Ep.10: This is not a pissing contest

I’m back in no man’s land drifting through the days between one appointment and the next.  My memory is now totally shot.  Each day I wake with a jolt.  The first thing I remember is that I have cancer, after that I’m all at sea.  I struggle to piece together what day it is, where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing.  But life does not stop and no one presses pause just because you have cancer so each day I push myself up and down and through the process of making packed lunches and sorting PE kit and vaguely making decisions about dinner.  It feels strange having to write everything down so I don’t forget.   This is not like me but I feel like I’m floating in a cloud.  I wonder if this is what dementia feels like.  Work has become more difficult.  I’m now too vague to feel I’m useful.  I feel guilty about how little I’m contributing and think I should officially take time out but then that feels like I’m a quitter and I feel guilty about that too.   I’m honest about how bad my memory is and tell colleagues to please remind me about anything they need me to do and keep reminding me.  I realise my memory must be a tell for just how stressed I am, I expect it leaches out in other ways too but forgetting is the most obvious just now.

On Friday my phone bleeped a reminder that I was to meet Al, a fellow cancer sufferer or, as his wonderful wife Kirsten puts it, cancer “warrior”.  We drove to Nairn beach through rain and sleet then drank half decent coffee in a café before walking Al’s dog, Jura, along the shore in the wind.  We shared our experiences and compared notes, mine so new, still blinking in the headlamps, his now 3 years old and more knotty and solid.  There’s a freedom in talking to a fellow fighter.  You don’t have to season your chat with positive can-do statements, its more down to earth, gritty.  Al says to keep your horizons close, almost as close as you dare, so you’re not setting false goals and over reaching.  He’s perfecting the art of living in the moment, the minute, the day.  I wanted to talk to Al because I’m so scared of being boxed-in and I knew that he’d gone from being an active super fit, lover of outdoor life to wrestling daily with a life-limiting diagnosis. 

We laugh at the shocking reality of realising we’re mortal.  He says he’s never wanted to know what the statistics suggest in terms of his own life expectancy but then recently he felt the need to find out so he looked it up but then wished he hadn’t.  This news sits between us for a moment, it’s on the tip of my tongue to ask ‘how long’ but I decide not to.  Somehow to give it oxygen would make it more real and I don’t want Al’s life expectancy to be a fixed figure, I don’t want to encourage it out into the light.  Instead he offers me an olive branch I can understand, shares that the first cycle he did on his electric bike when he was in remission, just a short loop round Grantown, was the best bike ride of his life.  I put that image in my pocket, knowing I’ll need to reach for it later when I’m in recovery and well enough to bitch at how much my life-saving surgery will have removed from me.

Al knows he will lose his war eventually and says that they’ll have to get to a point where they start preparing for the inevitable but they’re not ready to prepare just yet.  Right now, right at this moment, because I don’t know how fast and far my own cancer has spread, Al’s situation seems and is much worse than mine.  But this is not a cancer pissing contest, there is no competition here between who has the shorter straw because, as we keep saying to each other over and over again, ‘each experience is different, each cancer story is unique’. 

And that mantra of ‘every story is different’ is one I find being uttered on a loop as I meander through this bizarre cancer landscape.  It’s there in my Consultant's gentle warning not to over-read the stories of others when he sends me off back into no-man’s land to wait for the next tests or results.  It was there on Saturday night when we sat and absorbed the stories of a dozen or so cancer warriors at a charity event.   We’d booked a table months ago, it was being pulled together by a good friend in support of 4 major local charities, all with a strong link to cancer, little did we know how personally poignant the night would prove once it eventually came round.  I sat and watched the big screen and tried to look brave as I absorbed the story of a woman with an 11 year old who was battling cancer and of another who had recently lost her own breast cancer fight, leaving a 4 year old son behind.  All the while David held my hand and whispered ‘that’s not you’ in my ear.  So I nod and I smile and try to look like I believe them when the many friends with us repeatedly say ‘you’ll be fine’.  But none of us has a crystal ball.  I’ve realised they’re saying it as much for themselves as for me so I’ve stopped wondering how they know I’ll be fine.

And it feels dreadful to admit it but as I sit and listen to all the other cancer sufferers and their stories all I can think of is that I don’t want to be like them.  I don’t want to find out that I’ve got a bigger battle ahead than anticipated, I don’t want to need to lean on the services of the beautiful and compassionate Maggies Centre staff, I don’t ever want to find out how wonderful the hospice team are.  I want to lose this pissing contest hands down.  I want to be embarrassed by what a fuss I made over nothing.  I want this all to be a mountain made out of a molehill.