Blog No. 338 - Becoming a Ghost Part 3 - Suffer Alone - 31 October 2025

 Becoming A Ghost (3) – Suffer Alone 

7 October 2027 

When we were told Margaret was dying,

My body started a collapse in slow motion.

Within days, I found it almost impossible to breathe.

For 71 years, breathing had come so easily.

Now my wife was dying,

I could barely get breath inside me.

It didn’t happen all the time,

Only two or three times per week;

But it happened every week.

Sometimes the breathing was easy.

That did not mean my body gave me an easy ride.

It meant a different kind of very hard ride.

One where the stomach swelled like a football;

A football filled with constant pain.

Sometimes even the stomach behaved itself.

That did not mean an easy ride either,

Just another variety of incredibly hard ride.

Sneezing and coughing is not normally life threatening;

Unless it is explosive and never ending.

Unless you have a stitch line down the middle of your chest,

A stitch line where they repaired your heart;

A stitch line that keeps trying to rip itself apart.

When the breathing was easy,

And when the stomach decided not to swell up,

The sneezing and coughing tried to explode my insides.

I still grab my chest every time I sneeze.

I still grab my chest every time I cough.

I doubt the grabbing will stop my insides from being spat out,

But I feel I must do something,

I must at least try and keep my insides, inside my body.

And at least none of the symptoms happened all day every day;

Not when Margaret was first diagnosed.

I needed to become a Cancer Ghost before I sneezed and coughed all day and all night.

I needed to become a Cancer Ghost before I was barely able to breathe all day;

Barely able to breathe all night.

I needed to become a Cancer Ghost before my stomach swelled up all day and all night,

Every day and every night,

Swelled up while I was barely getting air inside my body.

Unable to breathe,

Unable to sleep,

Unable to eat,

I began to die.

It was all slow motion at first.

I was so very, very strong.

I would not leave Margaret to battle the cancer on her own.

But even the strongest can be made to fall

Can be weakened if the attacks are constant,

If the attacks are unrelenting.

I weakened,

Ever so slowly,

Ever so slowly, I began to die.

The doctors had no explanation.

The hospital could find no cause for my illness.

When I was admitted that first time the date was 30 April 2021.

My lung capacity was assessed as 42% of “normal”.

It took so much effort to achieve that 42%.

It took everything I had.

Margaret visited me during my hospital admissions.

She could still drive then;

No one else visited except for one friend.

Although Dave knew the Pretend Friends,

He refused to behave like they did.

It really helped.

I had a birthday in hospital while I struggled for life.

On the Tuesday after that first admission,

On Tuesday 4 May 2021,

The night duty nurse wondered if I was okay.

I was not okay at all.

I was unable to breathe;

I was dying.

The pain in my stomach was overwhelming.

The nurse put me on oxygen for the next 12 hours.

She insisted I wear an apparatus to open up my lungs.

If the lungs could not be opened,

I would die.

The duty doctor refused anything stronger than Panadol for the pain.

The nurse gave me intravenous Panadol

Somehow, I survived the night.

Margaret nearly walked right past me next day.

An Old Man had taken over her husband’s body.

The Old Man had a name.

The Old Man was not called John Hankin.

The name of the Old Man was Cancer Ghost.

Months and years later, I was still alive.

Months and years later, I was still Margaret’s Rock of Strength.

I refused to abandon her.

I had become a Cancer Ghost,

But I stayed around.

I am still a Cancer Ghost.

I am still around.