Hello again friends. This post may land hard with some of you. It’s about my recent diagnosis of cancer and includes some thoughts that may be disturbing.
It’s a 9-minute read.
I noticed all the colours first. During a fortnight’s wait to see the doctor over a suddenly swollen arm, I would prod the errant limb from time to time wondering what was up. One morning I put my hand right in the armpit. Two lumps. I checked the other arm: nothing. And the first arm again: a pair of bloated beans beneath the skin. I knew. I couldn’t be certain, but I knew.
That’s when the colours came. The book-spines on the shelves, the woodgrain of the walls, the muted hues of March on the river, the river-reflected sun rippling waves of white across on the ceiling. I went out. Colour everywhere. The burnt red of bricks, the shocking yellow of the new willow-whips, fresh moss on a shed roof. With each step, the same thought: I might be dying.
Waiting at the doctor’s, I watch an ancient man shuffling inch by inch to the exit. Another man, dressed in scrubs, gently holds the elder’s arm, kindly reminds him there’s no rush, offers a taxi. Now there’s a man who knows how to care, I think. Then he calls my name – it turns out he’s my new doctor, Tim. He’s kind with me too, and direct. I feel a career’s experience in his diagnostic hands. I may have a blood clot, something neurological, or perhaps a cancer.
Next morning I’m in the airy hospital atrium, which soon gives way to narrow strip-lit corridors and dingy, dead spaces. Tell-tale scars of fiscal neglect line the whole fabric of the building: broken lifts, crowded staircases, bits of old sellotape stuck to office windows. More photocopied ‘PLEASE NOTE…’ signs line the walls than any human could ever digest, overlaid by flatscreen TVs cycling staff announcements and ‘Eat your fruit and vegetables’. No natural light.
But the care is natural enough. I ask how long my tests are likely to take and the orderly shrugs, though kindly, and the queue behind me laugh in sympathy. I smile, it’s my first time. Nurse Rose welcomes me with the grace of a maitre d’ and hooks me up to one machine after another, sleuthing for clues in the body faithful: EEG, BP, bloods. Each movement of her hands balances a natural attentiveness with the cultivated efficiency of a nurse in her vocation.
The doctor sweeps in with a battery of questions. After Rose the nurse, Basma the doctor seems more distant, but I can feel that her work matters to her. Several hours of scans and biopsies later, Basma calls me back through. By and by, she asks me what I think I have. Cancer, I say. She thinks so too. She imagines I’m scared. I’m not, I say, and for the first time I cry. I can hardly get the words out but I feel them come from the depths: I feel thankful, I’ve been one of the lucky ones, I’ve had a beautiful life. Basma puts her hand on my arm and I thank her for her care.
On the way out, care seems everywhere I look. Very ill patients giving each other the thumbs up across a ward. The bus driver, running late, getting out of his cab to help a woman off with her Zimmer. Random smiles that would usually pass me by but now feel precious. Smatterings of mattering: such stuff as peace is made on, rounded by a sleep.
Evidently, an early symptom for me has been a penchant for intensified sentences. I wonder where the shadow lingers, but if it’s there I can’t find it. I feel at peace with the prospect of my life ending early. The end of a life’s consciousness, if indeed it does end, belongs to the gift I was thrown into from birth. I used to choose that thought like one might pick an axiom to live by, though for some years now it has chosen me. I don’t want to measure life by quantities, still less insist myself entitled to more of it, as if greedy with a gift. This mutation in my body does not feel like life’s unnatural corruption but part of its natural difficulty.
It gets more complicated when I remember that my life is not a personal possession. I belong to a tissue of relations – I am that tissue. I think of a murmuration: each starling flying beside its fellows, but each also becoming the throng itself – each starling becoming Starling in the dusk sky, a dance of ‘I’ and ‘we’ in complete balance. Looking for that same movement here below, I find myself in the swim of the river, sensing through my skin that in this family of vitality among whom I number, the fall of every sparrow this spring is marked and felt by others.
And so, in the difficult moments when I pass my deadweight news through the circles of those I love, I feel my life rolled in with theirs, with every other being, with being itself. The narrow prerogative of What do I want? opens, Starling-like, into What does the field of being invite? And then the question of struggle – struggling to survive, not so much for my ‘self’ but for the life I’m involved with – comes back for answer. If I had children, I imagine the answer would already be made for me.
As it is, facts on the ground may have relieved me of that do-or-die dilemma. I don’t have readily treatable lymphoma, as the doctors first suspected, but a particularly aggressive instance of metastasising adenocarcinoma of unknown primary. It means I shouldn’t expect a long life. I’m sorry if this is the first you’re hearing of this. I’ve been letting people know bit by bit but I can only have that conversation so many times in a day.
It’s come right out of the blue for me, too. For my whole adult life, I’ve never so much as popped a paracetamol. In thirty years of work, I’d had five days off – and one of those was for a hangover. A month ago, I was digging over the vegetable garden, teaching dance, bombing around on my bike. Now bits of me are bulging, my face looks like a funny mirror, and I can’t stand for more than a few minutes.
Whatever equanimity I may feel before the possibility of an early death, it doesn’t transfer to the discomfort in my body. Having escaped serious pain so far, I’m loaded instead with a constant gravity of dis-ease that cramps me to a stoop. As the doctors now flood with chemicals the small corner of nature that is my body, its sovereign wisdom and power have been shoved to the side and told to keep quiet. My back seizes up to protect me under the assault, sharpening the stoop. My attention is submersed in the white noise of it. I have to reach up through heavy layers to meet another’s gaze, or to spare the season’s first flush the attention that I want to – and still shall – give it. Until then, I find myself rubbing my belly and asking my body for forgiveness for the insult.
With equal regret, necessary relief arrives in anaemic boxes from Big Pharma. I crinkle pills from their blisters against pain, sickness, allergy – chemical regiments deployed against the side effects of the chemical treatment. A silver lining comes in wild morphine dreams (not, I admit, the one with the pigeon dying in the cleft of a rock), but the deepest release from discomfort comes from a hot bath. A gentle dance calms the body right down too – it really is better than drugs.
I spend a lot of time lying on my back daydreaming, writing a bit when I can in the mornings. Beneath me is the physical assurance of a bed, which I don’t take for granted. Beneath me too is the solidarity of love from all those who have flocked to cook me food that sadly I can’t always eat, offer lifts to the hospital, waft up their prayers or the balm of a poem, offer a few minutes’ company and urge me on adventures I can’t yet join. Their waves of care lift me from my bed, take me crowd-surfing under a night sky where every star constellates the companionship of care.
(How beautiful we are when love is drawn out of us like this – how natural we become. What testimony against the commonplace that ‘people are made violent and always will be’. Love is there, underneath, has been all along, waiting for our invitation. This is hope.)
Back to earth: the outlook. In his mild tones, my oncologist Paul tells me that if I do nothing I’ll be gone in a few months. The only first treatment, whether curative or palliative in intent, is a blunt blast of old-school chemotherapy, a strong kind. Six weeks in, we’ll know whether it’s worth pressing on to try to suppress the disease and stretch the prognosis from months to years and a few more dances yet. Otherwise, the cancer may be allowed to take its course, with symptoms eased for the slide down. Either way, I hope to leave life as I came into it, ‘through the gift’ of it.
Arzhia, bright star in my firmament, has taken me in for a while, offering to be my companion on this journey and face my trial as her own. She surrounds me with long Bahá’í prayers and small plates of food. I try to care for her in her caring for me, but we both know the balance of attention tilts my way – like these words from Ysaye Barnwell (do have a listen) addressed to her late grandmother, which have come to me via Arzhia today.
‘I know that I’ve been blessed over and over again
Yes I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world through my own eyes.
Hope's work 