“I have shaken 10,000 hands, performed thousands of operations and most of those people are no longer here”
These were the words that echoed around my kitchen on Monday morning as I sat drinking my coffee to try find some strength to get out the house and move my body.
Having woken up feeling the impact of radiotherapy again, my first thought was to just close my eyes and go back to sleep, but then the voice started in my head: “Come on David, let’s go.”
It’s much easier to just sleep, to sleep through the pain and fatigue and hope that I dream of sport and not cancer.
However, I am aware that like a car battery, for me to charge and have energy I need to move and preferably in nature.
As I struggled with the inner voice I slowly swung my paralysed leg off the bed after my spasms eased and then stood.
Getting up each morning paralysed is a long process as the spasms resemble a loose electrical cable flapping around. These are not painful but if I try to step too soon I would fall.
As I sit facing my coffee I know I have kind of won my morning just by making it to the kitchen, my first win.
However, that’s not enough for the athlete in me. I want more, actually I need more. More movement, more nature and sport to keep me living.
As I sit thinking I am so exhausted and in pain I can’t face the next challenge of getting outside and either to the golf course or gym.
I know this sounds pathetic - even as I’m writing it I think, “come on David, just get on with it”.
I guess this is the psychological battle that comes with cancer and spinal cord injury.
Each morning I am blessed to have the time to enjoy a hot coffee without rushing out the door to a day's work, however I would swap that any day for some of the days I face.
It is funny how certain things are meant to happen at certain points of our life and if our eyes are open we see them. Or in this case it was my ears.
I hit play on the High Performance podcast hosted by Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes to listen to their discussion with Dr Rahul Jandial - a brain surgeon who in an indirect way changed my life.
As he spoke his voice captivated me and everything around me became distant.
I was transfixed on his every word and I needed to hear this message more than anything today.
When Jandial said “I have shaken 10,000 hands, performed thousands of operations and most of those people are no longer here” it moved me in a way I have never felt.
As he explains there is nothing that can prepare you for the words “you have cancer” but he goes on to say how well many people do when the finish line is in sight and how his patients deal with it.
Of all the sessions I have had with psychologists over the years, somehow this created a shift in me that I have never had.
He explains how sometimes he says to his patients "you don’t have decades left but you have years".
I paused my breathing and held those words in my conscious mind longer.
I wanted to plant that seed deep in my subconscious so it gives me a reminder of the finite time I have on this planet.
I felt like it was just Jandial and I in the room now and I thought this is a philosophy I want to live by.
In that instant I had an overwhelming surge in motivation to get out there and live, even if traffic is so bad that it take two hours to drive to the golf course.
I want to walk those last miles with an inner narrative that I lived it my way.
If that wasn’t enough Jandial then reminds me again of the impermanence of life when he talks about how he has learned from his cancer patients that life is short and the meaning of life is that it ends.
With that I finished my coffee and was on the range for over two hours everyday this week.
Something lit a flame in me and those words on a wet Monday morning have installed a philosophy that I will live by now until my last breath.
