Authors: Anthony Wilson
It just happens. And if I live and recover, as everyone keeps saying they are certain I will, that has nothing to do with fairness either. It doesn’t make me a better ‘fighter’ of the disease if I survive; or a weaker, weedier person if I don’t. It just means the treatment will work for me, or it won’t. Of course I want to live. But I don’t want anyone saying within a mile of me that it’s unfair I got it. It’s unfair on everyone who gets it, if it is at all. I’d rather say ‘tough’ as in ‘it’s tough for every person who has it’ and just leave it at that. Just as it is good if you recover – though ‘good’ will never adequately cover it – and very tough if you don’t. Though that doesn’t cover it either. Let’s say a Kray twin, or Hitler, they get it, then die. I know they’d feel they had just as much right to ‘conquer it’ as I do. And according to Gabe, I never hurt anyone. Little does he know.
My hair – such as it is – started falling out today. I was sitting in the bath when I noticed it. A faint grey scum just above the water level. On closer inspection it was made up of tiny, 3½ millimetres, say, strands of hair. It reminded me of what my bathwater used to look like the day after a visit to the barber’s as a boy. I called out to Tats and she came in and confirmed it. When she went back to the bedroom to fix my syringes I pinched hard on my scalp. They were there, too, at the end of my finger, lifeless iron filings that, because of their size, seemed heavy and fragile at the same time. It is very odd seeing it ‘go’ at last. It’s not like I leave great clumps of it lying around (though if you look hard enough you can see it on my pillow), nor that huge discs of pink appear on my scalp where there were none before. I have lived with the prospect
of it ‘going’ for ten years or so, since a short haircut became a necessity, not a question of fashion. But now that it is falling out for real I find I mourn its passing, in spite of the pre-emptive haircut with the boys, and in spite of the compliments from women (the main difference between men and women? Women say ‘Don’t you look gorgeous!’. Men say: ‘You never had much to lose anyway’). It is one more sign of the process taking hold, one little step further away from looking (and feeling) like the person I was before I had cancer.
Racing through the final pages of Diamond. It will be a loss when he goes/when I finish. I like his logician’s mind very much:
It’s the idea of taking spiritual responsibility for a disease once it’s been diagnosed which annoys me. For it leads to the idea of the survivor as personal hero that only those who want to survive enough get through to the end, and the implied corollary that those who die are somehow lacking in moral fibre and the will to live.
There’s another lovely bit where he’s listening to the usual suspects on some ‘jocular’ Radio 4 programme, where they have to work out the medieval recipe for quince jelly by following some sort of Sanskrit riddle, and he hears the old him for the first time. I love the very real double take here, but also the idea that the pre-cancer Diamond seems to have no idea what is about to hit him:
He was the one who didn’t realise what a boon an unimpaired voice was, who ate his food without stopping to think about its remarkable flavour, who was criminally profligate with words, who took his wife and children and friends for granted – in short who didn’t know he was living.
It really does take a special book – a book about dying – to make you notice your life more closely.
I must have seen twenty people today. First James Bradley came round for coffee, then half an hour later Linda Southwood. She brought daffs (as did James) and a stick of French bread from Tesco’s. ‘I found that the one thing I wanted to be friends with was this,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘You read my mind,’ I said.
She recounted comedy-howlers from her own chemo-days: a child, concerned she was overdoing it by constantly receiving visitors, saying ‘Mummy, you should really be upstairs dying’; another child, admonishing her for eating his
burnttoast-crusts
: ‘Don’t! They’re carcinogenic!’
Then I went to the pub to see Group S who were celebrating the end of the taught course with chips and a lager. For the third time that day I heard myself holding court and describing the steroid energy-rush followed by the Granocyte-induced-crash. ‘You look bloody good on it anyway,’ said one. I’m learning to say thank you to this, on the grounds that it is much nicer to be told you look well (even if it is a lie) than it is to be told you look worn out in the name of honesty.
They were on good form, demob-happily passing on gossip about other groups and students, including at least two course-couples I have taught and had no idea about. Apparently one student called her classroom assistant a lesbian on day one of her teaching practice, then couldn’t understand why the staffroom sent her to Coventry.
I ate a plate of chips, sipped my mineral water, and felt normal for an hour.
On the way out I took a pre-emptive Paracetamol to counter the shooting pains in my back, a repeat, almost to the hour, of how I felt last week. As Tatty says, the Granocyte may keep me alive, but apart from the nausea on the night of my treatments, it is the side effect I have come to dread the most.
On the way I saw Cara and Gina in the deli buying sandwiches – on the way to see me. We sat round the kitchen table. For the first time in months I heard some work-gossip
(all of mine is stuck at December 2005, an eon ago) and felt both relieved to be away from it all and alienated at the same time.
I queued in Lloyds the Chemist behind some ladies and their prescriptions. While we stood there in silence – a waiting room kind of silence, for a shop – I began to listen to the inane chatter of the in-house radio station, Lloyds FM. It’s the sort of thing Jimmy Young used to do on Radio Two (‘In a minute, your calls on bowel cancer, meanwhile, here’s Abba’) except it is entirely about health, unleavened by politics or showbiz or sport.
As I listened I learned that there is a shortage of radiologists in the UK. Dr Martin someone from the Royal College of Radiologists (is there one for everything?) was explaining that we just aren’t making enough of them, hence the waiting lists all over the country for people to receive CT and ultrasound scans. Hence the relief in the GP’s face when, on January 20th, my pain undiminished, I asked if, well, he wouldn’t mind recommending me for a private scan. ‘I was just about to suggest the same to you,’ he sighed. ‘Normally I’m reluctant as I never know how people will react. But in your case it’s a good idea. In any case you wouldn’t have been seen for another six weeks, even on the urgent list.’
‘What are the side effects like?’ friends ask.
‘Do you really want to know?’
They blink.
The main one they’ve heard about – the main one I had heard about until just over a month ago – is the sickness. This is the one, my performance on the first evening of chemo excepted, that I seem to have escaped most conspicuously. Tatty and the children will tell you, however, that I seem to burp constantly (‘Dad, that really smells!’) and that every
time I do I feel as though I might be about to throw up. I haven’t –yet– but for that one night, but it feels as though I’ve reached the point of no return, every time.
So I don’t tell them about that, referring instead, expert that I now am, to ‘the cycle.’
‘It must be very tiring,’ they say.
They are not joking.
This is all to generalise, though.
I’ve noticed subtle shifts in the side effects from cycle 1 to cycle 2, although the general pattern remains just as I have described it.
Cycle 1 side effects:
Cycle 2 side effects:
Rich called and described in more detail than I wish I could remember his wee: ‘At night a Burgundy, in the morning a rich Bordeaux’ (he has kidney stones).
We talked about people praying for us. ‘It’s beginning to bounce off me a little,’ he said. ‘I mean, I know they mean it, but, partly it is something to say, to take up the space at the end of a card or phone call. I mean what they don’t say is ‘I am expecting the living God of the Universe to reach into your pain and bless you with his healing touch.’
‘It’s a bit long for a start,’ I said.
‘So instead they say, “I’ll pray for you.”’
Somehow I found this tremendously encouraging. It turns out he’s just been given
Blue Like Jazz
. I told him to cut to the chase and go to the bit on cancer and war metaphor.
A real curiosity in the post this morning: a card, book (
The Maker’s Diet: The creator’s plan for optimal health!
), leaflet and
Healing Scriptures
CD from the mother of a friend. It took me a whole minute of looking at her name before realising who it was bombarding me with unasked-for Christian material.
I did not find it helpful. Something about the syntax in sentence 1 of the card aroused my suspicion straight away: ‘I was so sorry to hear about the cancer.’ It isn’t that it is ungrammatical,
it is that it isn’t true. What I mean is that it acknowledges my having cancer without really communicating any sorrow that I have it. It’s all in that word ‘the’. ‘I was so sorry to hear about the cancer.’ Not: ‘that you have cancer’; not: ‘that you have been diagnosed with cancer’; not even the euphemistic: ‘about your illness.’ Instead: ‘about the cancer.’ Just: the cancer. Not ‘
your
cancer’ but ‘
the
cancer’. Placing it,
the
cancer, in a kind of possessive-less limbo, as though not attached to or, dare I say it, living in an actual human being, thereby acknowledging its presence, but not acknowledging me. Which is, ironically, to deny both the cancer, with its determined determiner ‘the’, and me at the same time.
The leaflet made me shudder as well: ‘sickness, disease, pain, I resist you in the name of Jesus. You are not the will of God. I enforce the Word of God on you. I will not tolerate you in my life. My days of sickness and disease are over!’ (I’ve just looked back at the prayers either side of this and three out of four of them close with an exclamation mark, too.) Apart from the fact that the days of my disease are not (yet) over; and apart from the war metaphor (enforcing the Word of God); it is the triumphalistic tone of this which I find so unappealing. Imagine you are an old lady being given this by an enthusiastic new vicar; or a man who has just discovered secondaries on his lung, having been clear for three years: what are you supposed to feel if you do not share the leaflet-writer’s certainty that you are cured? Where does this kind of thing leave you? People of faith are made to feel worse by this kind of thing, through the guilt that it induces a) for not getting better, if that happens and b) anxiety and fear for not having ‘resisted’ hard enough. I know my friend’s mother means well, and I know I should be grateful, but I only find it depressing, rather as I find double glazing salesman who ring you during supper depressing. Of course I want to get better, but I am not going to pray prayers that I can’t subscribe to culturally or, for want of a better word, linguistically. It reminds me of what I remember one writer saying in a
Guardian
piece from last year: ‘Truth starts with syntax.’ This leaflet is not true.
I opened the book, very warily, at random. In a chapter which is a long list of ‘Don’ts’ entitled ‘How to Get Sick: A Post Modern Prescription for Illness’ we are entreated (no. 23) not to ‘Use plastic food storage products, the popular food wraps [nor] re-use plastic drinking bottles,’ ‘Do aerobic exercise’ (no. 17) and ‘Get tattoos’ (no. 10). No. 20, where I opened the page, warns against the dangers of wearing tight underclothing:
Lymph nodes that are compressed or blocked by tight underclothing such as bras or other tight clothing may not allow the lymph system to be properly cleansed. […] Women should not wear bras to bed.
I am so glad I knew that.
Back at the card which accompanies all this, the penultimate line reads ‘Trust Tatti (sic) & the children are all doing well.’ Poor spelling aside, this rather falls between the two stools of thoughtfulness (she remembers that I am not alone and that my cancer has affected all of us) and naïve optimism (on what grounds is that (person-free) trust based? Has she spoken to my consultant?). It is also horribly informal. It is ‘Trust that …’ not that ‘I trust that …’. This is a person I have not seen for over three years and she is writing to me as though we chatted for half an hour on the phone last night.
I haven’t unwrapped my
Healing Scriptures
CD from its plastic sheath yet. The blurb on the back opens with: ‘Defeat your doubts and receive your healing by allowing the healing power of God’s word to flow through you.’ This assumes a) I have doubts about God’s power/love, b) that I am not allowing him to heal me, the inference of which is that I am to blame and c) that if I don’t defeat my doubts (more war metaphor) I’ll be in a lot of trouble. The CD promises, furthermore, to ‘[give] you powerful promises to stand on for healing.’ I’m sorry, but what does ‘stand on for healing’ mean?
Does it mean ‘go on standing’, with the implication that I may have to stand for some time before being healed, i.e. that it will involve lots of
effort
and hard work on my part; or does it mean, simply, to stand
for
healing? Which begs the question, why ‘stand’ for healing and not ‘sit’ or ‘collapse on the sofa for healing’ or ‘have a lie down’, which is what I feel like most of the time. Why do I pick up a dreadful whiff of testosterone-fuelled muscular-Christianity from all of these products? And why do so many of us, the mothers of friends included, fall for it?