Meier Detour back to Life

Honest, thoughtful, funny on the long road through cancer and a new experience in Kalimpong/Darjeeling
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-8192-0348-0
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Torn from his life by the supposedly fatal diagnosis of acute leukaemia, the author finds himself in intensive care. This was followed by months of chemotherapy and years of outpatient follow-up. As a turning point, he quickly realises that this is also a part of his life. He takes steps to make the most of the short time he has left. Along with the ups and downs of cancer treatment, he also sees funny things, has wonderful experiences and makes new friends. During his follow-up treatment, he starts making notes about this time. And then, by chance, he finds his personal retreat for three months on a small mountain farm in the lower Himalayas. Here he combines his experiences and impressions from the past illness with everyday life in Darjeeling. Is this the end of his leukaemia story?

After many years as a human resources manager and consultant, the author spent 20 years as a professor of economics with numerous publications in Germany and abroad. He has worked and continues to work worldwide as a consultant and quality manager in international education projects, primarily in development cooperation. As founder and current member of the advisory board of a foundation for street children in Africa, he is also involved in the care of acute leukaemia patients.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meier, Harald

Leseproben

My New Truth The Himalaya Highlands

Do not despair, even in the face of great suffering;

Perhaps misfortune is the source of happiness.

Menander, Greek poet 341-290 BC

My New Truth

The day of the truth

The next morning, I went to the lung doctor I knew who had diagnosed the hidden pneumonia years ago. On the 200 m or so from the parked car to the surgery, I was glad be able to sit down at a tram stop halfway there.

The receptionist probably realises that I am somehow acutely unwell and I am immediately taken to a treatment room; the doctor remembers me. After I've told him everything, including that I was in India and the US at the beginning of the year and in the DR Congo before Christmas, and that I wasn't any worse afterwards. Then, his usual routine begins: blood pressure, blood sample, lung function test in a chamber that looks like an old tele-phone box, and an X-ray was taken.

According to the doctor, it's just the beginnings of pneumonia, ‘but that's not a problem, we can get it under control with antibiotics,’ he said and continued: ‘I quickly make an appointment with a cardiologist today,’ and he sends me directly. ‘You shouldn't drive’, he adds.

I wonder why? It works better than taking the train or walking ... and I'm also thinking about a possible parking fine. But I don't have a ticket, yeah. So I take the car; again no parking fine at the cardiologist in the city centre.

I sit with him again in the afternoon. According to the cardiologist every-thing is okey, he mumbles as he looks through the report. ‘There's just one more blood value that needs to be checked. Don't worry, I'll send you to a haematologist to be on the safe side.’ I've heard the term before, but I don't know what they do. He's already made an appointment; strange. But it's convenient, the practice is in my neighbourhood and not far from my flat. I could go straight away, he knew the doctor. I would be seen straight away. But I should go by train or taxi, never by car. Outside, I think about the parking, where my car is again. No parking fine again, so off I go; I'm as happy as a child.

In the haematology practice they’re already waiting for me. I was examined immediately and the doctor, she was friendly but firm, took another blood sample. After what felt like five minutes, she comes back and directly clarifies that everything now has to be done quickly. She already has reserved a bed for me at the university hospital. They would wait for me, because a acute leukaemia was suspected.

Apart from the changes I had previously noticed myself, I consciously had not noticed the other typical symptoms such as pallor, nose and gum bleeding or bleeding that was difficult to stop, uncharacteristic back or headaches until then; I only realised this later when I read about them. Swollen lymph nodes, the typical slightly enlarged liver, and spleen were only diagnosed later in the hospital.

I know the term leukaemia, but I only know that it has something to do with blood. At school, at the age of 12 or 13, a classmate had this disease and died in hospital a few weeks later.

Then, my first thoughts were to wash my still wet clothes? And in between, I pack a small trolley. I have to sit down again and again for two minutes; I function like a machine, completely without emotion.

Emergency admission and escape

I take a taxi, it's already dark when I arrive at the hospital. The haematologist had said, a doctor would pick me up in the emergency room. When I report there and say so, I am told in a friendly but clear manner: ‘We are doing the programme here. please take a seat back there.’

I'm sitting in the middle of what I see as real or less real emergencies. Finally someone takes me to a treatment room to take blood samples. They have trouble finding a good vein. I've known this all my life and I immediately feel better and more confident, when I said, ‘it's best to go straight to the abdominal vein.’

I once heard this saying from a venereology specialist during my studies when a colleague couldn't find a vein. And he confidently, almost like a mate in her presence, told her about his professor during his year at the hospital. The both look horrified, so do they here now. Then they call in someone else and it works. And I should drink.

Sitting outside again I see the full emergency programme here with drunks, people ranting and complaining. I feel sorry for the young nurses and doctors or trainee doctors. Gods in white, I think, they have to put up with everything from everyone here, and they remain calm about it. I'm told twice more that I have to drink water. Good, at least they know I'm here.

Now, I've been waiting for two hours, enough is enough. I go to the admissions desk: ‘May I leave my things here? They've been telling me to drink for hours. But nobody shows me where a tap is. I now look for a vending machine where I can get something to drink.’ Within two minutes, they give me wo large bottles of water.

Finally, shortly after 11 p.m., a young doctor takes me to another admission room. She looks over me at some papers and repeatedly palpates the lymph nodes in my neck. She looks at me seriously and asks a few questions. Basically what I had already answered at the lung doctor and the haematologist. And she then asks just as seriously whether I know that I have leukaemia? I answer, probably a bit too flippant: ‘Yes, I've heard that before today, something about blood or something?’ ‘IT’s a very serious matter now,’ she immediately replies. ‘You must know, blood cancer, as it is popularly known, doesn't take a break,’ ... and she adds after a pause for breath and holding my arm ... ‘and no jokes either.’ A clear message ... and I wonder if I would be here now if I had googled it beforehand.

With the doctor, a hospital paramedic pushed me in a wheelchair (why actually?) through the night to a nearby building. They took the lift to the 4th floor reception area of a ward with four corridors, each protected with closed large double milky-white glass doors.

As the haematology practice, here they’re already waiting for me as well. I slowly get an idea how serious the situation is, but I remain supposedly relaxed. The night nurse leads me into a hospital room. I am told to lie down on the free bed by the window and not to undress yet, the doctor will be back in a minute.

I knew as a child that cancer is very dangerous and it is often equated with death. I remember hearing the word cancer for the first time in the late 1960s. My mother had for a long time a non-specific allergy and there was on TV something like the movie Cancer Hospital, based on a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

At some point my mother jumped up from the sofa, now I know what I have, that's why the doctor doesn't tell me anything? Of course she didn't have cancer and later got her allergy under control. But what kind of fears did she have for a long time and at night? And I knew about my classmate who had died of leukaemia during this time, which I didn't think had anything to do with cancer at the time.

Later, I often hear from friends that he or she had cancer or had died of cancer. But it was always far away. For me, it was always like someone else's illness. It was only when it hit two colleagues in the last few years that it was suddenly very close. And now me?

I would later learn that there are very different types of cancer, and it is actually just a kind of collective term for the so-called Malignant Tumours, which can occur and act differently even within one organ. Even though, a cancer diagnosis was practically the ‘death sentence’ some decades ago; there are now many relatively successful cures. Of around half a million cases of cancer every year, slightly more than half survive.

Rapidly developing molecular biology has made it possible to understand cancer on an individual patient-centred basis. As a result, differentiated therapies that are customised to the individual patient now have a high probability of survival in some cases. In children, for example, it is around 80%. It is therefore very helpful for patients to find a hospital that specialises in their specific cancer.

I'm in luck, this university hospital is part of a leukaemia research network, nationally and worldwide.

I'm lying on a fresh hospital bed, still foil-covered. At that moment, all I could think about was dying, and I never imagined that it would be my shared 2-bed room apartment (or quarantine cell!?) for the next few months.

I wonder what some-one was lying here with before? Surely cancer too, the building it's obviously the hospital’s cancer department. I can't get the film out of my head, which I had only seen a short clip of at the time and my parents had then sent me to bed.

It's unpleasantly warm in the room and it smells of urine. I try to open the window a little, but the window handles are blocked and the panes seem smudged. In the bed facing the door, an elderly man is snoring and gasping. There are two open urine bottles hanging from his bed and he is connected to an infusion stand with a few bags.

I lie down again and think, if I have to die, then please in the Swiss Alps or at a nice coastal seaside spa? I don't actually know any specific place, I just remember pictures of the beautiful panoramic terraces at health resorts.

Spontaneously, I get up quietly and just as carefully pull the suitcase, which is not yet...