Making Descansos

Judge no one happy until his life is over is a familiar theme in Greek and Roman philosophical writing. The Sword of Damocles, which almost translates into the English idiom as “walk a mile in my shoes” is often used to describe a sense of foreboding. Dionysius was a fourth century B.C. tyrant of Syracuse. To all appearances he was very rich and comfortable, with all the luxuries money could buy, tasteful clothing and jewelry, and delectable food. He even had court flatterers (adsentatores) to inflate his ego. One of these ingratiators was the court sycophant Damocles. Damocles used to make comments to the king about his wealth and luxurious life. One day when Damocles complimented the tyrant on his abundance and power, Dionysius turned to Damocles and said, “If you think I’m so lucky, how would you like to try out my life?”

Damocles readily agreed, and so Dionysius ordered everything to be prepared for Damocles to experience what life as Dionysius was like. Damocles was enjoying himself immensely until he noticed a sharp sword hovering over his head, which was suspended from the ceiling by a horse hair. This, the tyrant explained to Damocles, was what life as ruler was really like.

Damocles, alarmed and quickly revising his idea of what made up a good life, asked to be excused. He then eagerly returned to his poorer, but safer life.

Now that Darryl has died, seven years after his original bowel cancer diagnosis, I feel an overwhelming need to write about the unspeakable damage of his surgeon’s ill chosen words.

I am not sure what possessed this man to tell Darryl that creative oncologists had little to offer, that he had seen inside Darryl, had seen the extent of the cancer and that he knew that Darryl would have only a few years left. And to top it all off he prescribd invasive tests that gave us scans, that, slapped on the walls revealed the ‘lights of cancer’ massed and dotted throughout his body. He never did bother to tell us that some of these lights were a result of inflammation from radiation and not cancer. It was the radiation oncologist that had to pick up the debris from this mess.

Let anyone be told, shown this and then walk in our shoes! No one passes out a mannual about how to live once the bone has been pointed at you. Helpful friends, family and acquaintances are quick to advise that you should ‘be positive’ but I challenge anyone to be cheerily postive in these circumstance, to be eternally optomistic as they sit with the sword of Damocles above them.

In contrast, Darryl’s oncologist was a legendary man who gave us threads of hope to cling to until the very end. Darryl saw Rohan just one week before he died and as he left his office Rohan said that he would see him again in three weeks, although, given how terribly weak Darryl had become, he must have known that it was unlikely that he would ever see him in his office again.

Should any doctor or health care worker stumble upon this page I would urge them to choose their words very carefully and treat the whole person and not the diseased organ.Patients cling on to every word and careless, totally inappropriate pronoucements can lead to emotional suffering of the worst kind.

Thanks to his surgeon Darryl lived in terror of death. What Darryl could never have appreciated was that death itself was not the enemy. Death came quietly, gently took him into a world of oblivion, a world free of pain and suffering. It was not easy for us as we watched Darryl’s heart beat on, his heart refuse to stop beating but we realise now that his spirit had gone by then.

The surgeon could have spared Darryl years of anxiety and nightmares borne out of anticipation, spawned by wondering what his fate would be, from wondering when the sword would fall and whether it would hurt.