In the long run

Today [I started writing this a week ago] I received the results from my latest brain scan. It was a rather Dickensian outcome. 

For the left hemisphere (abode of the large, original tumour) 'it was the best of times': September's surgery removed most of The Terminator. Things look calm. On the right side, it hasn't been the 'worst of times' but the situation is more anarchic. There has been some growth in the minuscule blips that originated in early 2017. They're both physically bigger and have more aggressive characteristics.

What does that mean? In some ways nothing has changed. The tumour hadn't been disappearing. 'Short-term' (a rather meaningless filler I picked up during my economics studies) it shouldn't meaningfully affect my health. Over the next few months I'll probably suffer more from continued post-surgical recovery and the toxicity of chemotherapy (the latter is hopefully still delivering blows to the tumour cells).

Long-term things get scarier. It reminds me of the scene in Indiana Jones when some spiky walls are closing in on him. In quiet desperation, like Indy, we'll keep throwing what we can at the rogue cells: a healthy diet, supplements, exercise. Unfortunately physical surgery is no longer an option (you only get to use it on one hemisphere). The chemotherapy and Gamma Knife seem to have done what they could. The walls inexorably keep closing in and not much is likely to change over the next few months.

I'll keep popping the pills, exploring alternative treatment options (I'm still on the waiting list for a promising vaccine…… there have also been some new developments in the UK about a treatment that penetrates the brain blood barrier), writing my PhD, changing nappies, 'racing' Park Runs with Ing and Ernie on Saturday mornings. 

And yet I can't help but remember John Maynard Keynes.  In a comment many see as a poke at the absurd obsession of economists with forecasting way way too far into the future: 'in the long run we are all dead'.
​
Time moves on, one breath at a time.