The Destructive Stew : Toss In Cancer, Fear & Depression

PATIENT NOTE: Within the world of those with a terminal illness, the things that go on inside our heads are often times inexplicable. The time spent sitting around doing nothing - when we used to be able to have jobs, go about 'normal' activities and the like can be severely restricted. All this sitting around, staring at walls while recovering, worrying about the future - our own and that of our families, make for horrible holes in our psyche that get filled with all kinds of different scenarios. What happens? Fear, loneliness and depression fill those holes and can lead us to say and do ridiculous, mean and even hurtful things to those closest to us. While the treatment we get - medically through chemotherapy, radiation and surgery are obviously important to our recovery and survival, I think that psychological help - though offered by care teams - is very under-valued and under utilized by patients and families. I really think that psychological counseling should be as prescribed as pain killers, or anti-nausea medication, for the overall well being of patients and their families. I WILL be addressing this with my doctors as I get ready to start my next round of chemotherapy.

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One of the things I enjoy is cooking. Cooking allows me to put good work into something - preparation, ingredients, special care, etc. Then to serve it up to hungry people who return to me looks of enjoyment which is all I ever ask for.

Sometimes, no matter what you seem to do though, there are occasions when something goes, horribly, horribly wrong. Relationships can be like that, especially ones complicated by a host of issues. Just as in coooking some you control as a chef, some you can't. Sometime you are short of something, sometimes the flame is impossible to regulate, sometimes you put in too much or too little of an ingredient, and some times there is a mistake in the recipe to begin with. Relationships are like that, an often delicate balance of things you CAN control and things you CAN'T. The success of the 'dish' is the result of that balance. And, like any adventure in the kitchen, if you don't pay attention to all the details, you will be left with a pot of dreck. 

So, currently I have made a bad, bad concoction that needs serious attention. In order to salvage the meal.

I call it the 'Self-Destruction Stew'.

Where the 'recipe' went wrong exactly, is hard to pin down, but I know for certain that many things have contributed to this mental-psychological-culinary disaster along the way. The pot has been simmering poorly tended for far too long. 

Looking back at my poorly imagined recipe I see there are some things that got tossed into the pot, some of which I could not control, some of which I could and some just happened to show up in there as if evil gremlin line-cooks had been tossing things in behind my back.

Bad ingredient #1: Personal 'Soup Stock''.  Like most stocks, they are not bad, but need ingredients to make the meal complete. To me ones stock consists of the baggage of a lifetime that we bring into every relationship. In my case I was raised to be a self-sufficient person who can get through anything with little outside help. "Do it yourself!", "Deal with it!", "Suck it up!", "Be a man - rub some dirt in it!", "Don't by ANY MEANS let anyone see your weaknesses!" So as a result I have ended up a rather stubborn, opinionated man, just certain that he has all the answers, and don't need ANY help 'fixing' things along the way. There are MANY problems with the results of this approach. Over the years it has made it VERY hard if not near impossible to really let people in and almost as importantly for me to let out what I feel, even to those closest to me. 

Bad ingredient #2: Rotten Spots - Complacency and Neglect. Have you ever grabbed, say a tomato from the vine and noticed that it has a couple of 'bad-spots', and just thought, "What the heck. I can 'cook them out'. It's a big pot, what could happen?" Well that is what has happened to me with several relationships. Rather than do the hard, extra work of dealing with the bad spots - cutting the out carefully, washing every thing properly before cooking, many times I have held them up, turned the bad spot so I cannot see (deal) with it and then just tossed them into the pot forgetting how ugly and moldy and rotten they became. This could have been avoided had the pig-headed stubbornness of my 'stock' not caused me to 'clam-up' (pun intended).

Bad ingredient #3: Job Loss. - The first of the uncontrollable ingredients thrown into the pot while I was not paying attention. While the bad pot has been stewing for years, some Gremlin-Cook tossed in first one job loss (folowed by a 10 month stretch of unemployment) then after finally finding another job that I held for a bit more than a year, a second job loss was thrown into the mix. Again, I should have been watching the pot - after a year though I though things were 'cooking along just fine' the aroma from the pot was just starting to make the kitchen smell good again.

Bad ingredient #4: Colon Cancer (the most recent one) - The second of the uncontrollables  - this second battle was much worse than the first one I experienced almost 20 years ago. This one ended up costing me my colon (and part of my dignity), left me hospitalized for many days, then left me, alone, at home, staring at the walls, watching too much television, watching the lives of people around me go on in their day to day routine, avoiding me, and I began to sink. This is where things began going from bad to worse in the stew. As any chef will tell you there are key points during the cooking of a meal, when if you are not paying attention, things can go really bad - milk can curdle, butter can separate, meat can burn, etc. 

I clearly was NOT paying attention. As I dealt with this new cancer neglect of the 'cooking process' - the sampling, the adjusting, the taste tests that all good chefs use to monitor the progress of the dish, I stopped doing. In the case of relationships this is when things went most off track. I stopped talking to those closest to me. I stopped sharing what my feelings (as always) and for some reason I put the lid on the pot, set the spoon down, left the kitchen and allowed myself to enter the long journey of fear and depression. 

Neglected, eventually, the dish begins to burn and smoke will rise from the kitchen, bringing attention to the disaster building on the stove. By the time I realized the kitchen of my life was filled with smoke, ran to the pot and lifted the lid it finally blew up in my face. The stench of negligence.

I stood there, looking at the mess I had made, all this time thinking that things in my life were cooking along fine, they were not. I had assumed that everything was o.k. and things were moving on. I ACTUALLY thought - again for reasons I don't understand - that they were getting BETTER by me not 'putzkying with the pot'.

At this point, with the dish most likely ruined, most chefs would chuck the whole thing pot and all, and try to make something completely new. However, the perpetual 'fixer' that lives in my broth had me convinced I could fix things all by my self. So once again, instead of asking another 'chef' (friend, family member - hell it could have been anyone) for help, I forged on ahead, by my self, and all I did was make things worse. By the time I got the lid off, turned down the burner, and started stirring the mess, I could tell that there was all kinds of stuff burned, maybe permanently on the bottom of the pot.

Bad Ingredients #5: Fear. All chefs, at some point have burned something on the bottom of a pot. It happens. With me, the FEAR of what was burned, and what might happen if I dumped the pot and really looked at it was devastating. I KNEW there were problems. I knew there were issues within my relationships with those around me and yet, as always, I was sure they would just go away, or 'blend-in' to the stew. So, instead of starting over when I could, I dumbly just kept stirring and scraping, stirring and scraping just SURE that all this stuff would 'blend' into the meal. Within my relationships I simply stopped talking, when I should have been letting people know what was going on in my head. Then, the Cooking-Gremlins returned to plop in another foul addition to the stew, when I was frantically worrying about how to deal with the gunk building up on the bottom of the pot.

Bad Ingredient #6: Cancer. Yes, another one. This time, seemingly more serious and with more lethal possibilities than the one I just spent eight months beating back. Again, I took the news - all manly like - plunked it in the pot with the stirred up charred scrapings of the now foul smelling stew, put the lid on even tighter sealing in the pain, mental, emotional and psychological, anguish and walked away. I was done.  All this did was make the smoldering pot explode, all over every thing in my life.

So, I run back into the kitchen - ever the fixer - grab a fire extinguisher and attempt to put out all the flames that the over-boiled pot had produced. So, now I sit, in the smoldering kitchen that is my life, trying to figure out where to start cleaning up. Everything I did along the way, has left the world around me a mess, covered with the soot of sadness, the crusty bits of what 'might-have-been'. Had I been paying better attention to my cooking, asked for help when I saw disaster brewing, things might have turned out different.

Now, I stand now at the sink, scraping the bottom of the pan, trying to recover what might be salvageable from the disastrous, 'Destructive Stew'. As I stand here, scraping the pan, wiping up the mess, I realize that  once again, in an evidently repeating pattern, I seized up, gave up, figured there was no purpose bothering anymore - since I wasn't going to survive this battle -  that the 'dish' of my life had simply been ruined -  rendered unfit for serving, so why bother trying. 

I took a look in the 'dining room of my life' and saw that, from my perspective anyway, all my guests (family, friends, loved ones) had run from the smoke filled situation and were heading their own seperate ways, not needing me any more, and most CERTAINLY not wanting to eat what I had been dishing out all these years. So, it has been very hard for me to believe that I CAN clean things up, make things right (with NEW help that I will be getting)  and bring them back to the table of my life at some point, to once again enjoy my cooking -- cooking that I will CAREFULLY prepare, watch DILIGENTLY and put in all the love possible to make things more palatable than they have been.

EPICURIOUS EPILOGUE: This is to ALL those dealing with terminal illness, while your body fights the disease with the help of medical treatment, your mind gets very little help along the way. Get HELP. Talk to your loved ones, talk to your doctors and nurses. This is VITAL. No matter how scarred, depressed or lonely you get along the way, don't forget (like I did) that people outside your immediate bubble of experience DO CARE.... But THEY can't read YOUR mind. YOU have to ask for help. It's the only way to get through this. Take time to realize that making a fantastic recipe (getting you healthy) takes a hell of a lot of team work, and you simply CAN'T do it on your own, hoping to 'winging-it' with no plan, by neglecting the 'ingredients', ignoring the 'process' and not giving the attention required along the way to end up with a meal fit to serve. For me,  all I can hope is that through enough 'mental-psychological' elbow grease that I can restore the pot, clean the kitchen, and get back to cooking up better food for the rest of my life.