A good start to distract me, listen to what, but how he says it. There you hear the ratio of doctor to his own knowledge. His power. There you hear his relationship to me. This is now substantially. I nose his words, intonations, the smallest details. Find tracks. Which patient, I'm for him? Would he know
what it is to sit on my chair? He looks at me, that is the first of its investigation. He looks over my naked face of fear. Listening to him and me. We are from the first eye contact clicked together. The back painfully tense. See me here. Not see me here now. It is a life without now.
He looks at himself as he looks at me? He sees whatever awaits him? Whether he knows it not, knows no such healthy it? And certainly not the doctor, who was a very poisoned chalice: to imagine immortal (Robert Klitzman, When Doctors Become Patients).
self-consciousness
And then there is a one minute time not yet self. The communication scorches in a fire blast anything that "once self vermocht. Only now I realize - if it's too late - I myself all that power, emotion, consciousness, anger, sadness've drawn. That is what it was all so. That self, which I am praying and in amniotic fluid. Now I'm lying like a fish on the edge of the pond.
The self-awareness is not there anymore, it is aborted. I am for the rest of my life a dismal Siamese twin, with my hump the unwanted guest. He has everything going for a long stay. He will put all his nasty hand. Even if I him fraternally with "tumor" response, "my tumor", he turns away. He is staying with me, but do not want me. He understands all too well that I do not want him. Yet we must do it together. My illness with their backs to me and which I agree with him, bare, so bare. I feel his stretched back. No amniotic fluid, but tanned skin mine by fear, by his callousness. A deafening, high-pitched sandblast peeling me with pointed kernels.
No self-consciousness, but consciousness by a privative: a consciousness, such as apathy. I do not know well, but I never quite to myself, as far as I know. Others write me perspective for now, serenity, wisdom. That I do not want to correct? These are not virtues, nothing to be proud of, but pitiful consolation prizes.
The roles
In the second year of my brain, my guest be registered at my address. The scans I see him as an ultrasound. My brains and uterus. We stand together, eat breakfast together, I talk with him all day. I gave him a name just yet. Meanwhile, I am familiar with him, so I know very clearly what he wants: to demolish me.
Students. A college. Their first room visit. They move a little embarrassed by the sick in our room of four. A caustic doctor listening to my records, whispered to him by a head nurse. The doctor cuts on his students. One is ashamed. He knows absolutely nothing to answer. Another paper has in himself and notes diligently. The head nurse towers above all out. They are sleepy and embarrassed. They teach me to look away from the man lying there in his pajamas.
For this look it is so. That is the basis of the training. The Professor learns particular, what glazed look (a frog look) to, he learns to look at that naked undergo. First rule: do not allow to cross the look with the patient. Go no contest to above. This look shows something, but also obscures. These rehearsed look says: I do not see. Soon I will not recognize you, do not shake hands, ask any encouraging demand. (Would I want to?) I learn to recognize that look. Precisely because his eyes can not cross mine, I see so well what occupies him. Do I get caught up in a mad desire for recognition, the doctor is trapped in denial. He says I'm not to recognize you.
Not how I do it full, but how they keep this up?
In Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Kostoglov looking for a book long to enforce that look of recognition. I'm not sick, I am. And yours I want that recognition. How dangerous for therapy, confounding 'you' to keep out? The objectifying gaze is commanded him, though it was to survive. But how can prevail against the desire of the patient to demolish the objectifying gaze? The look of the doctor wearing rubber condoms.
A scene with desk and table
A table, three chairs. The doctor administers the door. He points the patient's location. He looks at the patient probing how he walks, how bent his back, how he committed? Where does the fear, the uncertainty itself firmly put? Where is my complaint in my body that he read?
The furniture. You're not next, but sitting opposite him. Two poles in the room. A boundary therebetween. No 'we', but a 'U'. No names. No friendship. Away. The ratio put me at once in sackcloth. I am a child. Walk away? Flee? Roaming? Die in a luggage rack of a train (Solzhenitsyn)?
For him, the furniture is a desk, for me, a bare table. The desktop is his workplace. On the screen to his left, he looks at pictures of me. I do not see them. The translations are mine. He looks at me on the screen. I agree, but it is not a reflection of me. He points to the pencil I've seen. The tumor lies in a far distance, like a luminous, silvery full moon.
On the other hand, where we sit, the desk is no place for knowledge and competence. On the contrary. I'm aphasic, he on the other hand is the master of speech.
Between his office and my table: nothing less than madness.
On the empty desktop is paper. For short notes. There are rules, appointments, treatments to our side shifted. As with the notary, accountant, lawyer. Paperwork.
If I put my own notes on his furniture (the papers are so uncomfortable on my lap), I cross a border, I jog to the hierarchy. In his place I would be scared. I fear, in any event itself.
From behind the desk the gambit: "What can I do for you?" (Martine Bachrich, Qu'est-ce qui vous Amene?). We are irrevocably with two. The doctor and the patient, a duo clicked together and entangled. I not only to him, but, it is so, he to me.
And it's true, I looked him up (and how!). Now I should not complain. I had the disease as well have let run its course. I might as well have this building, this door, this ratio can ignore this language. You should not go to a doctor. What made me so imprudent to do so?
But now I'm here. My name was called in the hallway. Obediently I'm right. I leave everything on the seat: jacket, vest, shoes, belts, pants, status, identity, expectations for happiness, for so many lives. Then I look for a moment, and suddenly there is nothing more.
His consultation room, his consultation time. He arranges them. (I still wanted it yourself!) For now, I have no objections in there. Will I ever be able to stretch my back? This is not a school for pride.
"Have you noticed," she says, "that he always takes some time before he speaks?" He pretends to study the screen, but I'm sure it's like. A small, playful, mischievous suspense. They're waiting on the edge of her chair. I hear the silence. He knows we can handle it. Next time the same overture.
How different proportions as I not only as a patient appear on the medical scene, but primarily as a fragile man that care should be worn. (Marie Garrau and Alice Le Goff, "Care," Justice et dépendance)
***
Feminine care, male therapy.
***
What does it depend? To be Reported?
The trust
Confiance, confession. It sounds. I confess to the one I trust. I take confidence. The need for people to confess! That stupid confidence. It also desire to be deceived. And the desire to blame someone.
People say to me: to cure it is important to trust your doctor. But I expect something back, that he is loyal to me. That he takes it for me. He respects me, he pulled out of time to get to know me - he's finally now my regular doctor for my incurable disease. He takes time so I can get to know Him. That nevertheless creates a 'together'. Something like, "We're going to take away." Yet a life. In part, the last one. he wants to have known?
I rely on the poor outcome. I trust that I will not heal. He will not heal me. That confidence.
The crucial Scene
A small room with stock, a scrubbing brush. Here, gossiping nurses, exchanging confidences, annoyances and infatuations. Such a room so. Matching the whispering conspiracy.
We both sheep on two chairs, as Jan Decorte would direct: shameful. We are both impressed and frightened heart after all those grueling years suddenly anyway: cowardly. Three specialists from the three cancers techniques. They stand. We sit. What a hierarchy. The perfect setting.
Church Research. "There is an international investigation ..." he says. Text: Your duty investigation to help others forward. Text: Your benefit, it is priceless expensive drug you get free. Text: Your interest in tackling the last remnants of the tumor. Text: it's just a pill, without significant side effects without displacement is needed.
I do not feel protected by my doctor, like a mother should protect her daughter against violent father. He takes it for me. Or maybe, his arguments are so transparent, so infantile that it seems as if a secret subtext underneath. Whispering: "Do not, especially not."
I look around me perplexed. I see the back of the business. Backstage. Successively, the waiting room, consultation room and behind again women to computers. Then again the hallway where chattering men and women (strong arms and butt) with beds rush through the corridors. Dozens of horses, in shifts for thousands of patients, hundreds of kilometers, day and night. They convey sorrow and fear, as if they went steaming dung carts across the country. Still further: an agency to sign a cooperation with the 'Big Pharma'. Still further: an auditorium for a presentation at a conference of oncologists, a publication in the Journal of Medicine. Still further: visitations, international ranking, and government savings.
All that seeps through the leaky ceiling of the small room with scrubbing brush and stock. In addition to this conversation are other, about forbidden love, forbidden lust (Cancer Ward).
And I do not hear in the background the growl of the cynicism, the bleat of obscenity, fighting, the yodelling vibration of the lust, the claws of the league, the stubbornness of the errors, speed up treatment, the operetta by flesh and blood? (Robert Altman, M * A * S * H, Samuel Shem, The House of God).
I've got a doll bear on my bedside table. At home nobody laughs.
***
You do not smell the stench of death, next to you? Your bed, where I am now the guest?
***
To cut, to burn, to poison. The three techniques. Not even to heal, not even to bring relief. (Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of Maladies)
burlesques
Immediately suicide. Preferably poetic, anyway! Pockets full of stones. Into the sea. Or a cocktail on the Internet. At Dignitas assisted death, though, neighbors protest: too many coffins pass through the corridor (Buñuel!). What would it be like to jump from the terrace? Or in the channel near here? The ground on my head. Agreements about the loved one. But what his appointments here?
The alternatives. Macrobiotics, a room with mats, where he receives. A magnetizer - a tumor I can not heal, though! A good diet (the waiting room full of lonely women hypochondriac). Anthroposophy. Homeopathy. The surgeon says mild and enlightening: here the interventions are "invasive", ie irreversible. The alternatives are not.
Feeling and intellect waver between the two. Anyway, neither can cure me.
At the end of this ride, a retreat in a beautiful - what else? - Monastery. Dom van der Laan? Vaals? The aesthetics it has yet again.
A notary to arrange everything.
A pastor with whom I already afspreek a service. In Begijnhofkerk here in my street. As grounded in the earth, says the pastor. A fiery baroque facade for a lay ceremony.
The female body
The female body: the Eldorado of the fight against cancer. And especially her breasts. 'Eliminate' (which is said to women, not men). And it does not stop: "The kiste is not dangerous, but let them take away anyway and that all other security too." You will not believe your ears! Medicine?
The breasts: a sweet miracle today, "tomorrow in the meat tray (Cancer Ward).
However, he then, in socks without buckle, pants around the ankles, motionless, fear pear in hand. And then the wind, right now! This is so, this is the so. ( "So" is now the most important conjunction. Ainsi (soit-il).)
***
How precious life is that life?
***
The radiologist whispers, not one, not two, not three questions opinions! (I asked four; this is my terminus, this face.)
the panic
Accumulation. Constipation. Pileup. Shrinks. Thoughts, feelings in one. A tangle. Which begin and where does it end? It draws. It drags. It pushes. It compresses.
Panic fills all the way, far over the edge, without measure. But in those matters there is nothing more. It is an empty excess. 'Leaky panic, "writes Sontag (David Rieff, Swimming in a Pool of Death). The touch anywhere on your body. You will be beaten rotten. In a tub with the most aggressive water jets. Until exhaustion overtakes you. And there is no end to. Panic is a storm that lingers on the spot. Silent and deafening. It goes into the leg foam of my bones.
That was the Great Panic. That took several months. I just got them slowly under control and then started writing.
Then the Little Panic. Punctual minutes. As intense as the Great, but limited in time. I so she could tell me that Little Epileptic Seizures. I could tune there my inner clock. They announce themselves - over one minute in advance. I look away, violently, if I can step up to a support (it lets especially mid happen on the street!). Meanwhile - after about 10 seconds - the panic rolling over me. Then vibrant, shocking climax - 2 minutes. Still time for aftershocks - one minute. More than 4 minutes. And time again to be completely in the world. The world: the Kruidtuinlaan. Very simple. Cars that stop at the lights, buses passing. People crossing. At the bottom lies the subway station Iron. So there. In that world. I walk briskly about 25 minutes down to a classroom. That is life, although I am very tired.
A variant. Stumbling, or rather the fear of stumbling. The surge of panic when I'm tripping. A high curb which I nevertheless often successful, though not without fear, use. I stumble over my fear. First: here we go again! Curses. Then, if gravity is pulling at me, a slow motion. The attack lasts longer than the fall. For the tasting, I still see: cars, their shape, their color, just not their number. Cane with a metal head, a plastic bag with a book, all on the ground (my book!). What about the porous back? I can still move? I lie in the crosswalk as a dancer of Rosas. In the cars, my audience. Three people lifting me right (I am so heavy?). A young woman takes me by the arm, up to the other side. She rubs my shoulder. I tremble exhausted; my truss moans.
I cheat you lover? Your future husband? Ashamed I take his place in the meantime. He has been running around somewhere now. He stood yesterday in the cheese shop next to me?
***
'Why me?' "Why not?"
***
At night, very heavy slide the right leg on the bed edge. That leg get back in bed!
an Appearance
The visit of a beloved brother at the bedside. In a room of four. A curtain behind his back. He on a chair. I straight up in bed. Tired. But while we're talking intensely with one another "something". An incident fracture. There is unsolicited and completely unexpected: joy (joie, joy). As if the Great Wind of the world is admitted. Not happiness, le bonheur, as of, and in the world: the little wind that lifts drapes, rustles, some dust blows up (Luchino Visconti, Il Gattopardo). This is different. I peat writing off my vocabulary. Nothing is enough to describe the Big Wind. Suddenly, even a child's experience. The first paragraphs of Frederik van Eeden, the little John, or "le calme" Baudelaire.
Nothing has prepared me for this. Nothing in the area that day, during that conversation. I stay all the time see the watery pockets on the aluminum tree. I feel love starched cloth ( 'luxury', Baudelaire). I feel my hand sometimes giving, it is again hosting on the sheet. I know next to me chromed rod to keep me in the bed. The known is not blown away. Here is here. But then the Great Wind, bright, refreshing. I know this does not come back, I have no desire to even. Large wind touched me. That will do.
This is me fallen and pulls back, as the mother whose fragrant train of her evening dress when leaving still draws equally between the doors. Unsolicited. Is this grace? Large Wind leaves open my arms, increasingly open, wide open. To each horizon.Ik reach for him. The world.
In twenty shots have Dreyer, Rossellini, Bresson that joy made visible. No special shots. Joy, grace are not special. They are loud and lively. In writing, I think, panic is deadly sin, fear is deadly sin. They take the world off. Large Wind completes.
Listen
No sedative, I say, and then I can step beside the bed, straight to surgery? I'm straight - but too late - the laughable in. Unemployed Brabant draft horses? I can not do them anyway. Besides, yet delicious that wind as they drive me who camioneurs of the sick beds.
In the dispatching center between several operating theaters are others as children sleeping under stopped. In this limbo prompt young women walk around. Too good to call them nurses. In hospital green. They carry plastic bags from here to the operating room. Thereby pushing the door firmly open, as the waiters folding door to the dining room. Waiters are the showcase of a restaurant; these young women are the waiters of the operating room.
They chat all the time by the tits. Of the half sleepers they do not care. I have to wait an hour, but that's good for me. That gives me plenty of time to make one of the tits to my bird. She's wonderful, petite, as there in the green, with the cap, with the playful, resolute, O moves so young steps on the scene of my infatuation. Chattering bird. My heart is now all alone in front of her, thanks to her.
The operating room, the light, protective arms me rolling on the table (protective, motherly, right here!) The right arm stretched out and tied up. A halfgekruisigde where true that half makes all the difference. I remember how many courtesy, consideration, kindness, care (care)?
Is life so together?
In the pool three adults have to hoist me. The first to put me down. The next to me to slide to the edge (right then), the last to let me into the water. We laugh loudly sad.
***
The mechanics during sex. The atrophying right leg, I can not focus anymore. I have to do it with me riding - andromache, greyhound, I looked at the 69 positions.
***
I have a city map of my quarters in the head. There lies neglected the sidewalk, which crossing is dangerous, I could fall. A lame card. One should press.
To feel
If the needle of the anesthetist through my vein to retract he becomes sweet and pleasant to the vein walls. The needle caresses. Its interior. The intimate it. The vein as vagina? Pure pleasure. Yet, still, do not stop!
Touch. After the fall on the back pushes the black African physician me with full hands and tanned skin. "Ça fait mal?" I feel his skin, I feel how he feels my skin pale, lambs, calves a skin. He must scare there. Black on white. And then the full hand, so full I never felt in a hand. With that skin can I rise from my agony.
Write
In the waiting hall. I have paper and pencil. Instead of pacing, writing. Panic View all writing. So they conjure, so to take revenge. Panic and revenge. You or me.
Panic is dry, grainy, sterile. Despair (the first weeks, months) is moist. Panic is something you can turn on and off. There is a switch somewhere. Despair is continuous. Panic is a machine, desperation music. Panic is monotonously modulated despair. In desperation you can sit down, you lie down. Panic is a tough cobbled.
From despair to panic and unrest back. That cascade. I convince myself that I am again master on board the mutiny have tamed. With the whip. (Thinking as a whip.)
This is all exorcise (but not only). All of this is magic (but not only). All of this is undeniable (but not only). For it is written there, thought, thought (Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking). With language I have an appointment. This text at the end.
But, on the other hand, language never touched during the unthinkable. One can not smuggle words to catch the unthinkable. One can say nothing else than that one can say anything about it. A suffocating silence. "I am black myself," says Sontag. Language is the sedative for the unthinkable.
I do not write for another patient, to share something, to seek support. I'm not charitable. I was never, why suddenly it? I am not a member of a support group. I do not write for them.
No, I do not want anyone putting together. I want the "we" of avoiding the sick. That irresistible bubbling "we." That shelter together. Take each other's hands. Even though I do not now, but soon, inevitably there will be anyway. I know for sure. Humiliation and consolation, that 'we'.
I write for doctors? No, I do not know their language, their relationship does not make mine, not take their eyes. Their language is not on my side.
But I know above all I need to understand them (Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think). What dangers they run? Certainly much bigger than me. What does their magic power (life and death) with them? How do they deal with the illusions of the patient with their own illusion? How eats this illusion to them? How much there is rust on their souls, in their hearts? If I know, I realize what cruel, fragile hands I am. In the operating room, the doctor takes all decisions - in spite of previous agreements with the patient. Who can verify it? He just does what he wants. With each operation is all that meat available to its criminal desire to act, now, here. So much hubris, so much madness.
Distrust and negative magic, such as paranoia. But also a liberating distrust. Only what can be questioned is knowledge (Popper, Bachelard, Hegel). Negativity is creativity. Thanks to 'le malin génie "(Descartes) a preliminary understanding is achieved.
Even among people you should not rely on good intentions (not even, especially to yourself). On the contrary, systematic distrust. Also on the moral plane deep doubt. The omnipresence of an esprit destructeur (Goya, Dostoyevsky, Sade, Henri Lemaire, Pasolini, Littell). The passion of malevolence.
The non-malicious is no more than a breath, soffio un, un soffietto, even more, a adempje, un soffiettino. Not even a passion.
'Are you tired?' ask my doctor as he hurries to the next patient. "It can not be otherwise" (after a fight), he says. I've just won my place. It's my consultation, possessive pronoun. I start with my questions. The disease is mine. The treatment thus also. He grants it to me (I think for the time being anyway). We both know that this is magical thinking, fiction, literature. No more than a temporary allowance of him.
How do others do it?
***
The poor doctor (the doctor sickening). In contrast, the 'good enough doctor "(as Winnicott' the good enough mother"). "With me you can find me ', like' I can live with that."
***
In the car, on the drive back, I put her bars into place: "This is do to my body!" I do not even realize that my body too is of her.
the Encounter
Two types of doctors: the convinced (believer) and the 'nihilistic' (infidel) (Klitzman). Two types of patients: about brave fighters and pessimistic, cautious realists.
War on Cancer (Nixon, 1972) and their foreign derivatives (Fight against Cancer) recruit overconfident believer believer patients and physicians. Where is the voice of doctors skeptical and distrustful patients? Is there no place for the courageous fight alongside the heroic fight?
For doctors is giving a defeat, dying not their world. Terminally apostasy. For the believer, every doctor healing defusing (magic!) Of mortality. The doctor brings his patient back to life. For stubborn patients (Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death), any therapy, even the most desperate experiment worth trying. They have heroic doctors on their side. They are the heroes of life, of faith in life. A few weeks yet. Perhaps a therapy come in the sight. Maybe somewhere an ultimate intervention within reach. What tenacity!
however, the nihilistic doctor says, against the dying is useless fighting. Where curing stops, starts speaking (Dunning, Enchanted World). Here is courage, not overconfidence.
I was in total in the cabinet of fourteen doctors. A beautiful sample.
There are especially sickening doctors. They do not listen. One only looked at my wife throughout the consultation (it's true, she's beautiful) and talked over my head. Another pride turned his laptop to us with a picture of a brain surgery. That was our first consultation. Yet another, old and tired, my file watched with a look of 'never stops here! ".
Not a pretty tableau. The ride ended at a surgeon us immediately involved in the decision. We can do this or that. This argues for the former, which for the second solution. Until our next consultation. Finally. This fourteenth it is so.
The facts
What a squabble after each visit. The 35 minutes of the return trip: stress and hassle. "He said that." "No, he did not say anything else." After a few rides peace was concluded: "What have you heard?"
The facts here are never harsh, never sure, never "really" clear. The sick man hears what he wants to hear. Sometimes worse, sometimes much less than she heard next to you. Over several sessions, we both took notes. Sometimes I had wiped off whole sentences, but that happened to her. Hear what you can hear. I forget even something as simple as the name of the drug, the quantity and regularity. Even though the bright paper. I need her again and ask. And immediately after that I am restless Prescription further reading.
I hear the doctor, but he did not even me. Who I am and what I would therefore, useful to him after years. He does not agree: you're life will you are terminally ill? How do you want to do (along with me)? What price you want to pay for your body?
It is no coincidence that you register an official document in your municipality where you check what interventions you do not want, such as forced feeding or breathing and so on. You see the list of life-prolonging techniques. One already worse than the other. Why do not you get that upon entering? Right away?
Traiter la vie contre la vie.
***
"To be sure," said the weak doctor.
Conceal the culprit
I tell him I'm not looking for a cure, but information. Next: What if I do nothing? And then, what could possibly be able to be done? Only then, what do you suggest for me? And then I ask it anyway also to other doctors. So I take the time, which I got, thanks to the slow-growing. I owe it to myself to use that interval.
Today the concealment for the patient is not obvious (formerly? Anne Philipe, Le Temps d'un soupir). The doctor is also hard to conceal it, but it can. Yet it is concealment - a guilty concealment - still there. Not more with respect to the condition in the process, but with regard to the consequences. What are the after-effects, which is the collateral damage, the price tag for your body? Here they did remain silent, she lied, let me illusions. That deception is inculcated them with their education. I am very suspicious of.
If doctors themselves get sick, they determine that this is self-evident (Klitzman). "You're alive," my doctor says when I ask tough questions. But I did not know at what price - it was me or for the treatment or afterwards made clear. They send me as it was in the trenches a walk.
Look: you as a doctor treating my pathology. Not tumor bothered me, but the effects. The doctor treating my cancer, not my discomfort in everyday life. For me it's success in treating secondary case, the damage to the everyday life substantially. Only when the patient has again there is a healing of full of life. Not so, on the contrary, the aftereffects ruin my life. And about that life goes. It is crucial to know what is being taken from my life. Let me count it: if the tumor remains the aftereffect shows a mutilation. Actually, I'm sicker than before. The doctor is engaged in the tumor, I have to do it with the mayhem. A tumor and lame on top. This is a tricky math. How to explain that when I get home?
The language of the guilty concealment is called euphemism, vagueness, appease, to minimize. "You're still alive." Until there are responsibilities. What happens after the patient is no longer his concern. Other specialists? But he knows neither institutions nor names. Find out for yourself.
Here, however, had the office - you know - can be fully used. Together bent over a large sheet of paper. He strokes the smooth paper and draws upon the plan of the various players: the disease, the treatments, the after-effects, a timeline, plan for the area (wife, friends, thinking, writing). About what life capital I possess yet? The doctor takes the score of my further life not with me.
It will never be like before. But that gives wings to the recall.
***
Relinquish the conviction, finding that everything has two sides. Nope, pain without reserve. Pain, there is no other way (Sontag). Panic is one block. You lie just below. Subject.
***
What remains? Actually a lot, basically everything.
tiredness
It's not unbearable. No, it's not unbearable. Being tired. Thé are tired. Do not despair, but his end.
Who has walked long committed tired down on the side of the road (Henry Bauchau, Oedipe sur la route). But at least it is a road, one side of the road (Tokaido). Walking is working and you get tired of. Of course. you eat sitting on the edge of the road. "I put me here to sleep" (Jean Renoir, Une partie de Campagne).
"They are tired" is very different than 'tired'. Being tired is the result, not of effort, but of lack of effort. An endless continuous, constant, compact mass. Life will not really change more from now. I can never decide which is due to be old (at once: dear old age) or disease. Without reservation, I would be the price of aging paying now. It makes everything bad if I walk jokingly of old age, or punishment of those unwanted guest. The same inconvenience, but a different sender. It makes a difference.
"Let's get on with it." It's not unbearable. This is no life. The life that is not life. Life collapses like a failed soufflé. Life bends. Am I tired? There is no courage anymore. Fuel. "It is," I must always say to visitors.
Joy and tiredness are indeed opposites, but share a lot with each other. They both have no time, no past, no follow-up, they are complete in themselves, perfect. They do not increase, not decrease. They are spatial, but not temporal. are tired sitting in a story, but they are not tired. Barse, stubborn immutability. is to bring in something or against joy, nor against fatigue. Joy is no laughing, no fatigue fatigue.
I'm tired: daily medications, testing, pricking, scans, MRI's, the contrast agent, the light bulb to warn. 20 times irradiation. Always the same procedures, always the same kind nurses who do not get out of their hands the routine. For seven years benevolent arms to help me on the table and off again. Ah, those false kindness. And then, not give in to naivety (which catechism of the clinic).
Fatigue and disappointment. They are sick and disappointment. Disappointment about life. Tired are: opposite of life itself.
Joy is the gift Fatigue is sin. Thé are tired turns living backs. Everything is wallpaper. Always the same. I expect nothing more from myself. Disappointment about myself.
Admit
Asks the unruly patient. Keeps asking. Raises. Doubts. Are you suspicious. Will verify to others. Proposes and weighs. That's my character in the game at the office and at the table. It's exhausting, but exciting. It is arm wrestling with a much stronger opponent. Winning is not in there. But persevere as long as possible is an honor.
The unruly knows all too well that there is no cure, there are only treatments. Postponement is possible that he should use. It is not a battle, but a guerrilla. The doctor sighs. Again a patient who receives the high! He waits until he breaks (Cancer Ward). Angrily, he says, how much time I have invested in you? So much more than in my other patients. My colleagues had you been long tossed on the operating table.
I was looking for myself not for medical information. That's too many cars medication me. I'll get it anyway never the doctor. I do something else: I beloer ratios. I rate calls. I weigh truth, or at least the attempt. Too many doctors wear indifference on their lapels, too much routine, too much the quickest way, too little time, not space. (Space!) Again and again resume the search for him as an interlocutor. A language to share with him. An illusion, of course.
But then there is the time that you specify, you break that you give yourself and lay down there. I bungel than a jumped violin. Powerless, formless. The "tipping point" where resistance to late spineless, shameful surrender.
Under rustle the dike collapses. Advance a sigh of the earth who admits that fails. It is so. It can not be otherwise. As with sandcastles suffices one spade sting. A delicious spade sting. The dam fails. I am driven to the operating table, with a lovely breeze through my head.
The worst
I stand at the railing of the Central Station in the city of B. I look down at the busiest time of the exodus. A cascade. So much noise! So fast steps. Nobody needs a handrail. Look, they do it with no hands! Just run the middle of the wide stairs! With so many people around them! Nobody stumbles! A miracle! That was years my journey, a move festive, I notice only now, now it has become definitively impossible. That's the worst that I've lost steps.
The mortality of siblings touches me the most. The primal us.
***
As long as we're talking, I'm not maimed.
***
Clinic as a gathering of hospital, clinic disease, anxiety, pain, painkillers, transient visitors and nurses, doctors, knowledge, equipment, ambitions, indifference, callousness, cynicism, of immeasurable sadness in the pool in which the life of yeast.
Hippocratic oath
The successes of medicine have unexpected consequences. New choices have to be made at each new technique.
Some notes in the margins of the Hippocratic oath:
The word is to the patient (which is why there are the patient's rights, why are they not given to each recording?).
The body of the patient (not the doctor, not the medicine).
The doctor assists the sick, nothing more. Treatment delivery.
The physician must say to which school he belongs treatment.
The doctor says he is a firm doer, or a conservative looking at.
The doctor insists that the patient still looking for a second opinion, as part of the diagnosis.
Doctor speaks about alternative treatments (which the patient is looking for anyway).
The doctor appoints the side effects.
Too much work? But for the most successful disease with the least chances of recovery must nevertheless be.
Everything on the table between adult men.
corps
The doctor is part of a corps. A corps with a crucible. A military corps. Arts and military both learn to do something you found in the cell in the normal world. The shedding of blood. The opening of the body. That one thus wants to kill and the other wants to heal not change the technique: blood to flow. The physician is cut out of very special wood.
Some surgeons want the blood spectacle. On the ground, on their green chasuble. I see it all by dredging the blood, with the firm step of the farmer on the muddy land. Without the spectacle of blood not a surgeon. Without blood show no Christ, no Church. Without blood show no cinema.
The bullet 'it' learns the military, scalpel 'in it "says the doctor. It requires coolness (the koelbloedigen). To defend, to heal. What does the doctor committed to become a doctor? What drives him twenties to the operating block, to the scalpel in his hand? What he gains thereby for himself? What is the pathology of the doctor? Such as: what will win the patient in this way to be sick?
Today, the incurable disease does not lead to silent acquiescence, not reflection, contrary to overactivity. Every little success seems an immense step (which is perhaps too). This will put a trap for doctor and patient. A faith in therapy. Temporarily cured, becomes healing. Incurable becomes curable.
That happens to me, at this very moment. Temporary cure as unreasonable promise. But Lazarus is a happy man? He has to die twice.
Around the incurable disease, a carnival, a danse macabre magic, naive faith, power, untold fragility. False hope will silence of courage and lucidity. False hope humiliates. False hope is unworthy.
