Staying Alive

He was a cop too. The desk sergeant at Hornchurch. When I was seven he came to my school assembly and lectured us on the Green Cross Code. I don’t mention that because it was a seminal Freudian moment in my young life. I mention it because…Oh, you’ll figure it out. Though I was quite proud of him that day, he wasn’t a model policeman. He smoked and drank too much, ate rubbish and he had his ideal cop job—sitting idly behind the desk as opposed to chasing down alleys after harelegged muggers. He was severely overweight, he had a perpetually raging ulcer, his blood pressure was off the scale and he had enough cholesterol coursing through his veins to open a burger stand.

They say that scientists have looked at the physics of the bumblebee and figured out that technically it should not be able to fly. Dad was like that. Technically he shouldn’t have been alive.

Everyone told him so. Mum, me, his colleagues, his mates and various doctors. Even strangers would wince and cross themselves as he walked by huffing, wheezing, purple-faced. Finally, sick of the nagging—and maybe just a little scared—he got off his backside. He did the Allen Carr thing and quit fags. He joined Weight Watchers. He kept a fastidious record of his vastly reduced alcohol intake. He joined a gym and started doing step. And one Sunday morning, not long after the start of his new regime, he stuck on a tracksuit, opened the front door and set off on a jog. He never came home. The Nissan Sunny that hit him as he lumbered across Upminster Road was a write-off, too.

Yes, I’d call him now if I could.

I drink another glass of water before stumbling into bed. I know I won’t sleep, though.

5.26 a.m.

I was right. Sleep is out of the question.

I go to the kitchen and fill a glass with orange juice. Maybe that and the three ibuprofen I pop from the blister pack will do something to attack my headache. They’ll do nothing to slow my heart though. I can feel it hammering against my ribcage. I wish it had something to do with all the coke I put up my nose. But the rush has long gone and I can no longer plunge myself into the blizzard of denial that comes free with every line.

This is purest, uncut panic.

I go to the PC in the corner of my living room and switch it on.

Come on, come on—so slow.

I click on the Explorer icon and listen to the beeps and burbles as the machine goes online. I call up Lycos and type one word into the search box. The same word I’ve tapped out every single sleepless night since Friday 21st November:

cancer

6.23 a.m.

Brett Topowlski claims the Internet is responsible for taking mankind—by that he does mean mankind; women are excluded from this hypothesis—to the next stage of evolution. ‘Look at it this way,’ he contends. ‘There’s an entire generation of blokes who’ve become ambidextrous. They’ve had to master the art of wanking left-handed because their right hands are too busy manipulating the mouse.’ He should know. He and Vince spend their working lives being virtual sex tourists—and, fair’s fair, I’ve spent a little time glancing over their shoulders. (I defy anyone to wander into their office with a Schenker research debrief for their immediate attention and not look at the image of, say, horse and rider engaging in a spot of role-reversal.)

But over the past fortnight I’ve made a remarkable discovery. The porn sites haven’t taken over. They’re outnumbered—dwarfed—by ones that deal with the C-word, the six-letter one. Tonight I carried out an experiment. I typed tits into 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 may be very negative feelings…

It has been written for me.

…This should not worry you, because all of them are part of the process of coping with your illness.

Phew, that’s OK, then.

The remainder of the page is written as bullet points.

You may experience:

 Shock

 Disbelief

 Denial

 Anger

 Guilt

 Depression

 Isolation

I could put a big fat tick next to every item. Jesus, in the past few days I’ve gone through more mood swings than a country and western album. Just for starters I’ve done a lot of denial. Only tonight I was buying it by the gram. And I still have moments of disbelief. Moments when I think—I really think—pixie Morrissey is going to leap out from round a corner, probably in clown make-up, and trill, ‘ Da-daaa! We really had you going there, eh?’ Actually, the disbelief is overwhelming. More than anything I can’t believe my bad luck.

While a drowning man supposedly reviews his life at lightning speed, I can afford to reassess mine at a slightly more leisurely pace. I’m doing a lot of looking back and all I can see is a catalogue of lousy fortune. And look at me now: up to my neck in credit-card debt, in a job that makes me loathe myself, and I’ve lost the only girl that ever mattered. That is not the description of a lucky guy.

Well, at least I’ve got my health.

Can’t say that any more, can I?

I’ve got a cancer that only a couple of thousand British men will succumb to this year. And while the overwhelming majority of them will make full recoveries, I’m one of the forty or so who won’t.

Why me?

Why couldn’t I have found that lump months ago, before its vicious mutant cells had begun their journey around my body?

And while we’re at it, why that particular cancer out of the dozens on offer?

Why not a little melanoma on the small of my back? A slice with a scalpel, a quick zap of radiation and I’d be back on the streets in no time. Then there’s colorectal cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, mesothelioma and multiple myeloma. My chances would almost certainly be better with any of those. They surely couldn’t be any worse. I’d happily number among the one per cent of male breast cancers. I could put up with the sniggers. Or how about bowel cancer? Let them hack some of my stomach out. I’d put up with that. I’d put up with pretty much anything over the deal I’ve been dealt. A tumour on my arm like Jakki’s uncle. That’s a nice treatable one. Just cut off my arm. Hack off both to be certain.

At least I’d be alive.

But, no, I’ve got cancer in my testicle, my liver and my lung and I don’t even smoke. I can’t even shrug and admit I was asking for it. Well, thanks a million, God, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, the fairies at the bottom of the garden, whoever the fuck.

I thought I’d plumbed the depths of my self-pity in the days after Megan left.

I had no idea.

And I’m terrified. The website doesn’t mention that one, does it? All-consuming, mind-curdling fear. More than anything else, I’m frightened…Of the impending pain…Of losing my dignity (not that there’s much to lose)…Of losing my life, obviously…And, strangely, of telling people. Making it real. Official.

You really should talk to someone.

Yes, but who?

I click on WHERE CAN YOU TURN? More handy bullet points.

· A counsellor

I have major issues with this one. I know, I know, issues—as in the raising of and the dealing with—are what therapists are all about. But I’ve known me for thirty-one years, and I have trouble talking frankly about my feelings with myself in the mirror. It would take me an age to feel sufficiently comfortable with a stranger and, well, an age is something I don’t have.

· Family

I’m trying, but there’s no reply at Casa Mama. Anyway, how is Mum going to comfort me? I know only too well how she will react. Remember the gashed shin? She will take all of the emotions listed on this website and fuse them into an incandescent ball of hysteria.

· A sympathetic employer

Now they’re having a laugh, surely. The thought of taking my disease and the excess emotional baggage that goes with it into Niall Haye’s office and plonking the whole lot down on his desk is just so ridiculous that it’s almost—but not quite—funny.

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