Review: Henki

Be near, neighbor

Strength doesn’t help anything when fear and anxiety creep out from under the covers. The fear of facing one’s own death is a completely different kind of research than the study of poems about death. Why does a person only learn when they have to experience it themselves?

About 10,000 men and 11,000 women are diagnosed with cancer every year. The most common cancers in men are prostate cancer and lung cancer. For women, breast cancer, on the other hand, leads the statistics clearly. A brightness that dazzles our eyes, even blinds them. We don’t examine our breasts, even though we have been rationally justified, and we may even skip mammography screenings because there is more urgent work to do. At the oncologist’s office, the age distribution of the patients is striking: even a woman in her twenties sits quietly waiting for the results. Reason and cancer have very little to do with each other, at least when you get cancer.

Don’t abandon the sick

The ideal of health prevails in our society. What’s wrong with that? People take care of their health and invest considerable amounts of money in it in various ways. Companies want to promote the health and work ability of their employees. Healthy people are visible and successful in working life. A serious illness is something that people like to put aside both in their own mind and in conversation. It’s embarrassing to talk about an illness and you don’t know how to deal with a sick person very naturally. The sick person is left alone in the care of a few true friends and nursing staff and soon moves to their own compartment in the sick ward. On the ward, life comes to a standstill. Time stands still or stretches to impossible proportions. If you spend that time in uncertainty, uncertainty, fear and pain, you can only guess how long even a second can stretch. Every visitor, a real intermediary is necessary.

From the patient’s strength to the fear of death

Margaret Edson’s play “The Spirit” premiered at the end of March at the Helsinki City Theatre. The play’s protagonist, Vivian Bearing (Miitta Sorvali), falls ill with ovarian cancer, and the events take place in a hospital. Treatments and nurses as well as pain and bitterness are brought to the stage. Vivian is a teacher, a professor who teaches English poetry. He is familiar with John Donne’s poems that talk about death. Vivian is firm and withstands her tough role as a guinea pig with her dark humour; The treating doctors do cancer research.

Not Latin, but intimacy

The play also criticizes the doctors’ attitude towards the patient, and it would fit perfectly into the curriculum of current and future doctors. Every day, patients are asked how they are doing here. People even ask if there is pain when you should know the answer without asking. The patient is the diagnosis, the object of treatment and the object of examination. It’s embarrassing that on the way to becoming a great researcher, you have to meet people,” laments a young assistant physician (Kristo Salminen). Caring and caring, taking the person behind the illness into account, is left to the nurses. Which one might be more important to the patient?

My mother had a mastectomy in the spring due to breast cancer. He praised how the treatment is organised in the ward where cancer surgeries are performed. There is a so-called “I” at work every day. A personal nurse who can be contacted in all matters related to illness and surgery. On her ward, it was a male nurse whose helpfulness and familiarity with the treatment of cancer patients surpassed previous hospital experiences. The surgeon was also a nice man. That was something my mother remembered to praise everyone. The doctor’s scientific expertise was secondary. The doctor was a human being, so the patient could also be a human being.

Dare to face death

Neither Vivian’s intellectual wit nor her strength will help indefinitely; because it only masks the fear of death and the fear of what you are and will experience before you die. Is the fear of death in old age more about being afraid of what will happen before death, how much you will have to suffer, how death will come? In the play, cancer is just a way of dying, not the main theme itself, but it is very well chosen. In addition to being a disease that affects many people in some way, cancer is also a unique living cell: when it is allowed to grow freely, it does not die, but lives forever.

Vivian struggles through chemotherapy and the progression of uncontrollable cancer towards the irreversible truth. He is not one of the winners. Or will he win after all? As he rediscovers the poems he has studied with the help of this self-eating disease, he also finds solace in death. With the help of a resilient nurse (Petriikka Pohjanheimo), he is given the grace to die, and the fairy tale sets his soul on a journey to eternal rest.

Theatre therapy and open discussion

People leaving the stands don’t talk unnecessarily, someone also needs a handkerchief. It is better to bring up painful and even disgusting things than to bury them under the hustle and bustle of a healthy and normal everyday life. The power of theatre is to make people laugh and cry quietly. Those who have experienced cancer, those who have followed closely, those who have lost a loved one, and especially those who have not yet experienced these things can come to the safe stands. Just as we do not talk about a serious illness, we do not talk about death, neither about our own nor those of our loved ones. However, caring for people is the greatest strength for a grieving person. The best thing we can give each other is to care. In addition to theatre therapy, we should also allow unpleasant things to be discussed and not always ignore them by saying “things got dark”. When you are grieving or afraid of illness, you don’t always have the energy to talk, but knowing that there is a caring person nearby when needed helps you cope. After all, death, with its over-emphasized power, is only the comma that separates life from eternal life.

“When sleep is over, we are forever awake
and death ceases, you go to death to death.”
John Donne