Actually it’s less cancer and more TV these days, which is 100% the way round that I prefer. We’ve gone a few rounds since I last wrote, but cancer is currently firmly back in its box. More accurately, it is now in a bucket in a hospital fridge – and crucially, not in me. Nonetheless, sorry that I told you I had a life-threatening illness and then didn’t publish an update for two whole years. Here’s what happened since.
Post chemo in 2018, surgeons opted to remove a lymph node chain in my pelvis, with additional ‘cyber-knife’ treatment to spritz those pesky, hard-to-reach areas. This is as exciting as it sounds: pinpoint-targeted radiotherapy that helps to keep your healthy tissue unfrazzled. Despite their highly inconvenient position, the offending blobs were winkled away without any consequences for my mobility or kidneys, or bum, or orgasms thank you very much.
I spent that Christmas recovering on a diet of Lidl stollen mini-bites and five seasons of Vikings. This smorgasbord of breezy axe murder and inexpressibly fantastic hair is way too sexy for the history channel, and I stand firmly by this use of 75 hours of my potentially short life. The wall-to-wall goring and impaling was remarkably easy viewing – possibly contextualised by my own big grisly wound and leaky bits. Nothing cheers you up quite like the reminder that at least you aren’t recovering from a berserker attack alone in a snow-cave, hiding from a bear. It’s also very motivating to watch TV’s idea of how people with potentially mortal stab wounds can be back shagging by tomorrow teatime with the right attitude.
By the time all the pillaging and marzipan was finished, I had more or less healed up and was coming slowly back to life. I blew on the embers of work, moved house, bought a Glastonbury ticket (a hubristic move) and as time passed, looked gradually less and less like a cockerel who had lost a fight. I was starting to believe that I had got away with it all when a follow-up scan in May 2019 showed ‘recurrence’ in the same area of the pelvic wall. I was back on chemo as quickly as you can land on the biggest diagonal bastard in all of Snakes & Ladders.
Last time this happened I adopted a policy of total surrender to the unknown and to the sofa, with a very low barrier to takeaway food. This time – not my first rodeo etc – I was confident that things would be different. It’s all about routine after all, isn’t it? I envisaged a regimen of kale smoothies, intelligent podcasts and strictly limited screen-time. I’d probably still be getting quite a lot of work done.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the arena of my ambition was swiftly redrawn in the shape of pot noodles, Fanta, crying and watching Gavin and Stacey while wearing sunglasses in the dark. I suppose I could have been better prepared, but maybe it was more valuable to enjoy a sunny fortnight in ignorance of what an almighty smackdown chemo would be the second time around. In short, the body remembers, and the body is not at all keen.
Aside from “keep taking the laxatives”, the best piece of advice I’ve ever received about this whole rigmarole is to employ marathon thinking. You don’t have to process the whole ordeal at once – in fact if you try, you’ll lose your shit very quickly indeed. Your only responsibility is to make it through the next hour. And here, TV and crisps can really help you. Got a gruesome problem to ignore? You’re going to want a temporary addiction that won’t be too rough to come back from – preferably which itself makes you feel queasy enough to stop and re-evaluate your life after a maximum of 6 hours. Thanks, TV!
To begin with I was too seasick for the gaudy scarlet world of Netflix, so I eased myself in with Gentleman Jack on iPlayer – because who isn’t at least temporarily diverted by Suranne Jones in spats, dazzling her way up people’s petticoats. And other more important societal statements. Thus fortified, I then managed three episodes of Stranger Things before poor Will’s flashbacks to the slug-puking days in The Upside Down came way too close to home.
There’s no hardship I won’t endure for Natasha Lyonne however, so next up was the whole final series of Orange Is The New Black in an almighty two-day binge, leaving me utterly bereft. The fact that there will never be any more OITNB is right up there with all the other garbage things that happened in 2019, presenting me with a serious supply issue in my newly-crafted addiction.
With my usual pessimism I weighed up previously rejected options on Netflix and struck gold with The Good Place. Given time to warm up it is genuinely hilarious, with characters designed perfectly to fall slowly in love with. The antithesis of ‘gritty’ yet heavy on the thought experiments, it’s quite a comfortable space to inhabit when meaning and mortality loom large. “What amounts to ethical behaviour in this deranged and hyper-complex world? Who the hell knows” is the general theme. This said, don’t expect to feel the same enthusiasm after 53 goddamn episodes. As its circuitous metaphysical plotlines noodle towards their (admittedly strong) conclusion you may reflect that The Good Place is really here to show us that sometimes, you just have to let things die.
Not me though! Or not yet, anyway. We’d always known that there was one potentially curative surgery left in the bag, but that it would be altogether more “Vikings” than the comparatively civilised procedure described above. Whether I would go for it was never in question. Even given the decent chance that it wouldn’t work, if I was fated to spend the rest of my life on disgusting chemo I might as well be doing so with a glamorous limp.
The tumour was nestled in the ‘sciatic notch’, daring anyone hard enough to take a knife to its fiendish hideout among major nerves, blood vessels and renal equipage. Fortunately for me, there was a surgeon mad talented enough to try. Duly warned that this time they would definitely be taking out some bits that I was using, I signed my ballet career away and hopped on the slab in November 2019. I am weirdly fond of getting a general anaesthetic and especially fond of not having cancer, so – call me a psychopath – I was quite excited to just get it done. Hoping not to wake up with a colostomy, I slipped contentedly under.
I woke up monumentally high in intensive care, giggling every time I asked the night nurse to pop my leg back into the bed when it wandered out. Alas, the novelty and hard drugs wore off all too quickly. No colostomy – yay – but partially paralysed, catheterised, epiduraled, cannulated up to the neck, morphine-stoned and inexplicably pumped with industrial-strength laxatives, I shall leave you to imagine my exhilarating time in ICU.
It’s been a hard road to the new normal via shock, grief and quite a lot of pain -most of which has now gone, though it looks like I’ll be stuck with a certain level of neuropathic ‘interestingness’ in the dead leg. I’ve had fun racing my friends’ babies to their developmental milestones – and I demand equal if not greater amounts of praise for every achievement. It had been a long time since I executed the bum-shuffle but I found it came back quite easily. By my own assessment however I am now no more incapacitated than the average person who is voluntarily wearing stiletto heels – which in my opinion should come with a free blue badge. Armed with crutches and my shiny new bus pass (a considerable source of joy) I’m confident that I could outpace Kim Kardashian on the savannah, which is all that really counts.
TV is once again my time-killer of choice and, briefly, thank heavens for Pose (which goes perfectly with oxycodone at bedtime) and Detectorists; which in the best possible way is essentially valium in audio-visual form. Watch them both and thank me later.
I’m now on 3 of 4 ‘mop-up’ chemo cycles (an encouraging term which I try not to think too hard about). Global pandemics notwithstanding, a return to life is tantalisingly close and I’m trying not to get too excited in case I get busted back to square one again. I was once all cocky about this not being a cancer blog. Well, fuck my plans, apparently. Nonetheless, we’re nearly there. Sorry this piece is so long – I started writing it a year ago. If you got this far, thanks for reading. And to those near and far who have been by my side throughout this horror show – thanks for everything.