Describe The Indescribable

I got a phone call today from a friend of mine. We hadn't really spoken for a while and it seems that an assumption had been made that because I hadn't been in touch things have been going really well for me. What's the point in attempting to explain how catastrophically difficult the past two or three weeks have been? I haven't been communicating with very many people because I simply have not been well enough to do so.

I don't know how to express the journey I have been on. It's not the pain, tiredness, sickness, hair loss. It's not even the gnawing sadness of the isolation of it all. Or the inability to articulate in any sort of coherent manner the disappointment of having to have someone else look after Danté for a fortnight because I haven't been fit to. I am not someone who ever shouts and screams about how bad things are, possibly I go too far the other way and in the darkest and most difficult of times I just shut myself down and do my utmost not to burden people with whatever it is going on for me. This is true not only of my correspondence with friends or family but also when talking with the medical team who look after me. It's the old thing of head down and get on with it.

On Tuesday my radiotherapy will finish and my recovery will commence. I have no particular emotions attached to the end. I have been making considerations of what I might do once I am recovered and my clinical check-ups have been completed. I have some vague ideas of what I might like to do but I'm not trying to make any firm future plans until I have a more clear idea of what the state of my health will be. Sometimes over the past weeks I have laid on the treatment table with the mask on and unable to move and wondered about the radiation inside my skull. What is it doing? Is it working? But mostly, if I allow myself to ask those questions to myself the overriding one is always "Is This Worth It". The straightforward answer is that I don't know.

When Dante Alighieri wrote his masterpiece, Divine Comedy, the narrator who is Dante himself (and after whom I named my four legged Danté) is thirty five years old and describes himself as being "half way along life's path". It is believed that Alighieri was a Gemini and born circa 1265. My point in all that is that when Alighieri was not substantially older than I am he wrote one of, if not the most beautiful things I have ever read. When I read the section of Paradise and discovered that Alighieri could not describe the indescribable I knew exactly what he meant. That is where I find myself right now, I am trying to make sense of and convey something that is indescribable.

So I just don't try.



This photo is of part of the radiotherapy machine, it is the display which shows the angles of the gantry which is the part of the main machine from which the beams of radiation are lined up and delivered to my head. It's a seriously cool bit of kit.