Mr Reaper sets the odds

Jim Pollard on 'being in remission'...

You can forget a lot about being ill after you stop being it. The  brain's good to you like that. I was talking to my girlfriend last night and the subject of suppositories came up (as it does).

I remembered having to use them at some point during my treatment but I still can't remember why. I just recall how hard it is to aim them and how mirrors don't help and anyway, you don't want to hear about this… the point is that as I walk into St Thomas Hospital for my three monthly check up, it's a real effort to remember what's going to happen. About all I recollect is that it involves Miles Davis and orange piss. (Not at the same time.)

As you approach one of our premier cancer hospitals there's a little reminder of why so many people have to go there in the first place. It's called the Dunhill Gym and Exercise Centre. It's funny, really - a contradiction in terms like the Salmonella Bar and Diner or Tottenham Hotspur Football Club - but it reminds you that when health and wealth go head to head there's only one winner. In the short time it takes me to walk up this concourse someone somewhere in the UK has died of cancer.

If I walked into St T's blindfold, I'd know exactly when I'd crossed the threshold. The coffee smell. I hate it. It reminds me of feeling pig sick on chemo. If I go into another coffee shop using the same set up as Tom's cafeteria, it has the same effect. The smell slaps my face as I enter. I feel nauseous, apprehensive - am I still in remission? - and then: Bored - these scans take time.

I take a deep breath and look up. There, over towards the pharmacy, underneath a sign reading Gastroenterology stands Syd (name changed). I breathe out again and wave at him.

He's not pleased to see me, grunts and vaguely flicks a palm in my direction. Gastroenterology is the study of the digestive system. 'What's up, Syd, did you eat some of your own cooking?'

'We'd be at the poisons clinic if he'd done that,' says a chirpy voice. Suddenly Mrs Syd is standing at my side full of beam and bustle and holding two cups of coffee. 'Hello, James,' she says with her business like smile.

I must look a little surprised. I thought they'd separated. She looks at me and then at Syd, ruffling his hair. 'Poor little lamb,' she says. 'He spent most of last week in the bathroom.'

 

'Still sleeping in the bath then mate?'

 

'And he hasn't passed so much as a bean.'

 

'It's IB syndrome, Jim,' Syd says in a stage whisper.

 

'Irritible Bowel?'

 

'Irritible Bird.'

 

Mrs Syd smiles, gives me her coffee and walks back towards to the cafeteria. 'I'll leave you boys to have a little chat.'

We smirk at each other - slightly awkward for a moment. Hospitals aren't our usual territory. The coffee makes me boak but it seems rude to put it down.

'Did you hear about that asteroid?' asks Syd, suddenly perking up. 'Mile wide and hurtling towards Earth apparently. Scheduled to hit in thirty years time.'

 

'Really?'

 

'Yeah, it'll explode with the energy of two million Hiroshimas, they say. End of life as we know it. It's nothing in astronomical terms, of course. I mean it's happened five times in the last billion years - a meteorite followed by the extinction of all known life, the dinosaurs are only the best known example. yeah, in astronomical terms it's a pretty run of the mill occurence. What's 65 million years in the life of the universe?'

 

'The end of the world as we know it?'

 

'Yep. Just thirty years left.'

 

For some reason Syd has cheered me up enormously. 'Want another coffee?' I ask, offering him mine.

 

'Thanks, mate. I could do with a dump. Fag would help, of course but she's taken me off them.

 

'So you two back together then?'

 

'Yeah, it's amazing what a bit of illness can do. A little whinging and bleating down the phone and she's round with the contents of a small chemists and a large dose of TLC. Jesus, I even got a shag out of it - first time since the sprog dropped.'

 

'So there's nothing wrong with you?'

 

'Not really. I did have a few stomach twinges a year ago and the appointment's finally come through. But you know what women are like. They think passing a bowling ball through your box is perfectly natural - call it childbirth - but one of their menfolk gets a little dose of the runs and they're disinfecting the place, calling in Rentokill and sending for the squits specialist.'

 

Syd waves across at Mrs Syd. She smiles back. 'Right, Sydney,' she bellows at the top of her ample voice, 'let's go and get those piles of yours seen to.'

I watch them depart. In accordance with medical instruction, I haven't eaten today and I suddenly feel ravenous. So I take another sniff of the coffee - yuk - and the desire recedes. I wander off to the CT department.

There's a hierarchy in hospitals. Cancer is a glamour specialism. When I go down to see the consultant, there'll be a receptionist who knows me, a seat in the waiting room, an attentive nurse to weigh me and make jocular remarks about my increasing girth and a doctor who has time to talk to me. But if Oncology is Manchester United, Gastroenterology is Scunthorpe. Syd will sit in a corridor squeezed between two other patients who have both been given the same appointment time as him. There will be complaints, there will be tantrums, there will be a nurse trying to pack him off for a coffee for ten minutes and there will be one distracted consultant counting down the minutes.

X-Ray is where they all come together - like the FA Cup, I suppose. A computed tomography (CT) scan is a series of cross sectional X-Rays at different angles and it enables them to see whether there are any lumps. In the waiting room, the only magazines I can find are full of recipes and restaurant reviews and items called 'contemporary ways to eat trout'. I'm fucking starving now but don't think these hospital people are sadists. Oh no. Nutritional salvation comes in the form of a large plastic beaker of piss-coloured aniseed flavour liquid - a contrast medium that shows up under X ray making abnormalities easy to see. I knock it back like it's a pint of Fullers London Pride.

They scan you by getting you to lie on a bed which slowly slides through the middle of a giant Polo mint. The nurse sees that I'm comfortable and then there's the familiar clunk of a cassette player opening.

'Would you like some music?'

 

'What have you got?'

 

'Er, Beethoven, Metallicca, James Last…'

 

'No Miles Davis?'

 

'Phil Collins do?'

 

'No.'

 

Everyone clears the room. From the corner of your eye, you can see them sheltering behind a screen of glass thick enough to withstand a small nuclear explosion or even the dulcet tones of Mrs Syd. So much for 'minimal radiation exposure'. The scan takes about 15 minutes and, as I haven't any worrying to do, I regret not having any music. All I can hear is the scan operator's chat over the microphone. 'Breathe in, hold it, breathe out.' Easy, peasy.

Then it's off for a PET scan. Positron emission tomography is relatively new and St T's are proud of having one of the few machines in the country. It's good for tumours because it doesn't just show growth but cell activity - in other words, they can see if the cancerous little bastards are still growing. Downside is an injection beforehand to introduce radiosotopes - radioactive forms of elements which congregate around the 'more metabolically active' tissue like schoolkids around a fight.

You can tell PET is state of the art. It feels like you're in a laboratory rather than a clinic. White, clean and with computer screens and pristine machines out of Tomorrows World, it's usually a little scary - like you're the subject of some cutting edge experiment. But today? Nothing doing. I'm getting blasé.

I'm thinking about this as a kid stabs at the back of my hand to find a vein. I'm assuming he's a nurse but he could just be a sadistic child. A vein pops and he tries again. I'd estimate he's done this precisely twice before. Probably on work experience. I just smile and let him get on with it.

I was terrified of cancer. No surprise. Who isn't? When they told me I'd got it, it wasn't as if it was the first I'd heard of it. ('Oh I see so there's this disease that kills thousands every year. Lummee.') It isn't news to anyone. We've all heard of the big C we just don't want anything to do with it. One day you've got no choice.

I remember when I first heard about cancer. It was when the athlete Lillian Board died. She was still in her teens, I think, and it was some time after the 1968 Olympics so I would have been about five or six. I have a dim memory of seeing it on the TV and I was left with the feeling that you had to be terribly unlucky to get cancer but that once you did, death was inevitable. It was around the same time that I discovered why I only had one grandmother. The other had died of cancer.

As I got older I never tried to find out any more even as the word began to buzz around more and more as I heard of more and more people who'd got it or had it. The fear was never explored simply tucked away where, like a cancer, it grew.

The thing is who wants to know the odds on dying young. Of course, once you get into it, it's all much more complicated than that. You become like a betting shop saddo forsaking fun to study form. Bookmaker - Mr G Reaper.  What percentage are cured? For which type? What's the odds on a relapse? Within one year? Within five? Within ten?

I guess that now I do know about cancer, I'm not frightened of it. These appointments sit in my diary between regular work. No underlining in red pen anymore. Sometimes I can sit down and read about it and think about it. And when you get to thinking about it, it doesn't half make you appreciate being alive. Even if you are lumbered with mates like Syd.

As I come up from booking my appointment with the consultant, Syd and the wife are queueing at the pharmacy. Syd's standing slightly awkwardly, like he's just got off a horse.

'You all right, champ?' I ask.

 

'The doctor stuck his finger up his arse,' says Mrs Syd.

 

'It's called a digital rectum examination in the trade, my sweet. And perhaps you could consider moderating your voice.'

 

'And he blew air up there, didn't he, sweetheart?'

 

Syd notices my confused expression. 'He used a machine, Jim.' Syd laughs. 'What a fucking a job, eh? Who would choose to be a gastroenterologist? Why spend all day with your finger up bottoms when you could be a gynaecologist and spend all day with your finger up…'

 

'So what's the verdict?' I ask.

 

'Possible ulcer. Keep taking the tablets,' says Syd, showing me his prescription. 'If that doesn't work it'll be a barium meal.'

 

'Told you that cooking course would come in handy.'

 

'Chortle, chortle. Either that or an endoscopy. They stick a tube down your throat to have a closer look.'

 

'Yuk,' I say - that Tommy's coffee feeling again.

 

'A tube down the throat. It's nothing,' says Mrs Syd.

 

'That's easy for you to say, sweetheart, you're used to having something long, thick and powerful inserted into your mouth.'

 

As I help Syd up from the floor, Mrs Syd hands in the prescription. 'And can I have a couple of Elastoplast with that?' she inquires of the wide-eyed green-aproned lady at the window. Inevitably, Syd's nose is bleeding and I dab at with tissue Mrs Syd has kindly provided. Syd is staggering slightly as he makes for a nearby plastic chair but curiously, there's a sparkle in his eye.

As Syd's backside bumps onto the seat, he winces.

 

'You sure you haven't got Clements?' I ask.

 

'As if,' he snorts.

 

'Well, if you want some suppositories I've got plenty back at the flat,' I say, 'Let me know if you ever work out how to insert them.'

 

Syd puts his hand on my knee and smiles. 'Good news about the asteroid, eh?'

 

'What?'

 

'It was on the radio. The scientists made some almighty cock-up. Someone forgot a decimal point. It'll miss us by half a million miles.'

 

Shit. Suddenly I'm scared of cancer again.

A version of this article first appeared in Jim's book All Right, Mate — An Easy Intro to Men's Health (Orion) first published in 1999. Five years on, Jim is still a St Thomas's regular. This is what he says now:

'There's obviously a large slice of poetic licence in this story as there was in all the stories I wrote for All Right, Mate?  I wrote about my cancer like that that partly because I didn't think I was ready for the raw emotion of it and partly because I didn't think anybody else would be. But reading them again now, it's surprising how accurately they reflect my feelings at the time. Feelings which I still have every time I get a cold. Has the Hodgkins come back again or have I got a new cancer?

I saw the film Girl's Night the other night in which Brenda Blethyn has cancer and Julie Walters takes her to Las Vegas for one last bingo. Both are terrific but in truth it's not a great movie, sentimental and shallow. Yet I sat there wide-eyed like a kid watching a horror movie — terrified to watch but not wanting to switch off. It certainly bought a lot back, struck some familiar chords. And, like that kid, I had nightmares about it.

I remember when I was a kid there was a series of Dracula and similar movies on and my brother insisted on watching the lot. My dad had to stay up with him. My brother was scared so why keep watching? Because it gets the adrenalin running, gets the heart pumping and quite simply reminds you that you're alive. The best feeling in the world.

I think I wrote the All Right, Mate? stories to try to put the whole cancer phase of my life in a box — or, in this case, in a book — but it doesn't work like that. We have this psychobabble notion of 'closure' but I think now that that's not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense. Not so much Freud as fraud. You can't close the lid on these traumatic experiences and if you believe that you can you're setting yourself up for failure. But the point is that not only can't you but you don't want to. The Hodgkins is part of me. It will always be there and as I get older I'll feel differently about it again and take different things from it. I know now that I'll always be writing stories about my cancer until it or something else finally gets me and that is oddly comforting.'

© Jim Pollard