My mental health as a cork in the sea - jumps on every wave, but never drowns. In difficult moments, I, like Mühnhausen, could always pull myself by a pigtail in relatively simple ways - talking with a friend, walking around the park, a delicious meal or a new clothes. If it was very hard, I locked myself at home for a couple of days and lived there between a sofa, a refrigerator, a pile of books and a TV set, waiting for the energy to accumulate, and everything will pass by itself. I was very stable in my instability. I did not fall into depression and did not see it close to myself. Perhaps that's why I could not recognize it. And I did not expect it now, after the operation, with almost safe breast and against the background of good news about complete pathomorphosis. As it turned out, in vain.
It all started back in Israel, about a week after the operation. First, a sleep was gone. No, I wanted to sleep and fell asleep fast enough, but I woke up after a couple of hours. 2.30 AM became my morning. Enchanted time, a threshold that I could not cross. After waking up in bed, I went to watch TV or read a book, and only closer to 7 am, if lucky, was fall asleep for a little longer. This sleep did not refresh me and did not give strength. Yes, strictly speaking, it was not even a sleep. Like some tricky mechanism, I, left the active mode for a while, turned it off, so as not to burn out.
The most delicious food seemed foamy, and if not my mother, I would have stopped coming to the table. Tel Aviv was boiling, sparkling the sun and the sea in spring around me, but life lost its color, taste and smell. I seemed to be locked in a room and looked at everything through a soundproof and gray window from the dust.
I returned to Moscow in complete apathy, and lived most of April. Such a wooden condition did not cause me suffering (quite the contrary), but there was a serious danger: my treatment was not over, and I stopped taking care of it. Almost a month has passed since the operation, when I just started looking for a place for postoperative paclitaxel. Now a week and a half of the May holidays are straight ahead, I have medicines on my hands, but there is neither a hospital nor a doctor ready to take me, and I'm in fear that with my own hands I can break the fragile and an intermediate success, so dear to me.
If I wrote a memo for friends and relatives of cancer patients, I would very much recommend them not to let the mood and capacity of a loved one out of control. In our situation, even the most active and organized can once feel that the forces are no more, that the only desire is to lie down and fall asleep. And for us, as for travelers in distress in the ice, it is impossible, because the price to such calmness is death.
I am not develop with Christianity. It seems that everything is good in separate - I generally recognize the idea, I believe in the historical reality of Jesus, I get aesthetic pleasure in the church - but I can not, I do not rise from religion to faith. What about religion? It is from fear: the illusion of unity with a mass of like-minded people and by heart the familiar repetitive actions distract and reassure. The ceremonies are rocking the flock like children in the cradle, but for me, even frightened to death by my diagnosis, this was not enough. And I go with my illness myself, without crutches. Neither ask nor complain ...
Fear accompanies all the way of treatment and never leaves for long. Sometimes looms in the distance, sometimes sits down next to me and takes my hand with a cold sticky palm. And it can sit like that for a long time, thin, silent and pale, watching me rush feverishly on the Internet in search of answers to another question. My fear is sleepless and fussy, and when I'm completely tired of it, I lay down and lie like dead, staring at the TV fixedly. Long, several days...
It would probably be easier to cry, but I do not know how. I cried only once, when the hair began to fall out. I sobbed loud, stretching long strands of hair from once luxurious hair. Of course, it was necessary to get a haircut earlier, without waiting, but I hoped... That's why I was face to face with destruction. I roared, the ruins of hair on the edge of the bath all grew, and my mother evenly hid them in the palm, monotonously calming me. Either my mother's help helped me, or I was just tired, but the tears stopped quite quickly. I was able to contain them and the next day, when I was shaved in the salon cabin. I sobbed, but did not cry. And it was much harder.
The worst thing is in pauses between treatments, when nothing happens. And now I seem to have found a chemotherapist, but because of the May holidays and her departure, the first course of paclitaxel shifts for the eighth week after the operation. The doctor says that with full pathomorphosis of the tumor, like at me, such a delay is not critical, but if it becomes psychologically easier for me, I can look for another chemotherapist and take the first course elsewhere. It's easy to say... And if suddenly this other place will become psychologically easier, and physically - more heavily. It is not a vitamins...
I phoned several clinics, collected information and agreed to think about it on Monday. Now I often negotiate with myself...
I apologize for the possible mistakes that arose in the translation. There are idioms that are difficult to translate into another language.
