through to all my patients. There is also the task of telling friends and family. One friend, whom I donât see often, says immediately, âWould you like me to come over?â I am enormously touched. We go for a walk together in the warm summer evening. I donât tell many people, only my closest friends. It makes an interesting touchstone. You find out quickly who you think are your closest friends, by who you decide to tell. As I ring them, Iâm aware of a need to be in contact with people who care about me. It feels like a blanket I can bring with me into hospital.
My friends are concerned and supportive. But almost universally, they donât want to entertain the idea that it might be a deadly cancer. I can understand their reluctance: who wants to think about someone you care about having cancer? But the continued insistence that, âItâll turn out to be nothingâ, becomes frustrating. I donât want to dwell on the prospect of cancer, but I do want the chance to think about it, sort out issues and emotions, prepare myself.
And then, of course, there is the other end of the spectrum. Such as the acquaintance who, having heard the news, rings up to commiserate and tells me that regardless of whether itâs cancer or not, the hysterectomy will be my undoing. Iâll never be the same again, she informs me darkly.
I think back to what I know of ovarian cancer. If it is late-stage, Iâm guessing that I may have a prognosis of about two years. Amantha is sixteen now. In two years, she will be eighteen. Too young, much too young tolose her mother. I canât bear the thought of her being motherless at eighteen. I meet an oncologist friend for breakfast. She says that two years used to be the norm for ovarian cancer, but with the new drugs coming on the market, she thinks they can give me five years. I feel relieved. In five years, Amantha will be twenty-one. Still too young, but at least itâs not eighteen.
How strange it seems now, from the vantage point of the future, to feel relieved at being told, at forty-four, that I might have only five years to live. How readily we get into bargaining positions with cancer. Everything becomes relative. A little more time, a little less pain, a little more mobility. All triumphs that carry with them hope, renewal, reprieve.
I am hyper-aware of my body. Not in a nervous or hypochondriacal way, but with a deep sense of amazement. Of awe. It is something, I remember now, that I have experienced once before, years ago, in the days following the birth of my daughter.
I remember the sense of being astonished, in the fanatical way of one who has seen the face of God, at what my body had done. It had produced life. It was as if I had been allowed a revelation. My body had produced this incredible, this extraordinary, this perfect human being. I was as stunned as if the broom cupboard with which I had lived all my life had suddenly unfurled wings, stepped forward and revealed itself to be an angel. The feeling lasted for a few weeks and then dissipated as invisibly as fine mist in sunshine. I did not come back to it until this moment sixteen years later.
And it is as if once again, I am aware of my body for the first time. Not the exterior of it, but the interior, the essence, the work it does. I remember reading a Jack London story as a child, where the hero is starving and close to death in the snow. His attention is caught by his hand and he notices for the first time what a miracle of engineering it is and how, in all the hours and days of his life, he has never appreciated it before. It is that same sense that I now feel, of being lost in a marvel. All the more so for the fact that it has been there all the time; going about its work humbly, unnoticed, unheralded, unappreciated.
It is not the way I expected to feel. Decades ago, I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid. It took years before a doctor ordered the simple blood test
My friends are concerned and supportive. But almost universally, they donât want to entertain the idea that it might be a deadly cancer. I can understand their reluctance: who wants to think about someone you care about having cancer? But the continued insistence that, âItâll turn out to be nothingâ, becomes frustrating. I donât want to dwell on the prospect of cancer, but I do want the chance to think about it, sort out issues and emotions, prepare myself.
And then, of course, there is the other end of the spectrum. Such as the acquaintance who, having heard the news, rings up to commiserate and tells me that regardless of whether itâs cancer or not, the hysterectomy will be my undoing. Iâll never be the same again, she informs me darkly.
I think back to what I know of ovarian cancer. If it is late-stage, Iâm guessing that I may have a prognosis of about two years. Amantha is sixteen now. In two years, she will be eighteen. Too young, much too young tolose her mother. I canât bear the thought of her being motherless at eighteen. I meet an oncologist friend for breakfast. She says that two years used to be the norm for ovarian cancer, but with the new drugs coming on the market, she thinks they can give me five years. I feel relieved. In five years, Amantha will be twenty-one. Still too young, but at least itâs not eighteen.
How strange it seems now, from the vantage point of the future, to feel relieved at being told, at forty-four, that I might have only five years to live. How readily we get into bargaining positions with cancer. Everything becomes relative. A little more time, a little less pain, a little more mobility. All triumphs that carry with them hope, renewal, reprieve.
I am hyper-aware of my body. Not in a nervous or hypochondriacal way, but with a deep sense of amazement. Of awe. It is something, I remember now, that I have experienced once before, years ago, in the days following the birth of my daughter.
I remember the sense of being astonished, in the fanatical way of one who has seen the face of God, at what my body had done. It had produced life. It was as if I had been allowed a revelation. My body had produced this incredible, this extraordinary, this perfect human being. I was as stunned as if the broom cupboard with which I had lived all my life had suddenly unfurled wings, stepped forward and revealed itself to be an angel. The feeling lasted for a few weeks and then dissipated as invisibly as fine mist in sunshine. I did not come back to it until this moment sixteen years later.
And it is as if once again, I am aware of my body for the first time. Not the exterior of it, but the interior, the essence, the work it does. I remember reading a Jack London story as a child, where the hero is starving and close to death in the snow. His attention is caught by his hand and he notices for the first time what a miracle of engineering it is and how, in all the hours and days of his life, he has never appreciated it before. It is that same sense that I now feel, of being lost in a marvel. All the more so for the fact that it has been there all the time; going about its work humbly, unnoticed, unheralded, unappreciated.
It is not the way I expected to feel. Decades ago, I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid. It took years before a doctor ordered the simple blood test
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