Untold Stories (78 page)

I agreed to have a blood test to check the level of the various minerals etc. in my blood. A few days later a letter came back with the results. Again, the alternative therapist did not mince words. The results of the blood test, the letter said, ‘turned out to be a lot worse than I thought they would be. Don't be alarmed, however, we can certainly put this right' and an analysis of the various vitamins etc. followed. ‘Without sorting this out, your chances are much less than fifty-fifty.' The remedy was six weekly visits to the Centre's clinic, an hour out of London, for a course of intravenous vitamins. ‘I trust you can see the arguments,' the letter ended.

All I saw was a barefaced attempt at medical blackmail and a doctor trying to panic me into using his clinic's doubtless expensive facilities. I showed the letter to my GP, who was less shocked than I was, I suppose because I had unthinkingly assumed that the practitioners of complementary medicine were more scrupulous than their orthodox counterparts. But why should they be? Besides, as my GP pointed out, even if the assumptions behind the analysis were correct, the benefits of intravenous as distinct from oral administration of vitamins were far from established.

To be told, though, that unless you abandon a course of treatment you've already decided on you are likely to die, hardly encourages; to engender such alarm and despondency in a patient the last thing a therapist, alternative or otherwise, is supposed to do. I did not go back to the clinic.

After a month or so's interval in which to recover from the operation I began a course of chemotherapy, consisting of twelve sessions at two-week intervals over a period of six months. These involved a fortnightly visit to the London Clinic, where I would arrive at noon on Tuesday, have a blood test and then, with luck, be hooked up to the IV drip around three, and which would continue night and day until I left late on Thursday morning. The therapy was precautionary rather than intensive, and meant to mop up any rogue cells that had escaped the surgery and were still in circulation.

I imagined, as most patients I should think do, that I would lose my hair (something in my case that might be thought long overdue) but my oncologist, Maurice Slevin, thought that this was unlikely, and nor did it ever happen. Or it hasn't happened yet. The other common assumption which I shared was that I would feel very sick but, conscientiously taking the necessary pills, I never did.

Still, it wasn't enjoyable and, as time went on, the two days every fortnight came to seem unending. I was restless, un-sick, always bored, though the nearest I came to actual discomfort was the feeling of having a slight hangover. As I wrote in my diary, ‘It's as if every fortnight I have to fly to Australia.'

I had never met an oncologist before and it was curious (and perhaps this is common too) how I regarded him as torturer rather than nurse, hunter more than healer, oncology, as I thought then, not a branch of medicine in which the doctor could expect to be liked. I was wholly wrong and came to look forward to Dr Slevin's visits, and never felt other than encouraged and heartened. I think I was a dull case, though I make no apology for that. With cancer, a challenge isn't what you want to be.

After my first bout of chemotherapy (I never felt matey enough with it to shorten it to chemo), I came home and wrote:

Just after the first session, I got home and promptly cut my finger. At which point Maggie Smith rang:

‘Oh, I'll ring back, darling. You need every drop of blood you can lay your hands on.'

I am aware, though, that in all this I am leaving something unsaid.

Until it came to it, I had always thought that in the event of serious illness I would always opt for the NHS. I have never been opposed to private medicine in itself, or seen any objection to the mixed arrangement whereby NHS hospitals have private wings for paying patients, provided, that is, that the treatment on offer in both public and private sectors is of the same standard.

In the treatment of cancer I think it is, and I was told that all the treatment I had, the operation itself and the chemotherapy that followed, was in every respect the same as I would have received on the NHS. The circumstances of the private treatment may have been more comfortable (though not always), but – and this is its main selling point – the crucial difference is that private treatment can be arranged more quickly, and that
in my case was vital. If there was a queue, I jumped it. There is no gainsaying that. Someone else may have died as a result. I didn't because I could pay, and this showed me up to myself.

Since, though, it also saved my life, I find it hard to regret, but it is not something of which I can be proud, the only extenuating factor that I paid for all my cancer treatment out of my own pocket. I have no medical insurance, believing, paradoxically perhaps, that it is the private insurance companies who have done most to damage the NHS.

But there were bleak moments, particularly when I was having chemotherapy in the London Clinic – if, say, they were late hooking me up to the treatment (which might mean paying for an extra day), when I felt I was the only patient in that institution who was actually paying his own way.

But there were droll moments, too.

Tedious though the chemotherapy was and long though I did to be away home at the earliest opportunity, I never wanted to be disconnected from the drip until the last drop of life-giving poison had gone into the vein, to be followed by the saline that flushed through the dregs. ‘This
might be the drop', I used to think, ‘that kills the cell that starts the secondary,' and I'd probably have licked out the sachet if I'd been allowed to. It was hardly positive thinking, or even picturing the enemy as one is recommended to do, and nearer superstition than either. I suppose the closest I got to positive thinking was to regard the folinic acid as strengthening medicine. But it got me through and I seldom came away other than cheerful and happy to be home.

Had the chemotherapy made me feel sick I might have thought differently, but the worst I ever felt was mildly hung-over. As time went on, though, it became harder each fortnight to find a viable vein, and I learned to bless and appreciate those nurses (the nurses invariably better than the doctors) who could slip a needle into the arm without pain or fuss. In the course of my treatment, most of the veins in my arms were used up (though they've since rejuvenated themselves). It's the addict's predicament, and I began to have to have the cannula fixed into the back of my hand, which was both painful and restrictive. Still, I was lucky. The nurses told stories of patients so shot up that the only useable vein was in the penis.

After each session of chemotherapy I would come home and make a stuffed marrow. It's not the most exciting of dishes, but what with precooking the rice and preparing the various ingredients, it became both a ritual and a celebration of life, a plain, wholesome and almost consciously life-affirming meal that we could polish off between us to mark the end of another treatment. And I noted in my diary, ‘It still seems to me strange how unblighted so much of the time manages to be.'

While in no pain, though, and little discomfort, as time went on I found the chemotherapy sessions deadening and increasingly wearisome. This was less to do with the treatment than the circumstances in which it was administered.

The London Clinic is not a lively institution, nor a particularly convivial one. Time was measured out in the steady drip of the folinic acid and the slow deflation of the sacs of fluid sagging on the stand. One woke in the night as a nurse came out of the darkness to shake the sac and shine
a torch on the tube to check the drip of the liquid across the optic and through the cannula into the arm. Sometimes it is a known face, or the nurse I had seen before I went to sleep, but more often it is a stranger whose name I do not know. There is not much acquaintance here. And if the nights were long, the days seemed scarcely less so. Though I could pass the time by a trip down the corridor, trailing my drip-stand, I seldom did, as there was never anything to see.

With two and half days in hospital every fortnight for six months, in all I spent nearly a month there and not once did I get into conversation with another patient.

I am not a gregarious man but it was in every sense too high a price to pay for privacy. There was no fellowship in suffering (not that I was suffering, particularly) but how should there be? In free hospitals the sick tend to make common cause, if only with a cheap cheerfulness. It's salutary to see patients in worse nick than you are, if only because pity drives down self-pity. But in private hospitals (and it's their selling point) you seldom see the other patients at all. And why should you? Rubbing shoulders is what you are paying to avoid. ‘If this is the lap of luxury,' I wrote, ‘I don't care for it much.'

Glimpses of my fellow patients were rare enough for me to write them down:

When Alec Guinness came to see me he was surprised and even disappointed that I had not lost my hair, understandably perhaps, in someone who had been bald since he was a young man. He was not wholly convinced that my hair remained my own until he had contrived to tug it to make sure. This was not entirely a joke.

Towards the end of the programme my boredom got to such a pitch I even began to devise improvements to the machinery.