Cancer Is Not a Death Sentence

Just back from Kilburn and 2 hours with the excellent Dr Han, the inscrutable Chinese accupuncturist. Her speciality is to spear your head with small needles which are wired together and attached to an electrical machine to give you tiny electric shocks. It's meant to help with `nerves' and I will let you know if it works tomorrow. I am not feeling very nervy as such but very wired, like my brain could run a marathon. Not a good thing late at night when you are trying to get to sleep.

Nutty is still progressing well. I bought a good chicken for him in Kilburn from a local butcher. I made sure it was British, went to a good school and was not the dreaded halal, these days you just never know. Though who knows if the butcher was telling me what I wanted to hear.... if I had been wearing a headscarf would his reply have been different?)

I was very interested to listen to the latest update from Dr Dressler, the dog cancer expert. He was discussing grief and how when we first have a cancer diagnosis for our dog we immediately think `that's it' and prepare for imminent death. He says;

`You know, it’s interesting when you look at the grieving process: there’s a different form of grief. And there’s interesting form of grief that happens before the event even is experienced. That means that we are anticipating something bad coming up and we start to become sad about it. And this form of grief can be completely overwhelming and incapacitating and many, many times when a guardian receives a dog cancer diagnosis from a Veterinarian, they will start to experience anticipatory grief before anything bad has really happened or anything that’s really significant in terms of the well-being of the dog. So it’s important to realize that in many, many cases we are experiencing grief for something that hasn’t even happened yet. We have abundant time and many cases were we can do so much good, where we can take proactive steps, where we can improve our life quality, where we can get increases in life span, and increases in life quality of our special family member and we don’t yet have to be experiencing the grief that accompanies with the departure of a pet.'

This was exactly my experience. I went into complete meltdown for weeks after Nutty's diagnosis and was a hysterical mess. I cried so much I have no tears left. Raw grief is an emotion I'd never felt before but in a way I'm grateful I've experienced it. It has made me more understanding of what most of us will go through but I hope I never have to go to that dark place again.