon, salt solution, gelonet and gauze. For depression: Lorien. And then for his usual hassles, Redilev for epilepsy, Crampease Nite for leg cramps that wake him up, and Ecotrin for blood-thinning. Later he may have to move on to liquid morphine.

Distracted

I wrote a page or two in the CancerCare waiting room today and - what do you know, just to illustrate the point of my writing - seem to have mislaid it on the way back. It was about my head being elsewhere when I have visitors or I'm out somewhere. I'm talking to them, but I'm aware, in an awful, bungling: not nurtury kind of way, of Geoff's plight. So midway between someone's story I will go over to him to see how he is, suddenly. However, I don't think ahead, or plan. I feel badly that he drove me over for babysitting, but didn't think to myself, hang on, he doesn't need to come at all. I could have gone by myself to begin with. And I'm being abrupt, rude, to family members because I'm not focusing on them and what they're saying at all. I'm not liking myself much at the moment. The balls I'm juggling are falling around me.

Dying is dead easy, everyone can do it

Doodgaan is doodeenvoudig: almal doen dit
(a book by Rene Gude in Dutch, I don't have the Dutch in front of me, so I've loosely translated the title into Afrikaans)
Interviewer: What do you do when it is three o'clock in the morning, pitch dark, and it's raining - and you get caught up with a huge mortal fear, that big black hole into which you peer and that shouts back at you: "Yes, but soon!" What then? Rene: You have to be careful with these kinds of stories. If you conjure up a very strong representation of that death, mulling over what it would be like when you are no longer there, then you are dealing with something that has not yet occurred and that you have never experienced yourself. This is unempirical.(you cannot verify or prove anything about it scientifically.)You conjure these scenarios which evoke emotions. You are busy awakening your emotions (unnecessarily) with unreal images. It is best not to have ideas about death. If death is there, you are not, and, therefore, you cannot know anything about it.

Halloween 2017 (in Mexico)

It isn’t even as though I didn’t know I was being loved my whole adult life. Geoff shows his love through actions. (By making me coffee every morning. By packing the dishwasher. Loading up the washing machine. Yes, we both have dirty washing and so on, but these were always traditionally my tasks and now he does them too. To me, it is part of him showing he loves and cares for me.) It’s that it suddenly comes home to one when you’re away and you see two people sitting quietly, her head on his shoulder and you begin to understand what it is going to be like once he is gone. No one to comfortably rest your shoulder on.
And it’s feeling like the height of callousness and carelessness to be away now … now that he is beginning to have to face his own mortality.
He sees the oncologist today at nine. He's had the operation, a new one, to remove his salivary glands and now we need to know if it was successful and if he needs radiation. And what the prognosis is.
And that's why I'm awake here in Mexico while he is in Cape Town.  I don’t think it’s easy
for anyone and I’ve not been able to have the conversation with him yet. I don’t
know how to begin it. Yet I know it's better to say something than be quiet. What I don't want to do is be insensitive, be pushy, be callous. But I have the spectre of Cynthia's way of dealing, of being quiet and expecting the other person to understand, and I know that doesn't work and it is not what one should do. You have to, however difficult, and insensitive, and callous, it might sound say something rather than not. Even cruel. Remember the  "HAD SHE (Cynthia) BUT TOLD ME is the part that happens, over and over and over again. From her side, she has always said it is obvious when something is impolite, or cruel, or insensitive. From my side it is not obvious. I need to be told.
Take Bettina for example: what a blessing that she can explode immediately I say something insensitive. I understand, apologise, sometimes crawl even and soon it’s all over. But the silent treatment which is not even just silent - just smoothing over into something else, is much much worse." (Quoting from my blog Sib - the broken relationship between my sister and me)  Unfortunately I do carry on, serenely unaware.
And another thing, things that seem self-explanatory to the general population (eg: "It's obvious that the President of the United States' life is worth more than a random five-year-old's" - well, to me TOTALLY unobvious. In fact the child is far more precious. The US pres has had at least 50 or in Trump's case 70 misbegotten years, why on earth would he be more valuable than the little boy lost in Capricorn? Why?)
But I digress (hugely). I came here to write about what is happening to Geoff and me. You see here again my incomprehension (as was Sheil’s: mine is hysterically less so) about the awfulness of death if you are suffering from something incurable is a gross factor. I can choose for myself: I am fairly decided to commit a hopefully assisted suicide as soon as I judge my grandchildren don’t need me around any more. (My judgment not their’s, by the way!) But my husband may have vastly different views and I am not to impinge upon them. Whatever he decides goes. And I will not make a spectacle of my sadness at losing him so that
he has to comfort me instead of thinking of himself.