Staying Alive. Matt Beaumont
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the search box and hit go. It came up with a staggering 3,199,658 matches.
It is nothing, though.
Because cancer got me 18,073,389. Over eighteen million mentions of the disease that will afflict one in three of us and kill one in four.
I haven’t been keeping count, but so far I must have visited several hundred cancer sites. I now know more about it than I ever did. (Not saying much, granted.) I know, for instance, that one per cent of breast cancers occur in men; that a Calgary businessman claims he was brought back from the brink by an ancient cure used by the Ojibway Indians; that over eighty per cent of lung cancers are attributable to smoking, yet only thirteen per cent of smokers will get lung cancer; that on the day Philip Morris—in an expensive corporate con—changed its name to Altria, some web wag re-christened lung cancer Philip Morris; that drinking milk produced by cows treated with bovine growth hormones increases the risk of colon cancer; that Hosen is the Hebrew word for strength and is also an acronym for Cancer Patients Fight Back; that frequent masturbation reduces the risk of prostate cancer; that frequent sex increases it; that shark cartilage, liquefied and given a pleasant fruit-style flavour, is the miracle that will revolutionise cancer treatment…
6.55 a.m.
The trouble is that I’m none the wiser. I fly around the web hoovering up facts, seizing on speculation and clutching wildly at every out-of-its-tree conjecture. I’ve looked at countless pictures of tumours the size of kumquats…nectarines…grapefruits…watermelons (which strikes me as wholly inappropriate. Why is it that, when dramatising their size for their dumb patients, medics invariably compare tumours to fruit? Fruit is tasty, nutritious, life-enhancing. Tumours, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, are not. Better, surely, to state that Patient X is host to a malignant growth the size of, say, a hand grenade, or a decomposing, maggot-ridden rat). I’ve waded through turgid papers posted by academics and heartbreaking poetry penned by mothers coming to terms with their children’s leukaemia. Yet I’m no closer to dealing with the only cancer I really care about.
My cancer. The one that will kill me.
‘ It isn’t possible to say without a lot more tests, but without treatment you’ve maybe got between three and five months.’ That was how Doctor Morrissey put it in her sweet, slightly yokel voice.
Between three and five months…
I consider myself a truly average individual—to the point, actually, of being totally un-individual—so I’ve gone for the middle ground.
I give myself four months.
Working forward from the day they told me, that’s 21st March.
It’s a Saturday.
Best keep my diary clear.
‘But you must be able to do something,’ I said. Pleaded, actually. Hadn’t they told me that these days the cure rate for testicular cancer is well over ninety per cent?
Well, yes, they said…Provided we catch it early enough.
‘But I went to the doctor as soon as I’d found the lump,’ I said.
Hmm, they mused, and how long had the lump been there by the time you stumbled across it?
Well, I dunno, I didn’t say. I don’t like to touch myself down there, do I?
Unbelievably, considering all this appalling news, my cancer is still only suspected. They can’t be certain until they operate to remove my testicle and then get it under a microscope. Having said that, the blood tests suggested I’ve got something called a teratoma. This is the less common of the two main testicular cancers, but—wouldn’t you just know it?—it’s the more aggressive. Given the high probability that I did have cancer, they wanted to see if it had spread. They gave me a CT scan. CT scanners are those gleaming high-tech machines that you see pictured in private health-plan brochures—photos of patients with peaceful smiles gliding into wide tubes where they’ll be showered with gentle diagnostic rays of something or other. ‘CT scans are amazing,’ gushed the technician giving me mine. ‘They give your medical team the kind of information they could only have got by slicing you open in the old days.’
Sorry, techie, but I hate any machine that tells my medical team I’ve got great big bloody growths in my lungs and liver that will kill me very soon.
‘There must be something you can do,’ I implored.
Yes, they’d like very much to lop off my left testicle and then subject me to an aggressive course of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or both, but they feared that the cancer is so advanced that it wouldn’t achieve anything other than prolong my life for a few extra months.
Well, I supposed, under the circumstances—death staring me in the face and all that—a few extra months sounds pretty good. ‘Let’s do it, give me drugs,’ I cried—no, screamed—in utter desperation. That was when they sat me down and took me through what it is to go through chemo and radiotherapy. I got all the ‘cancer may be grim but the treatment is invariably grimmer’ stuff. You don’t want to know.
I know I didn’t.
‘But I don’t even feel ill,’ I said. (Which was and still is pretty much the truth. I have a painless lump on my testicle. And a tightness in my chest, which is more than likely due to a heavy dose of hospital-related stress.)
They didn’t say much then. They simply looked at me, their expressions doing the talking for them: ‘ You don’t feel ill now? You will, boy oh boy, you will.’
The choice, of course, is mine. To be treated and last maybe a year: time spent feeling sick as a dog. Or not: enjoy a better quality of life for a shorter time. Quality of life. Ha!
You really should talk to someone, they said.
I haven’t talked to a soul.
Instead I came to the web, the first resort of sad, lonely twonks. I came in search of…What? An understanding? A miracle? I haven’t a clue and, besides, whatever it is I’m no nearer to finding it.
No, the Internet has made things worse. The sites that have freaked me out the most are the ones that are there to console and inspire. The ones filled with personal testimonies from fellow sufferers. Brave struggles in the face of overwhelming pain. Stubborn refusals to accept the verdicts of the doctors. The worst are the ones where I read a memoir of courage and endurance and then at the end a caption: So-and-so died on 19th June 2003.
So hang on, let me get this straight. After all that teeth-gritting, bloody-minded effort you went and died anyway? Please tell me there’s a point here.
I haven’t seen myself in a single one of these sites. I am not brave or stubborn. Never have been. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about death—panicking, actually—and the only way I could cope at all was by reminding myself that while it was a cast-iron certainty, it was a long way off—I could think of it as hypothetical.
Not any more. Now I’ve got a date. I’ll be gone in four months, give or take. I’ll expire incoherent, incontinent and saturated with enough morphine to keep all of Glasgow’s junkies in a permanent blissed-out fug. And while I wait for that to happen I’m staring numbly at my PC as a fresh site downloads. Pretty graphics in shades of pink and lilac. Pictures of smiling doctors and nurses who look like they know what the hell they’re playing at. I read the menu.
ABOUT US
LATEST TREATMENTS
UNCONVENTIONAL ALTERNATIVES
YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS
WHERE CAN YOU TURN?
I click on YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS.
A diagnosis of cancer comes to most people as a shock. Your mind may well be confused with many different feelings, some of them conflicting. Some