Love for Now (17 page)

Other little signs of ‘getting better.’ Tatty reached over for a snog last night and as rapidly called a halt to proceedings claiming she’d got a rash from the stubble on my chin. ‘You’ve got hair!’ she exclaimed. ‘When was the last time you shaved?’

‘Three days ago?’ I said.

‘Well, it’s growing! And don’t tell me, I know what’s coming next.’

‘What?’

‘That it’s not all that’s growing,’ she said, pretending to be me sounding dirty.

While I’ve been ill the fridge-magnet-poetry-fairies have been at work. Some of it wouldn’t look out of place in the more experimental poetry journals:

There’s also great nonsense to be had:

Which I think has a certain lyrical grace underneath the madness. Who is the author/culprit?

reads one contribution towards the lower part of the door, and, just above it

The giveaway, one of the first lines to burst onto this scene reads:

Was it John Ashbery sneaking in one night, or the ghost of Kenneth Koch? I think it was Shimi announcing the beginning of his puberty, aged 11, possibly with the help of friends as they raided the cupboard for chocolate milk.

Scan day.

Am sitting in the kitchen with coffee having had an early lunch. Am not allowed to eat from 12 onwards (8 minutes’ time). Have taken the same disgusting drink as last time, Gastrografin. It’s very aniseedy; you need a good go of mouthwash afterwards. In my scan-letter it said they’re going to do the following:

This is two more (pelvis and thorax) than last time. It must be a) to check the tumour has shrunk/disappeared and b) to double check it hasn’t spread anywhere else.

I do hate lying there and feeling the hot knife of the liquid surge through my body, plus the simultaneous feeling of being about to throw up and shit myself. The clipped ghostly tones of the voice inside the polo (‘Hold your breath please’ – pause – ‘Breathe away normally’) are fully sci-fi, as though from a story by a child imagining ‘Doctors in the Future’.

I’ve taken the required 400 mls of water-mixed-with-Gastrografin, and can report that the final mouthful nearly made me throw up. I had to run (not easy) up to the bathroom to get to the mouthwash. Close. They say in the letter that it’s a procedure which doesn’t hurt and has no side effects. True,
but I feel this doesn’t cover it. The boredom of waiting, the talking about nothing to your spouse, the sitting with other bald patients in their gowns in the corridor, the boredom of waiting. On one occasion an old woman sitting opposite me in the waiting room nearly revealed all, by accident, as she bent over to pick up her shoes. She hadn’t done her gown up at the back, so the thing fell down over her shoulders. Had her friend not reacted so swiftly we could have all been in trouble. The thing was, I remember the look of utter indifference in her eyes, as though to say ‘I’ve suffered so many indignities already, what difference will it make if you all see my breasts?’

More rage today about cancer-language. I was channel hopping after
Frasier
and caught Lorraine Kelly interviewing a 24-year-old woman about her breast cancer. (It turns out she is the subject of a documentary tonight on ITV, one of those fly-on-the-wall films which follow you for a year.) In the clip I saw she discovers from her consultant that she does, indeed, have the ‘rogue’ gene that many other women in her family carry and the (male) consultant touching her arm and asking if she is all right. Despite being the news she has expected, it is clearly traumatic: she has already decided that if she carries the gene she will have a double mastectomy.

My problem is with none of these people; it is with the programme makers. As we see the woman walking down the corridor to the consulting room (with her mother, who has also had a double mastectomy) the voiceover intones: ‘This will be the moment where Becci discovers whether she has the gene lying in wait for her.’ It’s the ‘lying in wait’ I can’t stand.

Only cancer makes us react in this way. We don’t talk of the common cold ‘lying in wait’ for people, or sore backs, or a sprained ankle. So why cancer? Of course, it’s because we’re terrified of it, though, ironically, closer to a cure for it than we are able an ‘invisible’ enemy force, almost as if we are talking
about guerrilla warfare or Iraqi insurgents. We can’t defeat it or understand it, so it follows it has to be demonised.

Cancer-books are no better. For the first time since my diagnosis I went on Amazon yesterday and browsed book titles on the subject. I noticed two things: first, that the market is overwhelmingly geared towards women (the subject of breast cancer is by far the most common); and second, that it appears to be the duty of the reader to ‘beat’ the cancer themselves. (The word ‘beat’ is not made up: it comes from a book called
Eat to Beat Cancer: A Nutritional Guide with 40 Delicious Recipes
.)

I’m not too surprised by the feminine angle of much of this literature. While I did find one or two books on prostate cancer, it simply appears that women are either better at talking about cancer than men, or perhaps that they just want to talk about it more than we do. This might be borne out by the fact that, the afterword in Ruth Picardie’s book notwithstanding, I have found only one cancer-memoir (so far) by a man, John Diamond’s C.

I don’t really blame the publishers of books with titles like
Beating Cancer with Nutrition: Optimal Nutrition Can Improve the Outcome in Medically-Treated Cancer Patients
: we all have to pay the mortgage. But I detest the war language in the above and in titles like
The Plant Programme: Recipes for Fighting Breast and Prostate Cancer
. As if the poor patient reading these hasn’t enough on their plate already (sorry). Not only do they have to ‘be strong’ and ‘fight’ the disease they suddenly have to become top-drawer cooks sourcing purely organic produce.

In the Top 30 of Amazon’s cancer books I counted, in the titles alone, two uses of ‘overcoming’, three of ‘beat’/‘beating’, the same for ‘fight’/‘fighting’, and one each for ‘struggle’, ‘tackle’, ‘arsenal’ (as in ‘the natural arsenal of disease-fighting tools’ – yum), ‘challenge’ and, finally, ‘outsmart’. What are we doing here? Outwitting Al-Qaeda? Scaling the south-west face of Everest? No, we are being treated for cancer. The most sane-sounding book I found was simply called
What to Eat if You Have Cancer: A Guide to Nutritional Therapy
, not a struggle or a fight in sight. I nearly went on 1-click just to register my approval.

By far the most common word used in the top 30 titles, however, was ‘prevent’/‘prevention’, often in conjunction with the word ‘plan’, as in ‘prevention plan’. To my mind, if you have shelled out
£
14.25 for
Everything You Need to Know to Help You Beat Cancer: The Ultimate Guide for People Who Have Cancer and Everyone Who Wants to Prevent it
, you either a) already have cancer and want some help with understanding it b) are convinced you are going to get it anyway and are actively looking for signs of it or c) fully subscribe to the idea that it’s your responsibility to be cured of it and are secretly ashamed you contracted it in the first place. The thing is I’ll bet most people who get cancer aren’t really looking for it and don’t know what the signs are. And while this book is probably extremely useful (why the ‘ultimate’ guide? Why not just ‘a guide?’) in detailing symptoms and signs, it has a nasty whiff of judgementalism about it. Who wouldn’t want to prevent cancer? It’s almost as if the book is daring you not to buy it.

And yet, I haven’t, and won’t, and nor will millions of other people, some of whom will get cancer and some of whom won’t. Does this make us worse human beings? Such book titles imply that it does, which, taken to a logical extreme, almost implies that we deserve it and that we only have ourselves to blame if we don’t recover. I’d rather read
Chemotherapy and Radiation for Dummies
(I’m not making this up): it feels more honest.

After the scan yesterday we raided the kitchen: toast and tea (Tatty) and cold boiled potatoes and hollandaise sauce (me). My hunger-cravings are one of the more unpredictable aspects of this whole business. And yet if you asked me was nausea one of the main side effects of chemotherapy I’d say no. What chemotherapy
has
done, most certainly, is change
the way I
sense
food, that is, remember its taste, texture and smell and the way I desire it in the same ways.

Most acute of these experiences has been smell. Coffee. I couldn’t bear the smell for weeks. Bizarrely, bacon of all things would also have me leaving the room (I cooked some for Bendy and Ellie for supper last week, and it was fine.) The worst smell of all, however, was that ‘freshly baked bread’ aroma which supermarkets and sandwich shops seem to pump out at will. Once, I nearly gagged in the foyer of the hospital opposite their bakery; and last week on a first-thing-in-the-morning trip to Spar for milk I was practically out of the door before I’d even walked in. I think in both cases it’s more that they’re heating up pastry (i.e. not just bread) that’s been pre-cooked which gets me. It’s sickly, slightly sweet and
heavy
: for some reason I can’t help associating it with cold-ache injections in my arm and moving stiffly down corridors.

Some things I will admit to:

To Guy and Jemima’s party last night. It was one of those extremely rare occasions where you sit in someone’s garden and feel warm the whole time. Also, that everyone you wanted to see turned up, plus that you could hear them talk.

Tats and I made a bit of an encampment on some chairs on a little patio halfway down Guy and Jemima’s garden with Vic and Tamsin, Becca, and variously, Adam Olsen, Jasper Hampson and Marco and Juliette.

Some people were there who we hadn’t seen for months, or only in passing at Becca and James Alexander’s Bond-do.

Rarely, it was also a party where you actually talk about stuff, in other words not just schools and house prices. (I wonder if, having gone through all of this, I will ever want to again.)

Later, once we’d put our jumpers on and Guy had lit the lamps, Jasper Hampson asked me if the experience of having cancer had changed what I thought about God. I was suddenly aware of everyone hanging on my every word. ‘Well, it hasn’t made me angry,’ I said, to his raised eyebrows. Then I heard myself say: ‘I made a decision really early on not to go down the avenue of asking “why me?” Partly this is because you never get an answer – there isn’t one, is there? – and partly because you can quickly get lost in a vortex of self-pity, and go mad, basically.’ I blinked at him. ‘So I suppose I was being pragmatic, really.’

I could feel myself warming to my theme. ‘There is one thing: I find that when I pray – if I do – my prayers are much more simple than before, like a child’s. Much more “Help me! Help me!” or “Thank you! Thank you!” than anything else, as if the clutter has been cleared away.’

‘We’re here to learn from you,’ Tamsin said then. So I said: ‘OK, the things which have irritated me most are people saying “I know you’ll be fine” and “You’ve got to stay positive/be strong/fight it.” Becca was quickest off the mark here. “Exactly,” she said. “How dare they play God with you?” They don’t know. None of us does. And as for “being strong”, well that’s just bollocks. Being strong is, I imagine, the last thing you feel like.’

Here is another thing I have learned: there are three types of people in the world: the kind who say ‘I’ll ring you and come and visit’, then don’t; the kind who say ‘I’ll ring you and come and visit,’ then do; the kind who make no promises at all, but still ring and come and visit. I know which category every single one of my friends and colleagues belong to.

I have three eyelashes left on each eye.

Bendy off school again, making sure she gets back to 100%.