Dealing with Cancer the Only Way I Know How

I went back to the hospital for tests. On the way, I remember wondering if I’d ever look at the sunrise in the same way again. Later, Nicola and Artemus arrived as I emerged from a bleary anaesthetic stupor. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. We found a growth and can be certain that it is cancer.”

How are you supposed to react when you are told that you have advanced bowel cancer? I felt deep shock and utter panic. I was thrown into a spiral of fear and confusion that would occasionally give way to absolute fury: For eight months, I had been in pain, and not one of the many health professionals I’d visited had taken the now-obvious symptoms seriously.

Is this the end? How would Nicola cope? Will I get to see Artemus grow up? What about all my unfinished projects?

A barrage of tests and scans began, but I couldn’t do anything except wait to hear how far the tumor had progressed. We knew it was advanced but needed to know whether it had started to spread.

For the first few precious seconds after waking up each morning, I had some relief. But then I would remember, and the flood of fight or flight would return. The worry was torturous, and I’d often break down in tears.

They called and told me that while it hadn’t spread, it was very close to the edge of the bowel wall. I would have surgery, and then the growth would be analyzed. When I came round after the operation, the first thing I heard was the sound of a distraught woman in the bed opposite who kept crying out, “They’ve ruined my life. I want my legs back.”

Several hours later, I was moved to a ward of five, including one man who had just been told that he had weeks to live, an old guy who was constantly abusive to the staff, and a prisoner under 24-hour guard. Nicola and the rest of my family, who’d traveled hundreds of miles to support me, weren’t allowed to visit because they had all come down with a vomiting bug.

For the next few days, I lay in bed listening to the prisoner in the bed next to me yelling in agony as his belly distended with gas. His guards would serenade me into the evening, chatting to each other about their preferred techniques for subduing inmates. This was, unsurprisingly, a real low point. My body was painfully releasing the carbon dioxide that had been used to inflate my belly during the operation. An epidural did something to help the pain, but I felt lonely, isolated, and disempowered.

Three weeks later, they called again with the biopsy results. Cancer cells had been found in the blood, they said, and in a lymph node surrounding the site of the tumor. This put the growth at stage 4 and increased the risk that it would spread. The solution was three months of intensive chemotherapy.