I had a birthday recently, but it wasn’t really one I felt like celebrating. I’m now the same age my father was when he was diagnosed with cancer. Within eight months of that diagnosis, he was dead.
I remember that year vividly. It started with a melanoma, but by the time he’d been diagnosed the cancer had spread through his body and was in his lungs. He went through bouts of chemotherapy, slowly becoming sicker and weaker as the months dragged by.
The worst was the pain, which we had to try to manage on our own at home. The morphine would wear off some time before we were allowed to give him more, so each day there’d be repeating patterns of quiet, punctuated by increasing cries of pain that would become louder and louder, echoing through the house. Finally, we’d be able to give him some more morphine, and he’d settle down again. It was traumatic for all of us. I remember at one point my parents asking me if I could source some marijuana from my friends to see if it could help manage his pain. Unfortunately I didn’t have any of those types of friends.
None of us wanted him to die, we just wanted him to be able to spend his last days with us without pain. Despite repeated calls to doctors, we could never get the pain medication right. It was only when my father was finally admitted to palliative care in hospital, a few weeks before his death, that his pain was properly managed. It’s why today I’m passionate about ensuring people receive adequate palliative end-of-life care.
Now I’m sitting here, at the same age, thinking about my own genetics and my two young children. Of course, there are things we can do to potentially influence our destiny. My father was a smoker, and worked outdoors for years without caring much for sunscreen. I’ve never smoked in my life, use sunscreen liberally, and get my spots checked by a skin specialist every couple of years. But so much of who we are is written in our bodies in permanent ink.
I look at my face, and it’s now very much like my father’s face. The same bad ankles plagued my sports-playing days as plagued his. I need reading glasses now, just like he did. There are many differences, for sure (unfortunately I’m bald while he had a full head