CAN-CER

Learning that I had cancer was like being thrown into a frozen pond, the ice immediately reforming above me as I crashed through.

The numbness is immediate. It grips your heart and puts your lungs in a vice. You hear everything as if deep underwater. The doctor’s voice becomes an incoherent muffle, your own thoughts white, high-pitched static.

Like an insect in amber or a leaf in ice, your life goes on hold.

I vaguely remember being shown scans. Strange, fuzzy cross-sections of my body, the tumours highlighted and circled. None of it looked like me. I’m not a sack of bones and tissue, painted in greyscale on a plastic printout from an MRI machine; that’s not me. I am my hopes and dreams, my favourite TV shows, my love of my dog and my hatred of feta cheese. At least, I was. Now, I am cold and scared.

The doctor pointed at some lumps, explained treatment plans, provided prognoses. He may as well have said it in Russian. All I could hear was that one word, its two syllables hitting me like wrecking balls.

CAN-CER

CAN-CER

CAN-CER

When people found out they would talk to me as if they were at my own funeral. It was like I was already in the wooden box, their comments expressed for the benefit of the survivors.

‘We’re so sorry.’

‘It’s such a shame.’

‘Let us know if there’s anything we can do.’

When it comes down to it, even the sincerest of sympathies can only be expressed in stock phrases. They stop meaning anything after you’ve heard them enough times, like if you say the same word over and over again, repeating it so much that it doesn’t even look real anymore. Cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer. Except that’s the one word that never loses its meaning. Not now.

If they’re not talking to you as if it were your own wake, people share their own stories of cancer, like me having it means I’m suddenly desperate to talk about nothing else. I suppose they think it is better than pained, sad silence. What do you talk about when the future is uncertain? In their situation, I would probably do the same.

Everyone has their own story. Of the vegan auntie who only ate organic but still got the pancreatic variety aged thirty-two, dying six months later. Of the eighty-something great-grandma who smoked two packs a day and never went to bed without a thimble of whisky. She somehow battled off breast cancer with little more than an arthritic shrug, because that’s the kind of irony that life loves to throw up. People like telling that kind of story; it makes everyone feel much better when there’s a happy ending.

Of course, even when there is a happy ending, the ominous, unspoken truth hangs in the air: I might not be so lucky. The ice grows a little bit thicker when that thought wanders across my mind, mid-winter growing ever closer. It’s like living constantly in late January. The Christmas decorations are long since packed away, the lights all turned off. Now it’s just cold.

I always supposed that getting cancer would unleash a sudden lease of life: a final burst of energy as I strived to savour every remaining day. That’s what you read about in the news. It’s not like that with me. Perhaps that comes later, holding hands with remission. For now, it is all I can do to keep myself out of the murky depths of the pond, from sinking down amongst the rotting reeds and the thick mud. I cannot swim; I cannot break through the ice. I have to wait for Spring, if it comes.

What if winter lasts forever? What if the frozen pond never thaws?

Or what if it does, but everything beneath the ice is already dead?

Please, let the ice melt soon.