Narrative of a cancer diagnosis
You think you’re fine and healthy, going on 36km bike rides, lifting weights, eating broccoli, going to ballet class, in such good shape for a 55-year-old woman, and then, suddenly, you’re not.
The gynaecologist told me over the phone, late Friday afternoon, because she was going on leave for a week. I could’ve waited to hear the bad news face-to-face, but I knew something was wrong and surely nothing the doctor could say was worse than my lurid imaginings.
Grade II endometrial cancer. ‘Totally treatable,’ she insisted.
I took notes, standing at my kitchen counter. I’m an intelligent, overeducated middle-aged woman, fully self-sufficient and emotionally contained. I deal with information at an academic level.
I double-checked the facts, thanked my gynie, and said I wouldn’t need a face-to-face appointment to hear it all again. I’d wait for the CT scan, the next step on my cancer journey.
Cancer may be treatable these days, but the word still has immense, negative power. A one-word death sentence, like a curse being laid on you. Like a nineteenth-century character coughing up blood for the first time, staining a white, lace-trimmed handkerchief. An oh, shit, moment of truth, as your mortality clobbers you in the face.
Alone, I howled, from shock and grief, the unfairness, and then, I returned to my computer and finished editing an especially tedious article on the youth wings of centre-left Albanian political parties, because I didn’t want it malingering over the weekend to Monday morning.
After logging out, I ran a bath and poured a strong Negroni.
If you continue your life as normal, you can hold back or deny the bad stuff. I went to tango on Saturday as usual. I sat with two friends who were hosting that afternoon, and I didn’t say a thing. This new reality, of my appalling frailty and mere mortality, was held at bay by the old reality.
I didn’t need to bring everyone across the line at once. I told friends one by one, a matter-of-fact phone call. I pride myself on not being melodramatic. I despise people who create drama. To me, that’s just narcissism.
I planned a trip to Arran on Sunday, to climb Goatfell, which I’d been wanting to do for ages. In the old reality, I had unlimited time. The weather was fine, a rarity in a washout summer, and if the NHS moved as quickly as it’s supposed to in serious cases, it could be a while before I was mountain-fit again. Also, I was engaged in the weird, self-cannabalistic (and, yes, narcissistic) writerly process of narrating the experience as I went through it. Yomping up Goatfell two days after a cancer diagnosis fit my narrative. I could see the victory shot on Facebook, me up a mountain, raising my fist at cancer, a strong, independent woman, dealing with whatever life threw at her.
By Sunday morning, my stomach was swollen and tender. I was in pain, almost bent double. I hobbled around my flat with a hot water bottle clutched to my guts. Just like the bad old days, when I first got my period (quite late, because I was a runt). I’d lie in sick bay, under the jaded eye of the elderly girls’ mistress who’d seen generations of teenagers using this excuse to get out of maths or sport. Surely she could see I was genuine?
Narrative adjustment: I didn’t go up the mountain. I cancelled my Scotrail ticket, wrote off my non-refundable Calmac ticket, and emptied out my hiking daypack. The new narrative: woman accepts reality of cancer and doesn’t force herself up the mountain to take a victory shot. Cancer has only just landed; it has to be beaten first.
Instead, fortified by ibuprofen, I went for a walk along the Kelvin path, where I met a tango friend walking someone else’s dog. We ended up in a café, talking tango and her pre-COVID life in Barcelona. I did not mention cancer. I did not become the Cancer Person. I enjoyed the normality, even though the heavy ache in my stomach reminded me otherwise.
I was told that I could wait up to three weeks for a CT scan. I could visualise the cancer growing exponentially every day that my diseased uterus was allowed to fester inside me. On the outside, I looked healthy and whole, but my insides were going all brown and webby, like soft fruit gone rotten. I’d never thought much about my uterus, once I’d neutralised it with the Pill, closing down both its reproductive function and its ability to generate crippling pain. Now, it was getting its revenge.
As a post-doc in Tokyo, several years ago, I went out for dinner in Kagurazaka, the old literary-pleasure district near Waseda University, with three other women. In my mid-40s, I was the youngest. None of us had children. The restaurant, which was niche both in size and taste, was called, in English, Wine & Meat. As we read and deciphered the board of exotic organ meats, the characters 子袋 leapt out. Literally, brutally, ‘child bag’.
‘Is that what I think it is?’
‘What else could it be?’
We all pursed our lips as one and continued to peruse the menu.
Now my own child bag, an unused body part, is going to be forcibly evicted, a troublesome tenant. (NB it is far, far easier to rid yourself of a diseased womb than a problem tenement neighbour who is repeatedly arrested for antisocial behaviour and has his door broken in every so often by the fire brigade when he’s too far gone to hear the screaming smoke alarm. But that’s another story.)
I spoke to a male friend who’d undergone successful cancer treatment several years ago. He’d hated the lack of bodily autonomy as a cancer patient, being pushed around on trolleys and subjected to invasive treatment. Being reduced to just a body.
As a woman, I’m already used to being just a body. Reach puberty, and your body is no longer your own private matter or even something over which you have full control. When I started my periods, life became demarcated into monthly intervals of agonising cramps and staining floods, the constant anxiety of leakage and discovery. (The absolute worst shame in the world is for people to know you’re menstruating.) Regular cervical checks are minor stuff compared to the Grand Guignol of childbirth, but they’re still invasive. We don’t have the same physical boundaries as men; our bodies are soft and leaky, permeable and public, not hard and closed and sovereign.
Other women have told me how they lost any sense of physical integrity or dignity in pregnancy and childbirth. Everyone’s up your business, and then you have a succubus that literally sucks you dry, if you manage breast-feeding. Maternity reduces a human being to an animal function. Some women love the primality of it. Other women just feel like cows. If they get mastitis, they are extremely grumpy cows. I was shocked, in my innocent late 20s, to see a friend using a breast pump. She was not glowing with the bliss of providing for her child the natural way. She was a human being attached to a milking machine.
On the Monday following the diagnosis, after a very long, strange weekend, I rang the doctor’s secretary and said, I’ll have that appointment when she gets back.
The secretary said, she knew you would.
On Tuesday, I was given an appointment for a CT scan on Thursday that same week. I caught the subway and a bus to the Queen Elizabeth in Govan, a new hospital that looks like a student village built on the cheap. My scan was done in a Portakabin out the back.
I took peppermint oil and simethicone for the pain and bloating, which turned out to be IBS gone mad, not turbo-charged cancer, provoked into full malignancy by discovery. I was coping intellectually, but my body was in shock.
‘I had an MRI in a Portakabin,’ said my lovely gynaecologist, when I finally saw her. ‘There was all sorts of equipment left spare after the Nightingale COVID hospitals were dismantled, but nowhere to put it.’
I was lucky to have my scan so quickly, within a week of diagnosis.
This won’t turn into a cancer blog. Enough of those around, and a fully treatable cancer isn’t a story. Cancer is banal in its ubiquity. I will enter a standard process, a conveyor belt of treatments, and come out the other end as another cancer survivor. I’m fit and healthy, and I live in a developed country with free medical care at point of use.
I’m lucky.
There will be nothing special or unique about my experience. Rather than setting me apart from other people, it is merely proof of my generic humanity. I’m just a piece of meat gone wrong.
This time next year, I’ll be taking those victory shots from mountain tops and maybe a beach in Greece, to make up for the Corfu walking holiday I’ve had to cancel. I’ll be OK. But it’s all been a bit of a shock, a massive fucking shock, and I’ve had to rearrange my narrative, an editorial as well as an emotional adjustment. The narrative only ends when I’m dead, and that’s not happening quite yet.
