YOU HAVE TO KEEP GOING

Those living with an incurable illness all say the same thing. While you’re alive, you have to keep living. If you give in and take to your bed, waiting for a time when you might feel better, you could wait for ever. I feel compromised and weakened by the treatments, but if I let that stop me from doing the things I really want to do then what’s the point of carrying on with all the side-effects? So we make short-term plans, even if half of them have to be cancelled. I keep working as a freelance writer and editor. I keep being interested in the outside world, in what other people are doing, as a diversion from the relentlessness of daily juicing, supplement taking, exercise, yoga, repurposed drugs, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, massage, steaming in a sauna blanket and resting when I’m tired. All of this, I believe, is helping me to have enough quality of life to keep on living.

And what’s interesting about looking outside your own small private world of concern is how many others you notice, just as compromised by pain or immobility, who do the same thing. They are the ones who smile at you as they wheel themselves through the park, pleased to be out on a sunny day. They are the ones who hobble to the opera, determined to sit through five hours of Wagner for one last time. The queues for the men’s loos were longer at the opera house than the women’s because so many older men have prostate problems. I looked up at the auditorium from my posh seat in the stalls (courtesy of a kind friend) at a sea of grey hair and thought that at least half of these people probably have cancer and the other half are probably not feeling too good, but here they are.

The most resilient make the effort. They override the understandable easier option of doing nothing and staying at home. They make things happen; they don’t blame others for their situation, wait to feel better or for someone else to do something for them. That is how to grow older with dignity.