When you put down your pen at the end of your last exam you are no longer a student. When you have sex for the first time, you are no longer a virgin. And when you are diagnosed with cancer you are no longer something. And what that something is I’m not quite sure. But that’s what I’m trying to get my head around.
I got good news during the week, which I guess is relative in the current circumstances. There is no indication that the cancer has spread beyond the tumour that now sits in a jar in some suburban pathology lab.
But if there is one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it is that there is no obvious destination. Nobody is going to say to me, “Thank you very much, you’ve been a model patient. Now toddle along on your merry way. You are cured.” Once you’ve entered the cancer building, you never really leave.
There is a sequence that you need to follow when you get on this merry go round. Ultrasounds, blood tests, surgery, CAT scans and more blood tests. It’s a familiar story to those that have waited in corridors for news of relatives and friends but it’s a world that was unknown to me until three weeks ago.
I now have lots of relatives and friends anxious to hear news of me. And I can’t help feeling that it’s actually worse for them. They are helpless and impotent. They want to do something, but apart from the occasional joke to keep my spirits up, there is not much they can do.
I, on the other hand, just have to lie back and let the doctors do their thing to me. My only job is to design a strategy to win the war that my own body has declared on me.
I’ve gone through all the emotions from denial (it’s not a lump, it’s just the way I’m sitting) to despair (why me, when I was just about to embark on my dream career as a porn star) to anger (how could you do this to me body, after I bathed you once a week whether you needed it or not).
The doctors are looking after my physical recovery, although their advice could be distilled into a single message, “wear tighter underpants!” But it is my job to manage the mental recovery.
I think it was Freud who said that our biggest battle in life is with ourselves. I’m not sure, but I know that Tony Soprano said “we are our own worst enemies”. And that’s never truer than when you are touched by cancer. This isn’t a virus that I developed after being with someone I shouldn’t have or an infection I picked up after exposure to dodgy flies or insects. This is something my own body did to me, the ungrateful pup. And the response will have to come from me.
There are some upsides of course. I’ve managed to get down to the target weight that I’ve longed for these past fifteen years. I’ve also been banished to the sofa for a couple of weeks which has allowed me to catch up on all those DVDs that I’ve been hoarding. And what has this taught me? Woody Allen is no longer as funny as he once was and Pedro Almodavar is a sick Spaniard.
My home confinement has also coincided with coverage of the Commonwealth Games. I’m a sports fanatic but any competition that is weak enough to allow Jersey to win medals does not appeal to me. Australia takes the games seriously for reasons that are beyond me. The coverage is so one eyed that it makes English commentary on the World Cup sound like the enlightened prayers of Buddhist Monks.
I have to confess that I’m a poor patient. I used to dream of being able to lie on my back and watch any DVD I choose. But it truth, it becomes pretty boring after a few days and I realise now that I’m a social animal who craves conversation and the opportunity to make people laugh.
But one thing people keep saying to me is that positive thought is the most important thing at the moment. So I’m treating this like a second life. An opportunity to start again and to leave behind all the anxieties I used to have (to be honest, they all seem insignificant now anyhow) and to embrace life.
So I’ll be doing that over the coming weeks while I wait on word from the doctors on what my follow up treatment will be. I’ll be telling the people I love that I love them. I’ll be savouring the freshness of hops in a cold beer. I’ll be licking the side of the ice cream bowl and crying when I see Chilean miners emerge from seventy days trapped in the bowels of the earth. I will re embrace all those emotions I chose to bottle up these past twenty years while I worried about superficial things like careers, property prices and whether my belly looked big in my favourite t-shirt.
This is a chance to start again. To see the world in a new light and I want to embrace it with both arms. Because at least I still have two of those.
I’m still not out the woods but at least I can see the clearing ahead. I have to see the specialist on Wednesday for the results of my last blood test. No doubt there will be some treatment after that. Much of this journey is about waiting for appointments, for tests or for your body to do its thing and settle down. But I take heart from those Chilean miners. They have shown us that waiting can be worthwhile if it brings redemption and a chance for a second life.
I am buried in a dark hole at the moment but I can hear the rescue shaft being dug and I know that I will shortly breathe clean air again.
Saturday 16 October 2010
Friday 1 October 2010
Sailing on the Big C
I watched the epic Grand Final on a big screen in O’Donnell Park in St Kilda, in the happy company of two thousand Saints fans. They played Collingwood in the final and St Kilda was the only place in the City safe from the nasal toned hell of Pies supporters.
The game ended in a draw which is about as rare as a Collingwood fan with a full set of teeth. As soon as the final siren went and the delirium of the crowd was reduced to anti-climatic mutterings, the Gods decided that we had frolicked in the sun for long enough.
As the crowd drifted towards the trams and the welcoming glow of St. Kilda beach hostelries, a great tempest moved in from the bay, hurling sand in its wake and changing the colour of the sky to tar.
“You have tested and tasted too much my friends”, God seemed to say. “Now its time to go home”.
It’s now Friday after the Grand Final (and the day before the replay that has gripped the City’s imagination all week) and I feel like God is passing on the same message to me. About ten days ago I found a lump in a place where men are not supposed to find lumps. I went through the whole gamut of emotions from despair to denial before finally presenting myself to a doctor. I was immediately subjected to indignities involving long needles and a stranger fondling those parts of your body that should be reserved for mothers up to the age of four and after a gap of twelve years or so, girlfriends and wives thereafter. When the doctor kept saying “oh dear, oh dear” I knew something was up.
But despite the ever increasing sense of doom that these procedures induce, there is a strange sense of calm that settles over you once you have handed over responsibility for your care to the professionals.
I’m quite happy now to sit back and be prodded, injected and cut open by a host of medical practitioners. It’s as though it is their problem now and not mine.
That was on Monday and events took on a surreal life of their own thereafter. I had stepped on to the medical rollercoaster and all I could do was hold on and wish for the best. I went for an ultrasound on Monday afternoon where a nice man chatted to me while he ran a warm nozzle over my little fellows. Then his tone changed and I knew that he spotted the fatal flaw. He didn’t want to tell me but I caught a glimpse of the screen and even to my untrained eye, a picture painted a thousand words.
The next stop on the roller coaster was the Urologist, a nice man in an opulent suite in the Freemasons Hospital. In the past, Freemasons were as popular in my Catholic family as the Klu Klux clan but believe me that feels irrelevant when you’re sailing on the stormy waters of the Big C.
He became the third person in two days to have a little fondle. It didn’t take him long to make a diagnosis. He sat me and my partner down and calmly explained that in two days time he would be cutting me open like and extracting my left testical. Then he asked if we had any questions.
Looking back I wish I could have thought of something smart to ask. Such as, “what led you into this line of work?” or “Will I get to keep it afterwards”.
But truth be told, I was a mass of confusion and could only mumble out some idiotic enquiries about whether it would hurt or not. Thankfully I had someone with me who could ask the important stuff and between us we managed to come away with a clear idea of what lies ahead.
Then I did what all right thinking Irish people would do in a situation like this. I went out and got drunk. We had a sort of wake for lefty and a promotion ceremony for righty who has agreed to take on sole responsibility in the future now that I am dispensing with the joint CEO model.
Thankfully, I’d sobered up by Thursday morning when the operation was due. I had rarely seen the inside of a hospital theatre before this year. But 2010 is swiftly becoming Annus Horribilus. I am now an expert on the Australian health system and I could probably be trusted with carrying out some simple operations myself at this stage.
The surgeon came to see before they put me to sleep and asked if I minded if a work experience student sat in during the operation. I said it was fine as long as he wasn’t holding a scalpel. It turned out to be a 16 year and I can only assume that he was given the job of holding my Willy while they shaved me. It’s a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.
I woke up a couple of hours later and felt pretty sore and a little lighter. Lefty must have weighed more than I thought. For such a life changing operation, they don’t waste time. I was out of hospital by 5pm and back on the sofa where I expect to spend a lot of time over the coming days.
While I wait for the wound in my groin to heal, I’m a little bit of limbo. I have to get a CT scan done next week to see if the cancer has spread. There is a good chance it hasn’t as they say that testicular cancer is one of the better ones to get if you are looking for full recovery. Although at the moment that’s like telling me that having one leg cut off is better than two.
I’ll get some more blood tests and then revisit the nice specialist in his opulent suite in two weeks. He will tell me which fork my life will take from here on. I hope it’s not the one less taken.
The game ended in a draw which is about as rare as a Collingwood fan with a full set of teeth. As soon as the final siren went and the delirium of the crowd was reduced to anti-climatic mutterings, the Gods decided that we had frolicked in the sun for long enough.
As the crowd drifted towards the trams and the welcoming glow of St. Kilda beach hostelries, a great tempest moved in from the bay, hurling sand in its wake and changing the colour of the sky to tar.
“You have tested and tasted too much my friends”, God seemed to say. “Now its time to go home”.
It’s now Friday after the Grand Final (and the day before the replay that has gripped the City’s imagination all week) and I feel like God is passing on the same message to me. About ten days ago I found a lump in a place where men are not supposed to find lumps. I went through the whole gamut of emotions from despair to denial before finally presenting myself to a doctor. I was immediately subjected to indignities involving long needles and a stranger fondling those parts of your body that should be reserved for mothers up to the age of four and after a gap of twelve years or so, girlfriends and wives thereafter. When the doctor kept saying “oh dear, oh dear” I knew something was up.
But despite the ever increasing sense of doom that these procedures induce, there is a strange sense of calm that settles over you once you have handed over responsibility for your care to the professionals.
I’m quite happy now to sit back and be prodded, injected and cut open by a host of medical practitioners. It’s as though it is their problem now and not mine.
That was on Monday and events took on a surreal life of their own thereafter. I had stepped on to the medical rollercoaster and all I could do was hold on and wish for the best. I went for an ultrasound on Monday afternoon where a nice man chatted to me while he ran a warm nozzle over my little fellows. Then his tone changed and I knew that he spotted the fatal flaw. He didn’t want to tell me but I caught a glimpse of the screen and even to my untrained eye, a picture painted a thousand words.
The next stop on the roller coaster was the Urologist, a nice man in an opulent suite in the Freemasons Hospital. In the past, Freemasons were as popular in my Catholic family as the Klu Klux clan but believe me that feels irrelevant when you’re sailing on the stormy waters of the Big C.
He became the third person in two days to have a little fondle. It didn’t take him long to make a diagnosis. He sat me and my partner down and calmly explained that in two days time he would be cutting me open like and extracting my left testical. Then he asked if we had any questions.
Looking back I wish I could have thought of something smart to ask. Such as, “what led you into this line of work?” or “Will I get to keep it afterwards”.
But truth be told, I was a mass of confusion and could only mumble out some idiotic enquiries about whether it would hurt or not. Thankfully I had someone with me who could ask the important stuff and between us we managed to come away with a clear idea of what lies ahead.
Then I did what all right thinking Irish people would do in a situation like this. I went out and got drunk. We had a sort of wake for lefty and a promotion ceremony for righty who has agreed to take on sole responsibility in the future now that I am dispensing with the joint CEO model.
Thankfully, I’d sobered up by Thursday morning when the operation was due. I had rarely seen the inside of a hospital theatre before this year. But 2010 is swiftly becoming Annus Horribilus. I am now an expert on the Australian health system and I could probably be trusted with carrying out some simple operations myself at this stage.
The surgeon came to see before they put me to sleep and asked if I minded if a work experience student sat in during the operation. I said it was fine as long as he wasn’t holding a scalpel. It turned out to be a 16 year and I can only assume that he was given the job of holding my Willy while they shaved me. It’s a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.
I woke up a couple of hours later and felt pretty sore and a little lighter. Lefty must have weighed more than I thought. For such a life changing operation, they don’t waste time. I was out of hospital by 5pm and back on the sofa where I expect to spend a lot of time over the coming days.
While I wait for the wound in my groin to heal, I’m a little bit of limbo. I have to get a CT scan done next week to see if the cancer has spread. There is a good chance it hasn’t as they say that testicular cancer is one of the better ones to get if you are looking for full recovery. Although at the moment that’s like telling me that having one leg cut off is better than two.
I’ll get some more blood tests and then revisit the nice specialist in his opulent suite in two weeks. He will tell me which fork my life will take from here on. I hope it’s not the one less taken.
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