Staying Alive

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?