Love for Now (4 page)

Rich was good on the phone on Saturday. We talked about the England v. Italy rugby game and cancer, in that order.

He asked me, ‘What’s it like telling people?’

Good question. ‘Not easy. I find I just go in and say it.’ Like I’ve been doing it all my life.

‘How do they react?’

‘Well, quite a lot of “Oh I’m so sorry”, but I’ve also had two “Oh shits.”’

‘You could do a survey.’

‘A research project. Fantastic idea. Work would be proud.’

Mummy and Daddy on the phone a minute ago. A local doctor friend of theirs has told them: ‘Anthony is the same Anthony he was before. He hasn’t changed.’

‘Haven’t I?’ I said.

‘Well, no, you have, I mean you have this thing inside you we wish wasn’t there, but you’re still you, you’re the you you were before we knew, that’s what she was saying.’

‘Right, I see,’ not seeing at all.

We went to see the consultant yesterday, walking hand in hand. A bright, dazzling day, too bright, actually, to look into the light, or even lift your head up from the pavement.

My consultant has twinkly eyes behind little steel-rimmed specs, and discretely expensive clothing. Her name is Felicity Carr. I addressed her from the off as Felicity.

I saw her before I met her formally, as they were taking my blood. In the bloods room a woman in a white coat sat in front of a computer next to which sat an enormous machine like an overgrown breadmaker. She poked her head around the door beaming and cradling a blue mug of coffee. ‘You must be my new young gentleman,’ she said. ‘I’ll be seeing you in a minute.’

‘I’m sorry to have to see you like this, under these circumstances,’ she began, ushering us into the chairs behind her broad desk. Her hand moved across to a dictaphone and clicked it to ‘ON’. ‘Tell me your story, why you’re here.’

So I told her, eventually running out of words, through nerves, at the bit about my biopsy, as if it isn’t still fresh in my mind. Thank God for Tatty being there.

She is charming, but very direct. The most difficult moment occurred just as Janette, the specialist Haematology nurse, joined us. Felicity turned to explain to her: ‘This is my new young gentleman, Anthony Wilson, he has a high-grade lymphoma.’

‘I’m sorry, what did you say, was it “high-grade”?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, I haven’t explained. It means active, aggressive actually.’

This had the effect of moving the conversation on rapidly. She had said it was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and that, yes, it was a cancer, but that it was highly treatable, with a more than 83% success rate. Funnily enough, she said, Exeter was a bit of a hot spot for it, with 40–50 cases last year. I was going to have the opportunity to be part of a trial if I wanted, in my treatment.

‘So does that mean it’s bad?’

‘Well, actually, paradoxically, it means it’s easier to treat.’

‘Because?’

‘Because the low-grade or indolent variety are common to people older than yourself and they can last for years.’

‘Right.’

‘And you have B-cell, not T-cell, lymphoma, which, let me assure you, is much better.’

‘Good. But it is aggressive?’

‘Yes. Which means – I’m sorry – we are going to need to start treating you straight away. I’m afraid it’s going to be quite tough going for you for a while.’ She blinked, once. By this time I was fiddling with my wedding ring, my default nervous reaction, and I dropped it. And that’s when I felt the urge to cry, except I was trying to pick up my ring while holding eye contact.

I needn’t have worried. Tatty had got there first. There was a lot of searching for tissues, with Janette having to leave us eventually for a box she perched on the corner of the desk in front of her.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr Carr. ‘I know this is big stuff for you both to deal with.’

‘Thank you. No. Yes. I mean, it is.’

Dr Carr introduced us to my ward doctor, who will oversee my chemotherapy ‘infusions’. His name is Karl. He showed us the rooms where I will sit when they wire me up each Wednesday. A long line of men and women sat propped up with pillows and cushions, attached intravenously to drips, reading and doing crosswords and looking for all the world like they were at the hairdressers. I did ask her about the hair, as it was something I knew Shimi would ask later. She blinked again. ‘Yes, you will lose your hair. And there may be other side effects too, but we won’t worry about those for now.’

Karl is tall, skinny and almost shaven-headed. ‘It’s no secret,’ Dr Carr whispered two seconds before introducing him, ‘that Karl has had chemotherapy himself. For Hodgkin’s. He knows what you’ll be going through.’

‘So you’re Anthony?’ he grinned. ‘And you must be Mrs Anthony.’

He turned to me again. ‘Don’t expect politeness here,’ he smiled, nodding backwards at the room.

‘I’ll bring my Chelsea scarf then.’

‘You and I are
not
going to get on,’ and he gave me a half-hug, his arm reaching round me, pulling my shoulder into him.

‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want you being nice.’

Dr Carr had finished by saying ‘Not the nicest news on Valentine’s Day. Take each other out for a nice lunch, if you can.’

‘I have to get back to work,’ Tatty said.

Which we had predicted, so had had a romantic lunch at Dart’s Farm the day before, steak (her) and Mediterranean chicken (me) with – shock – wine. Delicious. A mosey round the shop for bread and chocolate, then home.

We sat watching the curling at the Olympics. The commentator referred to the ‘ever-increasing tension’ of the game, while his partner, not to be outdone, claimed ‘the curling has been pretty aggressive this afternoon, unbelievable in fact.’ Tatty looked at the screen and said ‘It’s a housewives game! They’ve all got highlights, they stand around gossiping, then get to work with dusters and brushes.’

Unlike many of our friends and family we have restricted ourselves to looking at a single website, lymphoma dot org, the official site of the Lymphoma Association.

You download a PDF file which tells you all the variants of the disease, their symptoms, treatments and side effects. I had no idea lymphoma was such a large family. I lost count of the different varieties, hungry only for information about what the hell was happening to me.

I learned three things. The first, which Dr Carr had also told me, is that no one knows how you get NHL, or where it comes from. Second, the kind of NHL I have, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common kind, with about 3,000 new cases per year. Lastly, NHL is a cancer of
the white blood cells. In my case, it is the white blood cells which produce the antibodies which fight off infection. Both literally and metaphorically, my body has attacked itself. No wonder people reach so easily for the description of cancer as a ‘battle’ which the patient must ‘fight’.

I toyed with finding out the difference between large B-cell lymphoma and large T-cell lymphoma but gave up, my E at O level biology coming back to taunt me. All I need to know, really, is that I’m very ill and that the treatment to make me better is going to make me feel even worse.

Later we watched
Bruce Almighty
outtakes with Bendy, who is off-school. There’s a deleted scene where Bruce is being shown by God the outcomes of his having said ‘yes’ to the world’s prayers. One lady, on being told she was bankrupt, slipped on some milk in a supermarket, sued and bought a condo in Florida. But God said that if he’d answered the prayer properly she’d have had to swallow her pride and talk to her sister and learn some humility. A boy routinely being bullied at school had his prayer answered and became a wrestling champion then a steroids addict instead of the outstanding poet of his generation. ‘The bullying was his material and you took it away from him. Sometimes,’ he went on, ‘to make a good picture you’ve got to use some dark colours.’

On Merenna’s last night with us before her trip – the night
of
the trip: I had to drop her off at the school at half-eleven – I made everyone’s favourite, lemon chicken with pesto, rice and peas. They destroyed the lot. Shim said ‘It’s the only good chicken recipe you do. The rest is rubber.’

While making it I played
A Walk Across The Rooftops
, and was astonished to find that it is still the Great Album I thought it was when I sat up half the night convincing anyone who’d listen as a student.

There’s a lovely bit in Giles Smith’s
Lost in Music
(the Cocteau Twins chapter, as it happens) when he describes the album as ‘painstakingly miserable’, the music ‘scrupulously pared away to the noise of someone tapping despairingly on a radiator’. And then this: ‘it’s an astonishing record, especially if you’ve got cancer.’

I’d forgotten that part of his story. The bit about the radiator is true, though, even if he is wrong about it being miserable. Like me, he finds he can still listen to them: ‘they proved too good, too resilient to be used and disposed of.’ Listening to it again, I know why: there’s hardly anything there. The key phrase of Smith’s is not the radiator being tapped, but the ‘pared away.’ Their gift, it seems to me, is chiefly one of suggestion. The music feels full, but is essentially spare. This is true of their lyrics too, which I see now more as an extended free verse poem which somehow has been made to sound like a narrative. It is beguilingly intimate, yet you never really find out what on earth is going on.

When I recover from this disease I will celebrate by writing an essay with the title: ‘Minimalist Urban Odysseys: The Blue Nile’s Debt to William Carlos Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow.’

Why did it take me so long to buy it on CD? I find it works just as well as it ever did, though I am embarrassed to say I can remember exactly the kind of thing I used to write about it (who was I writing for?), with phrases like ‘crystalline brilliance’, ‘superbly crafted’ and ‘heart-rending’. As a soundtrack to falling in and out of love, it was perfect. As a life-affirming soundtrack to coming to terms with cancer – or just cooking chicken – it is the real thing.

‘What’s it like, telling people?’ said Rich on the phone, again.

‘It’s like watching a film in which you are also the main character. You’re not pleased with your performance.’

I felt this especially yesterday, when I went in to work to tell my students, moving from room to room. Pin-drop silences,
and lots of very wide eyes. I slipped in the gag that with my youth and fitness – and good looks, ha ha – the prognosis is 80%+; and that anyway it’s not like I have much hair to lose. One girl I found outside afterwards in tears being comforted by a friend. ‘It’s just that my mother’s cancer’s just come back. It’s in her liver and lungs and bones,’ she said. It wasn’t easy.

I said to Rich, ‘The other kind of lymphoma, the low-grade sort, just sits around all day watching Channel 4 Racing. Much harder to deal with. My sort wants to go to Ibiza and sleep around. They can tackle that one head-on.’

Later I was on the phone-marathon. Nic called my email ‘beautifully crafted’; and Charlotte said they were like poems: ‘Keep them, they’re fantastic.’ But nothing prepares you for the lack of preparedness in someone’s eyes when you tell them face to face. ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Fuck.’ ‘I’m so sorry.’ ‘Is there anything we can do?’ My most frequent response to this is: ‘Don’t lose touch.’

The great thing (there are so many!) about having cancer is the retail therapy. I had my Christmas-money-copy of
Pink Moon
on when
Made to Love Magic
arrived. It’s like having a rather talented but otherwise monosyllabic older brother busking in the drawing room. I played it the morning of going to see the consultant, suddenly spooked by Drake’s barehanded admission of his need of others. ‘Black Eyed Dog’ didn’t exactly improve things later on. I’m still glad to have it around, though. That Larkin thing about a good poem/song about despair being better than a bad one about happiness.

Last night we lay in bed reading the literature on the study I’m being invited on. Its title is ‘A Multicentre randomised clinical trial comparing Rituximab and CHOP given every 14 days with Rituximab and CHOP given every 21 days for
the treatment of patients with newly diagnosed diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’ Pithy. Acronym: ‘R-CHOP 14 vs. 21’. Basically they want to know if the life chances are better if they nuke you every two weeks, compared to the more standard three.

Even if I’m in the trial, I still may get it every three weeks, as they have to have a control group. And it’s a computer that picks me, just like on Goal of the Month.

It’s a chilling list of side effects:

Well, not so chilling actually. But that’s just the CHOP effects. Rituximab takes it to a whole new level:

Most of these go after the first treatment – phew – or start to decrease. They were at pains to tell me if the side effects are really bad, then they have drugs for those too. I pick up my first patch of anti-uric-acid tablets today.

The thing which scares me most is knowing that to get better I am going to have to feel shit for a while: a long tunnel approaching, the sides of which your headlights don’t fully illuminate.

Sitting propped up in bed while Tatty plays with her new mobile. There’s a lot to be grateful for. Wes and Allie and baby Olivia passed through last night with fizz and hugs and banter. And finally a good phone call, Gill, the Research Nurse at Haematology, saying yes I have been accepted onto the trial and it will be every two weeks instead of every three, making the treatment more intense, but shorter. We got the diary out last night and I put luminous green C’s and R’s on the days of treatment and recovery, two weeks apart. If all goes well the chemotherapy (CHOP) finishes on 2nd May and the Rituximab on 30 May.