When the Fog Sets In: Never Give Up

 

Blick (24.12.2025)

After leukemia-related chemotherapy and radiation, writer Claude Cueni (69) suffers from neurocognitive deficits and chronic exhaustion, similar to Long Covid. The consequences for his life and creative work are profound. Yet he never complains. A guide against self-pity.

The good news first. When the fog sets in, stay calm. One day it will lift again. You can speed up the process—through training, training, and more training. Not once a week, but every single day.

At first, every mishap feels incidental: that can happen. Gradually, however, you realize that you are disappearing into the fog. Thinking slows down; your mind moves in slow motion. A trivial shopping trip—some cherry tomatoes and a frozen pangasius—has to be planned with the same care Magellan once devoted to his circumnavigation of the globe. If you haven’t forgotten your wallet for once, you can’t remember what you wanted to buy. You step on the scale in the morning and forget your weight three seconds later. You walk into the living room and no longer quite know why you went there.

When time turns into a weekday

 

That happens occasionally to healthy people. It happened to me thirty times a day. I forgot my passwords—and forgot where I had stored them. In my agenda, I confused times with weekdays. Handling familiar devices such as the coffee machine, the remote control, or the iPad became a challenge. I was constantly exhausted—even after ten hours of sleep. Daily structures dissolved; everyday life turned into a comedy. Blackouts on an endless loop.

Where I once had a 500-page historical novel mapped out in my mind like a film from beginning to end and could continue writing early in the morning almost like a secretary taking dictation, I now forgot parts of the plot. I wrote passages I had already written the day before. Characters from older novels slipped into the scene I was currently working on. Letters flew out of words; a table turned into a fish. When building a diorama, I assembled things that didn’t belong together, and my miniature worlds became Kafkaesque ruins.

You die before you are dead

 

When the fog sets in, you avoid social contact. The feeling is mutual. There is a cartoon showing two people standing in an empty chapel at a cemetery. They stare at the empty benches. One says to the other: “And yet he had 5,000 Facebook friends.” When you are diagnosed with leukemia, bronchiolitis obliterans, and chronic GvHD—and statistically have no chance of survival—you die before you are dead. Many people think: why should I still have spaghetti with him, he’ll be dead soon anyway. And if you are immunosuppressed to prevent further organ rejection, you avoid most events yourself.

For fifteen years, I spent every winter in voluntary quarantine. That was the secret of my productivity. You become a Robinson Crusoe of the big city. The only thing that continued to function beneath the blanket of fog was creativity. Some people have music in their blood, others creativity—you can’t switch it off.

But that was not the reason why I continued to publish a new novel every year. The reason has a name: Dina, my truly extraordinary wife.

Dina – the strong woman beside the broken man

People often say: behind every successful man stands a broken woman. In our case, after fifteen years, it’s the other way around. Beside a broken man stands a strong woman. I owe it to Dina that I survived the long martyrdom under the sword of Damocles, that I endured pain, the late effects of radiation, and two new cancer diagnoses. Dina brought the Philippine sun into my life—and ultimately lifted the fog.

One should not underestimate what healthy partners have to endure. I know both sides. My first wife—now deceased—died one year before my leukemia diagnosis. She had breast cancer and later colon cancer and, in the end, did not want home care but only me, twenty-four hours a day. That was normal for us; we had promised each other that as teenagers. Today, I experience the other situation and know that the healthy partner also needs breaks—to recharge. On a mountain hike or a city trip with friends. That benefits both.

Mental arithmetic, memory games, songs from my teenage years

 

What helps against the fog in the brain? A structured daily routine with firmly integrated training sessions. Almost everything you do regularly becomes a habit—both the good and the less good.

When I stopped leaving the apartment alone and only went shopping with Dina, I memorized the prices of individual groceries and added them up in my head. At the checkout, I compared my total with the receipt. At first, I was only successful if we bought no more than two items. Today, I am once again better at mental arithmetic than others with a calculator.

To this day, I play memory games every morning and sing the hits I loved as a teenager. It takes you back to a time when life was carefree, when life didn’t yet have an expiration date, and when sick people belonged to a different species. You cannot sing and worry at the same time. Singing is also good for the lungs—mine were rejected by foreign stem cells to the extent of 55 percent. And because I memorize song lyrics, singing is also good for memory.

Since other late effects prevent me from typing for hours every day, I began building dioramas—miniature worlds, scenes from novels I will no longer write. More than a hundred by now.

Self-pity is a waste of time

 

Although the fog has now lifted, I have kept the daily training routines. They have become habits. What remains is this realization: self-pity is a waste of time, and the pity of others is not helpful either. Time does not stand still. It waits for no one. It does not wait until you have accepted your illness. It is also a waste of time to ponder why you developed leukemia or another serious chronic disease. Even two-year-old children get leukemia—and they were not employed and were not unhappily married.

One should not dwell on all the things one can no longer do, but value what is still possible. You cannot change the disease, but you can change your attitude toward it. Human beings are far stronger than they believe—otherwise our species would never have survived. Life remains interesting; learning makes it even more interesting.

Dina sometimes says: “If you live in Switzerland, you are favored by luck—and if you are treated at the University Hospital of Basel, then even with leukemia you are a lucky person.”

Never give up!

Last autumn, as a long-term survivor with an unusual medical history, I was invited to the hematology patient day at the Universitätsspital Basel. The conversation with chief psychologist Birgit Maier encouraged many people. That is why I wrote these lines. I hope one person or another can benefit from them.

In this spirit, I wish all those affected and their loved ones the very best of the good. People no longer die as quickly today. Medicine is making astonishing progress—at ever shorter intervals, thanks to AI. Never give up. Do not give up.

About the Author

The author who never dies

Claude Cueni (69) is an exceptional figure—both as a patient and as an author. Doctors speak of an “unusual” course of illness; he himself jokingly calls himself “the author who never dies.” In 2009, he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, fell into a coma following cerebral hemorrhages, and survived blood cancer after chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant. Since then, he has suffered from chronic graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), during which 55 percent of his lung tissue was rejected.

Although his medical file is more extensive than the body of work of many other writers, Cueni is among the most productive—and independent—authors in the country. He has written stage plays, radio plays, over fifty screenplays for film and television (Tatort, Peter Strohm, Eurocops), as well as computer games. His historical novels became bestsellers and were translated into numerous languages. He was also a long-standing columnist for Blick. Most recently, his illustrated book Small Worlds II was published, and this year his dioramas were exhibited at the Basel gallery Galerie Sarasin Art.