Disempowerment & Resentment

This blog post is a little different. From time to time, or maybe quite often, I would like to begin sharing some of my unpublished writings from back in 2018. These writings served more like a journal than anything else, a way for me to vent my own anger, frustrations and griefs while Kim was going through her second bought of chemo. They served to help me make sense of what I was feeling as I process my experiences and emotions best through writing.
 
Up until last year, I had never returned to nor reread any of these documents, so they are very raw. I have edited them only for grammar, style, and to try iron some sentences out to make them more clear, rather than the verbal vomit they were back when I first wrote them.
 
My hope in sharing these is that they can give others a bit more of a peek into the reality of living alongside someone with stage 4 cancer, the emotional battle of being a caregiver, and again, as with all my writing, I hope they can serve as a companion for anyone who might be experiencing a similar situation, or similar feelings but in a different context.
 
Unless I am on holidays or extra busy with work (like last week) I hope to publish on my blog once a week.
 Peace be with you.
 
Aug. 9, 2018
Yesterday while Kim was in the chemo chair, an interesting and understandable (at least to me) event happened.  It was the hottest day of the year thus far and even in driving to the clinic I could see people’s tempers were on a hair-trigger.  People were driving with an edge and you could tell there was not a lot of patience in the general public. It makes me wonder how many more accidents there are on the hottest days of the year than when we have temperate weather.
It didn’t help our mood or the mood of anyone at the chemo clinic that the staff were also run off their feet, and by the time we got there at 1:45pm, they were already a good 25 minutes behind schedule.  In being walked to Kim’s chair the nurse was already apologizing for being so busy and it was clear this was no throwaway line; it was uncomfortably busy when we got to our pod of chemo-chairs. 
Things for us went fine, and within a totally acceptable time-frame, all our questions and concerns about pre-meds were answered and Kim was hooked up.  This is when I overheard a conversation that caused me to reflect.
 
It was now 2:40pm and I overheard our nurse talking to another nurse asking if she could take her 2:30pm patient as she was so busy she had yet to even look over his bloodwork or do any prep for him.  I looked at my watch and noted this man would have now been sitting in the warm waiting area for probably 15 minutes, knowing he would still be there for another 10 minutes before any nurse would come out and get him.  Having just experienced this situation ourselves I already felt for him.
Then minutes later a third nurse came into the pod asking if the patient had been brought in as she couldn’t find him in the waiting area.  It had now been 25 minutes since his appointment time and the third nurse who went to bring him in started checking everywhere.  She walked to the coffee bar and checked the bathrooms a couple times over the next 10 minutes.  Finally, 40 minutes after what would have been his appointment time, and having placed a phone call to him, they discovered that he had simply left, walked out of the cancer clinic without getting his treatment or telling anyone.  Apparently, as the gossip went, this was not unique for this person.  The interesting thing for me, however, was the total surprise and incomprehension of the nurses over this man walking out.
Now there was nothing wrong or offensive in the nurse’s reaction.  They did not say anything disparaging, but just accepted that this is what the patient did and unfortunately, he would need to wait a couple days before they could book him in again. They were really just left questioning why someone would ever do this.
 
For me, I understood.  I have been in this person’s place many times, waiting, waiting, waiting, and becoming more and more frustrated as you wait some more.  Kim and I had been feeling this way just an hour earlier, but unlike this person, I let out my frustration by swearing under my breath, looking at my watch, and commiserating with other people in the waiting area.
However, what I believe this man was exercising was the smallest amount of agency and control he felt he had left in life.  I am guessing he had simply had enough. Tired and frustrated from the chemo and the way it made him feel and the time it took up in his life; tired of feeling a total loss of agency within himself to influence what was happening to him, and feeling no control each time he came to the clinic, this was the one way he was able to make his voice and power heard, as misplaced and inconsequential to anyone he thought he might be standing up to. He was a person who was potentially feeling disempowered for days, week, even months on end, and now with nerves running short, time being stretched and waiting too long in a hot room for chemo he didn’t want and which was most likely going to make him feel even more miserable than he already was, he excised his last bit of agency and power and walked away.
 
Was it a rational decision?  No.  Was it the right decision? He felt it was in the moment.  In the end what he did will end up taking more time than if he had waited a couple more minutes for the nurses. But for him in his anger there was a release, a statement of power; his voice was heard. What he did, in my mind, was understandable, and was the natural outpouring a man who felt disempowered. 
 
I am guessing, because I see it in myself and I understand what this person did, what he was feeling was a lot of resentment. Resentment to so many things he doesn’t know where it started, but it is now firing off like a shot gun in many different directions, hitting everything in sight. Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk who died in 1968, writes about the need to get rid of resentment:
 
“The most difficult and the most necessary of renunciations: to give up resentment.  This is almost impossible, for without resentment modern life would probably cease to be human at all.  Resentment enables us to survive the absurdity of existence in a modern city.  It is the last-ditch stand of freedom in the midst of confusion.  The confusion is inescapable, but at least we can refuse to accept it, we can say, ‘No.’  We can live in a state of mute protest.  But if resentment is a devise which enables man to survive, it does not enable him, necessarily, to survive healthily.  It is not a real exercise of freedom … Driven too far it becomes a mental sickness.”
 
Resentment, I am almost certain, is what this person was feeling, resentment towards life, towards his cancer, and now towards the people who were not able to stay on schedule.  I feel this because I see it in myself.  So much of my own anger is not so much anger as it is resentment towards life, and our current life situation.  Acting on resentment feels like a freedom (albeit, a false freedom), as for a moment it breaks us free from the captivity and negative feelings we may be feeling against what we think is our oppressor.  No doubt this man was exercising in the fiercest “mute protest” against something that he didn’t even want (chemo) to treat and illness which was trying to kill him. 
My hope for this person is that he felt some freedom and empowerment in what he did, that it was a release and he can let the resentment and hate go. For in the end these feelings and turmoil will only serve to do him harm, for they can never end in freedom, but only in the resentment and irrational things it makes us do becoming its own oppression.  It is again, as Merton writes elsewhere, “Strong and happy hate does not realize that like all hate, it destroys and consumes the self that hates, and not the object that is hated.  Hate in any form is self-destructive.”