The Best Australian Essays 2014 (10 page)

Sex and Cancer: A History in Three Parts

Luke Ryan

I

Despite being the foundational function of the human species, nobody talks about sex when you're diagnosed with cancer. There's a sense that sex is simple recreation, or distraction, and now that you've got real problems the whole unseemly business can just be pushed to the back burner for a while. Tell anyone that you had sex while in the midst of chemotherapy and they gape at you slack-jawed, as if astounded that a human being going through that kind of physical punishment could still be capable of a feat of such endurance. I get the feeling most people assume that when you have cancer, all your non-vomiting time is spent staring out a hospital window and considering the prospect of your own demise.

However, doctors do talk to you about your reproductive future, which, as a twenty-two-year-old, was something I thought I was a good decade away from having to discuss with anybody. Mum, in particular, was not someone I ever thought I'd have to involve in my masturbatory schedule.

When I was sick at the age of eleven, we weren't considering the reproductive repercussions of my chemotherapy regimen. I was still on the soprano side of puberty and besides a vague footnote to the effect that a year's worth of chemotherapy could, on occasion, produce long-term infertility, we didn't think twice about it. There wouldn't have been sperm to extract even if we'd wanted to. Sex in all its permutations just wasn't on the agenda.

Back then the closest I had come to sex was at the age of four, when Mum walked in on me during bath time to find me trying to get my penis up the tap. If you roll the logistics of this task around in your head for a second, you realise there are a very limited number of positions into which you can fold yourself that will allow you to place your penis inside a bath tap. Well, there's only one really: the Linda-Blair-descending-a-staircase-while-possessed-by-the-devil. Although I have no memory of the incident, or what I could possibly have been trying to achieve, let it never be said that I was not an ambitious and/or demonically possessed youngster.

My only other piece of X-rated exposure came two years later, when I walked in on Mum and Dad having sex, an event that, by contrast, I remember all too vividly. It's an incident notable not so much for the fact of catching my parents mid-coitus, but more for the fact that I then went to school the next day and told every single person there that I, and I quote, ‘saw my Dad sexing my mother's bottom'. The reason we have a direct quote is because my classmate Dan went home and told his mother and she decided to let Mum know that I was going around school telling people that I had seen my parents having anal sex. In defence of my mother's honour, I was still using the word ‘bagina' at the time so may not have been entirely up to date with the workings of the female anatomy. (This occurred a day after I made my first and only entry in yet another of my failed journals, Mum and Dad having confiscated this one when they found that my remarks for Saturday 4 July 1992 consisted of:
I walked in on Mum and Dad having sex haha! M15+ Whoops!
Evidently, seven-year-old Luke was difficult to impress.)

By 1997 I had only the vaguest idea that girls were important and that it would probably be good to have sex with one before I died. Fortunately, it was a topic we never needed to contemplate. Four years later I read a news story about a fifteen-year-old boy dying of cancer who had convinced his nurses to source him a prostitute and I wondered if my nurses would have done the same for me. Not that I would have had much idea what to do when she arrived – I was playing a lot of Uno when I was in hospital – but I still felt that seeing a real-life, non-Mum woman naked needed to be on my bucket list.

When I was twenty-two, though, things were rather different. In the intervening years I'd gone through puberty, grown an extra layer of hair, put a condom on a banana and even seen a few real-life, non-Mum women naked. I also now had sperm. Lots and lots of sperm. As a general rule, chemotherapy works by annihilating the fastest-replicating cells in the body, so sperm stands in the frontline of the assault. On this basis, my oncologist recommended that I freeze a sample of my sperm before I started treatment. Just to ensure that the grade-A genetic stock that had produced two separate tumours in twenty-two years could be passed on to future generations. He may not have used those exact words.

Mum was at the oncologist's with me when this discussion came up, and a couple of days later I arrived in the kitchen to see her busy with the family diary.

‘Lukey, I've booked the appointment.'

‘What appointment?'

‘You know. The appointment.' Silence. ‘Where you produce a sample of yourself.'

‘Oh.'

A beat.

She grinned mischievously and said, ‘I bet you're looking forward to that.'

It would have been a lazy thirty-five degrees outside as I drove to my ‘appointment', an erotic temperature if ever there was one. It took me a couple of loops of the hospital to discover the down-at-heel wing to which they had relegated what a doctor friend of mine referred to as ‘Jizz Palace'. I made my way up to Level 3, went down to the end of a drab, brown-carpeted corridor, turned right into another corridor, this one covered in tarnished 1960s lino and lit by dying fluorescents, and kept going until I finally arrived at an unassuming door that read, in euphemistic fashion:
Keogh Institute for Medical Research.
I knocked.

I was the first person I knew of that had ever needed to provide a sperm sample, so my understanding of the process came solely from seeing people donate sperm in frat-boy comedies. Suffice to say, in reality there are far fewer wise-cracking African-American nurses than the movies would have you believe. I opened the door on to a lab plucked straight from a low-budget 1960s sci-fi film, populated by two dorky uncle types who glanced up from microscopes that they were using to, I presume, examine sperm. They grinned unsettlingly, and rolled their chairs towards me. I tried to work out how best to tell two complete strangers that I had come to ejaculate on their premises.

‘Uh. Hi. My name's Luke …'

‘Ah, Luke. You're freezing some of your sperm today?'

‘… Yes.'

‘Excellent. Well, here's your cup.' He handed me a tiny cup. It resembled a medical-grade shot glass. ‘Head next door. You'll find some magazines in there if you need them. We have some DVDs too, if you'd like?'

I didn't think I could bear browsing their porn collection while they watched, so I demurred.

‘Well, if you change your mind, let us know.'

‘Will do.' I was pretty confident that I wouldn't be breaking off mid-wank to ask them for more material.

‘Now, we need you to catch at least sixty per cent of the sample in the cup, so make sure you're careful.'

‘Um. Okay.'

‘And when you're finished producing the sample come back and we'll pop it in the freezer for you.' While their enthusiastic smiles suggested an admirable degree of passion for their chosen line of work, the last thing I needed right then was the thought of them both mentally cheering me on from the next room.

‘Thanks. I'll, uh, be back soon.'

‘No rush. Take your time!'

I met their eyes, trying to gauge if this was a joke. It wasn't. Tiny cup in hand, I walked next door and entered the masturba-torium. This was, essentially, a glorified disabled toilet. To my left there was a table laden with an extensive array of two-decade-old porn. Next to the table there was an actual toilet, largely unadorned. In the back left corner sat a chair, done up in that ever-so-erotic, puce-coloured hospital pleather. Then, in the other corner stood a weird semi-recliner, which was essentially a puce-coloured seatback, laid at a forty-five-degree angle, with no seat and two armrests. Despite contemplating it for over twenty seconds, I still couldn't work out how or why anyone would choose to masturbate in that position. Had they received complaints? Were there folk out there who couldn't ejaculate unless they were forming a perfect triangle with the floor and the wall? And how on earth were you supposed to ensure you caught sixty per cent of your sample in that tiny cup if you were using your free hand to keep yourself upright? The mind boggled.

Plucking a weathered 1983 copy of
Playboy
from the stack, I set to. There's something inescapably weird about having to masturbate out of utility. As masturbation is probably the most useless activity you indulge in on any given day, being provided a definite reason to ejaculate sucks a lot of the already limited magic out of the experience. Also, knowing that there are two strange men waiting not five metres away to receive a cup full of your semen is less than ideal. I flicked open to June's ‘Playmate of the Month', Jessica, who was reclining, nude, on a faux-revival chaise longue, like some kind of permed, well-to-do sea lion. I closed my eyes, and thought of England.

When I was finished I headed back into the lab, feeling suitably chastened.

‘All done?' They beamed at me as if expecting me to compliment their public-hospital-themed self-love dungeon.

‘Yep.'

‘Did everything go okay? Did you catch all of the sample?'

‘Yep.'

My need to escape was overwhelming. A jar of my semen sat between us on the table. It is very difficult to converse with someone while your own ejaculate sits there, staring at you accusingly. They made me sign a couple of forms. I mumbled a goodbye. I noticed they didn't try to shake my hand.

I drove home, a bit dejected, and walked into the kitchen. Mum was having lunch. She looked up at me. ‘So,' she said cheerily, ‘how was it?'

II

A few weeks after my trip to the sperm bank, I started dating a girl named Lucy. Dating is the sort of activity that, by its very nature, tends to be forward thinking. The moment at which something transitions from idle sex and into a full-blown relationship is usually the moment at which you begin to imagine a year, two years into the future and still see that person lying in your bed each morning. The problem with dating while you have cancer is that half the time when you look a year or two into the future,
you're
not lying in your bed anymore. Your life at that moment is more concerned with avoiding endings than searching for new beginnings.

Still, at the age of twenty-two, sex tends to be a driving force of your existence in the same way that oxygen is a pretty bang-up way to stay alive. Simply sidelining the issue because of a piffling concern like a life-threatening illness ain't going to fly. And when the sum total of your daily obligations is a fifteen-minute visit to the radiotherapy clinic (with weekends off) and all your friends have jobs and university degrees to attend to, well, having a girlfriend becomes a really useful way of passing the time.

So, I started seeing Lucy. She was a few years older than me, pale-skinned, with punkily dyed, asymmetrical hair. Her eyes had a kind, almost sad cast to them, although I later discovered this was because of the permanent watering caused by her heavy, just-this-side-of-clinical-blindness contact lenses. She was tomboyish in attitude and fashion, a girl of quiet self-possession whose wry smile gave off the impression of being in on a joke that you haven't quite worked out yet. On the first date I took her to see a band called Explosions in the Sky, and at the end of the night she kissed me in the car. For the second date we watched a film at an outdoor cinema and drank a six-pack of Peroni. I told her Peroni reminded me of summer. Lucy said they tasted like sex. It wasn't a come-on, but the way she said it made her sound devastatingly assured. We went home together. She understood enough not to ask about my illness. I think she recognised a man looking for escape when she saw him.

We got along fine, but I think from the moment we started dating we were both afflicted by the sense that we were counting down the days until it was time to break up. I was preoccupied with my health and had plans to leave the state as soon as I could. She was in the middle of a university degree and had locked herself into Perth for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, we settled into a cosy pattern: wake up late in the morning, eat breakfast, I'd drive her to university, go to my radiotherapy appointment, and we'd meet up again that night and drink and talk until late. For me it was these small routines, these dispatches from a less complicated life, that left me feeling the most together.

At the end of May 2008, a couple of weeks before I finished my final round of chemo, she sat me down.

‘Luke, this has been, um … great, but I think maybe we should leave it here.'

Having in my mind already departed for Melbourne, sans her, my relief must have been palpable.

‘Yeah. That sounds about right. It has been … um … great.'

We were awkward, but sincere. It
had
been great, but it was done. It was hard to know what else to say. We kissed to fill the gap and both blinked back tears.

There was silence for a minute, then:

‘Anyway, I think this might be me done with boys for a while.'

‘Oh. You mean …?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Right.'

Looking back at the amount of
The L Word
we'd been watching, I feel like the warning signs were definitely there. I couldn't really blame her for trying it out with me, though. I was perhaps the most short-term-relationship participant you were ever going to find. One way or the other I was going to be out of the way in a few months. And, personally, at a time in my life when it was easy to feel transient, I'm just glad to have had such a decisive impact.

III

Recently I discovered that my sperm had taken the chemotherapy rather more personally than I had. Whereas most men might expect to produce something in the order of 40 to 60 million sperm with every ejaculation, I am apparently coughing out around 100,000. Of those fifty per cent are dead on arrival, leaving me with a grand total of 50,000 troops to hurl against the impregnation barricades. In my head I imagine my testicles as a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the remaining population has emerged from their subterranean bunker to discover that, yes, they really are the last people left on earth. As they stand there in uncomfortable silence, surveying the wreckage of their civilisation, a single tumbleweed rolls by.