What Keeps You Awake at Night?

I’m still waiting to hear the result of my cancer surveillance CT scan. It’s been two weeks so far. I try and take each day as it comes, but that’s not easy to do. My main coping strategy has been distraction, primarily by immersing myself in other things. This takes a lot of effort, and only seems to work some of the time. I didn’t expect to hear anything during the first two weeks. I know it will get harder from here on in.

My primary distraction has been to work intensively on my crime novel. The report I got from the professional editor was very positive and encouraging. He also gave me a series of suggestions for improving the novel. In particular, he pointed out where I could cut some back-story and some scenes that he felt slowed down the momentum of the novel a little too much.

It’s so much easier for someone else to see where you could make structural edits to your manuscript. I did realize that it needed improvement and I recognized that the opening act was where I most needed to focus my attention. But I couldn’t see exactly what edits ought to be made. If truth be told, I was also resistant to making further structural changes. I had already rewritten a good part of the opening act of the novel over previous months. I’d invested a lot of time and effort in it.

With the editor’s prompting, I took a very hard look at what I had written. I noted down what the key plot points were in each of the scenes that he had identified as potentially cuttable. I soon saw that all of these could be placed elsewhere in story. I thus ended up cutting four scenes and one sub-plot. And now the opening of the novel does flow much better, with a more immersive intensity.

He also pointed out that my narrator tended to use certain exclamations and speech tags rather a lot. Turning to the ‘find and replace’ text command, I discovered that my narrator said ‘bloody hell’ 65 times over the course of the 281 page novel. Rather too many, don’t you think? Even for a crime novel. I ended up removing or replacing plenty of these. As I did for several other words and phrases that were overused.

Oddly enough, I can lie awake at night imagining alternatives to ‘bloody hell’. I’m not going mad. It’s just my distraction therapy in action. If I wasn’t worrying about my novel in the wee small hours, I’d be worrying about the return of the big C.

Alive and Kicking

It’s come around again quickly. Tomorrow, my cancer surveillance CT scan takes place. I currently have a nine month interval between scans. It’s been eleven and a half years since my first tumour was found. It’s been six years since my last tumour was removed. And it’s been five years since I’ve been under a surgeon’s knife. The type of cancer I had does not respond well to drugs. So the primary treatment is surgery. I hope and pray that I never have to be chopped open again. Each time they go in there is collateral damage. This, it seems, is inevitable, however beneficial the purpose of the procedure.

My abdomen was slit open four times in six years. The end result is that the tissues of my torso have been seriously weakened. Indeed, the lower part of an abdominal muscle was removed completely during emergency surgery seven years ago. As the tissues repaired after each of these procedures, I was left with lots of scar tissue and adhesions. These give me pain and loss of function in different parts of my torso. I know each of these sites intimately, especially when they nag at me in the small hours. The worst is my left side, where my ribs were cut open five years ago.

Ah, I hear you say, but you’re still alive. Not many of those who’ve had Stage 4 cancer are still with us. Don’t get me wrong, I am delighted to be amongst the lucky few. Learning to live with the unwanted results of surgery is a luxury, compared to the other option. But I don’t seem to keep this knowledge in the front of my mind. Like anyone else, I naturally try and do things as part of normal everyday life. But when my body brings me up short with a stab of pain, I have to step back. And say, no, I just can’t do this anymore.

It’s a challenge to accept your limitations. In my head, I’m still a younger man. T is doing her best to stop me injuring myself. She has taken on plenty of arduous tasks. And she acts like a conscience, telling me to stop if she sees me embarking on anything too foolhardy. I try my best. But from time to time, I do too much or I go too far, and I end up hurting myself. It’s not easy being a survivor.