Thirty Three Trips Down The M1, And What My Brother In Law And I Talked About

The phone call I did not want

I am going to be honest from the start, because otherwise this story is worthless.

I did not like Sipho. He is my husband's older brother, and for twenty two years he had been, to me, a man who talked too loudly at Christmas, who had opinions about how I raised my children, and who once, at a funeral, told me my hair looked better the other way.

So when my husband phoned me from a work trip in Gqeberha and said, in a voice I had never heard him use, that his brother had been diagnosed and that the treatment was every weekday for seven weeks and that there was nobody else, I said yes before I had thought about it, and then I put the phone down and stood in my kitchen in Kempton Park and thought about it for a long time.

Thirty three treatments. Thirty three drives in, thirty three drives back. Two hours of my day, minimum, and much more than that when the M1 decided to be the M1.

I want to be clear that I never considered saying no. I want to be equally clear that I did not want to say yes.

The first week

The first week we talked about traffic.

We talked about traffic the way people talk about the weather, which is to say we were both using it as a wall. Every morning I would fetch him at ten past nine from his townhouse in Bedfordview, and he would get in, and he would say something about the roadworks, and I would say something about the roadworks, and then we would sit in silence, and I would put on the radio, and he would ask me to turn it down without ever quite asking me to turn it down.

He was a big man who had become a slightly smaller man, and he was very careful about it. He would not let me help him with the seatbelt. He would not let me carry anything. He walked into that building the first day like a man going into a meeting he intended to win.

The treatment itself is short. That is what surprised me. You picture something enormous and what actually happens is a person goes into a room, and lies very still on a hard table for a few minutes while a machine moves around them, and then they come out, and it is not even eleven o'clock yet, and you drive home.

It was the smallness of it that got to me. The whole enormous weight of the thing was compressed into fifteen minutes of a man lying still, and then a whole day of being a person with cancer.

Week two, and the vending machine

The thing that broke the wall was a vending machine that ate my money.

I was standing in the waiting area with a coin in my hand and no coffee, and I hit the machine with the flat of my palm, not hard, but hard enough that a woman looked up, and I heard Sipho laugh behind me. Really laugh. The big Christmas laugh, in a waiting room, where nobody laughs.

He said, "You know Ma used to do that. Exactly that. With the hand."

And that was it. That was the door.

He talked all the way home about his mother, who died before I met the family, and about a dog they had, and about a fight he had with my husband in 1987 over a bicycle, and I heard about my own husband as a nine year old boy, and I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes at a red robot on the corner.

What we actually talked about

Over the next six weeks, here is what we talked about, in no particular order.

His marriage, which had ended in a way he had never described to anybody, and which he described to me somewhere on the M1 South while I pretended to be very focused on a taxi. His fear, which was not of dying, he said, but of being managed. His absolute refusal to tell his daughter in Perth what was happening until he was through it, which I argued with him about eleven separate times, and lost.

He talked about work, and about how he had built a small business and sold it and how he thought about it every single day and could not decide if selling it had been the best or the worst thing he ever did.

He talked about what the radiation oncologist had actually said to him at the first consultation, which he had not told my husband, and which he told me because I was the one holding the steering wheel and it is easier to say difficult things to a profile than to a face. I will not write down what he said. It was not mine.

And he asked me, once, in week five, in the car park, before he got out, whether I had ever liked him.

I told him the truth. I said, not really, no.

He said, "Ja. Same." And then he said, "But you're here," and he got out of the car and walked into the building, and I sat there and cried so hard I frightened myself.

The practical things nobody tells you

If you ever end up doing this for somebody, and a lot of people end up doing this for somebody, here is what I wish I had known.

The parking will become your enemy. Not the treatment, not the traffic, the parking. Find out on day one whether the parking is validated and where the closest bay is, because on the day when the person you are driving is exhausted and grey and cannot walk two hundred metres, that will be the only thing in the world that matters.

The tiredness is cumulative and it is not linear. He was fine for two weeks. He was fine, he was fine, he was fine, and then in week four he was not fine, and it came down on him like a wall of water. Nobody had lied to us. He had been told exactly this would happen. But you do not believe it while you feel fine.

Take notes. I started taking notes in week three, in a cheap notebook, and it is the single most useful thing I did. Not medical notes. Just things. What he ate, what he could not eat, when the skin on his chest started to burn, what the nurse said about the cream. He could not hold onto detail by the end, and the notebook could.

And take the appointment yourself, if you can. I mean the sitting in the room. He asked me to come in with him once, in the last fortnight, when he was too tired to trust himself, and I heard the conversation with his own ears and I understood in ten minutes what I had misunderstood for six weeks. There is no substitute for being in the room.

The doctor

I did not expect to have any feelings about the doctors. I expected them to be like the machine, technical and impersonal and, in a way, a relief.

What actually happened is that I watched a man in his sixties, a proud, difficult man who spoke to nobody, be spoken to like an adult for the first time in months.

Sipho hated being handled. He hated being soothed. And the thing I noticed, sitting in the corner of that consulting room with my handbag on my lap, was that nobody was soothing him. He was being told what was true, in order, with the parts that were bad clearly marked as bad, and he was being asked what he wanted.

I remember him saying, "So I can still drive," and being told, honestly, on some days, not on others, and to make the call in the morning and not at four in the afternoon when he would want to pretend.

He came out of that room lighter. Not happier. Lighter. He said to me in the lift, "That man doesn't waste my time."

I have thought about that a lot since. The whole world of illness is full of people telling you it will be fine. When my sister was going through her own long thing, I remember hunting the internet at two in the morning for a straight answer and finding only reassurance, and how much I resented the reassurance. Some of that hunting is how I ended up reading about Treating Cancer and the practical business of what actually happens week by week, which is what I had wanted all along and could not get from anybody who loved me.

The last day

They ring a bell. I did not know that. On the last treatment, some people ring a bell.

I asked him, the day before, if he was going to ring the bell, and he said, with total contempt, "I am not ringing a bell."

He rang the bell.

He rang it once, hard, like a man closing a meeting, and he did not look at anybody, and then he walked out fast, ahead of me, and I had to half run through the car park to catch him, and when I got to the car he was already in it, staring straight ahead, with his hands on his knees.

We drove to Bedfordview in complete silence.

At his gate he did not get out. He sat there. And then he said, "Are you going to keep coming?"

And I said, "For what?"

And he said, "I don't know."

What is true now

That was four years ago. He is here. He is annoying. He came to Christmas and had opinions about how I raise my children, who are adults now, which he was told about at length by both of them.

We are not close, exactly. I do not phone him. He does not phone me.

But once every few months, he sends me a message that is just a photograph of a bad vending machine somewhere in the world, and I send back a photograph of my hand, and that is the entire conversation, and it means something that I could not explain to anybody who was not in that car.

People ask me, when the subject comes up, whether I have any advice for someone who has just been told. I do not, really. I am not a doctor and I am not a patient. But I do tell them one thing, which is that when they are choosing where to go, and when they are sitting in a room with an oncologist Johannesburg has produced and are deciding whether they trust this person with the next seven weeks of their life, they should notice whether they feel like an adult in that room.

That is not a medical criterion. I know that. But I sat in the corner of a consulting room with my handbag on my lap and watched a man who had lost everything he thought made him a man be handed back one thing, which was the right to be told the truth.

And then I drove him home, thirty three times, down a road I now cannot use without thinking about him.