This week my partner cleared out his closet of clothes and donated them to charity in preparation for his death. I stood there mortified, unable to move. It was just too much, adding insult to injury. I couldn't help him do it. I just stood there. This is all so surreal.
My partner is dying from cancer. He was diagnosed 5 months ago. From the information I can gather and from what I am witnessing I doubt if he will make it through this next year. These last 5 months have been a nightmare of varying degrees of hell. Cancer is all consuming and has affected our lives from every single angle possible and on a multitude of levels; suffering in sleep deprivation, relationships, finances, time, energy, career, spiritually, socially, recreationally, not to mention physically on every possible level. The pain from the beginning symptoms to palliative radiation treatment to recovery, I can only describe as perverse. I've never witnessed such deep uncontrollable pain that went on and on and on. And this is just the first cycle.
It has been a dreadful thing to find myself caught in the cancer system as a caregiver. Its not something I want to be in and its not something my partner and I ever imagined would happen. In a situation like this, kindness and caring is at a premium. It is a precious human quality that is rare within the system . I find myself drinking in every scrap of kindness that comes my way and deeply grateful a hundred times over for every demonstration of caring. These two graces have a remarkable ability to free me of my prison of psychic suffering and I immediately channel my energy into relieving my partner's suffering in any way that I can.
I don't understand how some “health care professionals” within the cancer system get past the screening process. Is it that insurmountably difficult to find people who have effective empathetic communication skills on top of technical and/or intellectual skills? It seems grossly ironic to reward some of these soulless experts with the big bucks when they would better serve society as butchers or mechanics. Meat and metal don't have emotional/psychological senses or needs. Their existence is not complicated. Meat and metal don't question or talk back or suffer.