The Check-Up I Tried to Cancel Twice Before Breakfast

An ordinary Thursday I almost skipped

I am fifty-six, and I had every intention of cancelling that appointment. It was booked for a Thursday morning, and by the Wednesday night I had already talked myself halfway out of it. I felt fine. I always feel fine. That is the trap, really, of being a man of my age in this country. We are raised to believe that as long as we can still carry the gas bottle from the car and open the stuck jar for our wives, there is nothing seriously wrong with us.

I run a small business in Johannesburg, selling and servicing industrial equipment, and Thursdays are busy. I had two clients to see and a delivery that had gone missing somewhere near Alberton. When my alarm went off I lay there and did the sum every man does. The appointment against the day. The mild inconvenience of being told I was healthy against the certain inconvenience of the traffic on the way there. I actually picked up my phone to send the message to cancel. I typed most of it.

My wife, Anthea, was standing in the doorway with her coffee, and she looked at me the way she has looked at me for thirty years, which is a way that sees straight through the front of me to the back. She did not say much. She said, go, Deon. You said you would go. So I went, mostly to avoid a conversation, and that small decision, made grudgingly, in a bad mood, with a half typed cancellation on my screen, is the reason I am here to write any of this.

The number that did not sit right

It was meant to be a routine check. Bloods, blood pressure, the general once over that my doctor had been nagging me about for two years. I expected to be in and out. But when the results of the blood test came back there was one number that my GP did not like, a prostate marker, slightly raised, nothing dramatic, but enough that he did not want to simply wave me off.

I remember him being very careful with his words, and I remember not really listening properly, because the moment anyone says a word like that, the room goes a bit far away. He said it was probably nothing. He said most of the time it is nothing. But he wanted me to see a specialist, just to be sure, and he wrote a name on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk, and I put it in my shirt pocket and drove back to the office and did not tell a single soul.

I carried that piece of paper around for eleven days. I would like to tell you I was being calm and rational. The truth is I was being a coward. I would take it out at my desk, look at it, and put it back. It is a very particular kind of fear, the fear of finding out, and it is far worse than the fear of most things that have actually happened to me.

Telling Anthea

In the end it was Anthea who found the piece of paper, because it went through the wash in my shirt pocket and she was smoothing out the damp fragments on the counter trying to work out what it was. She held up the blurred name and looked at me, and I could not do the brave face any more. I sat down at our kitchen table, the same table where we have eaten thirty years of suppers, and I told her everything, and my voice did a thing I was not expecting halfway through.

She did not panic. That is the thing about her. She took my hand across the table and she said, right, we will phone tomorrow and we will make the appointment and we will go together. We. From that moment it was we, and I cannot tell you what that word did for me. A burden shared is not halved, whatever the saying claims. It is not neatly halved. But it is carried better when there are two of you under it.

The hardest part was still ahead, which was telling the children. They are grown now, our two, one in Cape Town and one still in Joburg with her own little ones. I did not want to frighten them, especially with nothing confirmed. But Anthea was firm that they were adults and deserved the truth, and she was right. My son went very quiet on the phone, in the exact way I go quiet, and my daughter cried and then immediately became practical and started asking about specialists, which is also exactly like me. You see yourself in your children at the strangest moments.

Waiting rooms and the honest word

The specialist did the further tests, and there was a biopsy, and then there was more waiting, and I have come to believe that waiting rooms are their own particular form of suffering that nobody talks about. The soft chairs. The out of date magazines. The fish tank. The other men, all of us pretending to read our phones, all of us knowing exactly why the other one is there and none of us saying a word. There is a whole silent brotherhood in those rooms.

When the diagnosis came it was prostate cancer, caught early, and the specialist was very matter of fact in a way I was grateful for. He did not dress it up and he did not frighten me for no reason. He explained that because it had been found early, the outlook was good, and he laid out the options plainly. He then referred me on to a radiation oncologist, because in my case a course of radiation treatment was the recommended road, and he wanted me under the care of someone who did this all day, every day.

I will be honest, the word cancer landed in my chest like a dropped spanner. It does not matter how gently anyone says it, or how good they tell you the odds are. It is a word that rearranges the furniture in your head. I drove home from that appointment and sat in the car in my own driveway for twenty minutes before I could go inside, watching the neighbour's dog patrol the fence, thinking about my father, thinking about my grandchildren, thinking about all the ordinary things I had been treating as though they were guaranteed.

The long ordinary weeks of treatment

Radiation treatment, it turns out, is not the dramatic thing you imagine. It is mostly routine, and routine is its own strange mercy. I went in for my sessions on a schedule, and the schedule became the shape of my life for those weeks. Anthea drove me when I was tired. My daughter drove me the days Anthea was working. I got to know the parking attendant by name. I got to know the receptionists. I got to know the other men on the same schedule, and we would nod at each other, and eventually we would chat, about rugby, about the potholes, about anything except the thing we were all there for, and then, slowly, sometimes about the thing itself.

The team that looked after me were extraordinary in a way I did not have the words for at the time. The oncologist overseeing my treatment had a manner that I can only describe as steady. He never rushed me. He answered the questions I was embarrassed to ask. When I was tired and low and convinced the treatment was not working, he showed me, calmly, with actual evidence, why I was wrong to despair. There is a kind of professional kindness that does not coddle you but does not abandon you either, and I received a great deal of it.

The tiredness was the real enemy. Not pain, mostly, but a deep flat fatigue that would arrive in the afternoons and sit on my chest. I had always defined myself by being able to work, to carry, to fix, and here I was needing a lie down after lunch like an old man. Anthea would find me asleep in the chair and put a blanket over me and let me be. My grandson, who is four, decided that Oupa was simply very sleepy these days and took to bringing me his toy cars to look after while I rested, lining them up on the arm of the chair, appointing me their guardian. That small boy and his cars got me through more afternoons than he will ever know.

Ordinary life, quietly returned

I finished the course of treatment on a Friday, and there was no fanfare, no bell to ring, just a warm handshake and a follow up date and the drive home through the same traffic I had complained about on the very first day. Anthea had made a proper supper. The children phoned. It was not a celebration exactly. It was more like a long exhale.

The follow up results, when they came, were good. Not a word I get to fling around carelessly ever again, that word, good, because I now know precisely what it costs and precisely what its opposite feels like. I go back for my checks and I will keep going back, and I have made my peace with the fact that this will be part of my life now, the monitoring, the vigilance. It is a small price.

What has changed most is not my body but the way I look at an ordinary day. I used to rush through them, treating each one as a thing to get past on the way to some better, less busy season that never actually arrived. Now I notice them. The first coffee. The dog on the corner. Anthea humming in the kitchen. My grandchildren's noise. I had spent fifty six years assuming these things would simply keep being there, and it took a raised number on a blood test to teach me that they are not owed to me at all, that they are a gift I get to receive one morning at a time.

Sometimes people ask me, when the subject comes up, how they should think about all of this if it happens to them, and I never really know what to say except the plainest thing. Go to the appointment. Even the one you have already typed the cancellation for. And if the news is bad, do not carry the piece of paper around in your pocket for eleven days. Tell the person who loves you, let them say we, and then go and find the right people, a good specialist, an oncologist in Johannesburg or wherever you are, and let yourself be looked after. There is no medal for suffering alone. I tried it for eleven days and I can promise you there is not.

I am fifty six, and I am still here, and this morning I carried the gas bottle from the car, slowly, and opened a stuck jar for my wife, and it felt like the finest work a man could do.