The cafeteria is little more than a small concession up on the first floor, sitting in the atrium between treatment areas. I’m aware that I’m sitting with a slump, my left arm covered in a half-dozen gauze pads. I look absolutely defeated, and crack a half smile at the pathetic figure I must be cutting.
I am inhaling a bottle of chocolate milk, a protein bar, and a sandwich because I’ve not eaten since 6pm the previous day; my blood sugar is on the floor. I have already passed-out from the repeated needle sticks (apparently this is my new thing).
Oncology. I came back here to this place, having been away for a year, because they asked me to. I didn’t want to; I’d had enough of it. It had been four miserable years of my life and I just could not do it. Nobody seems to understand, not even people closest to me. You get pulled into the machine and ‘care’ starts to feel like an elephant on your chest.
The facts are I had a very dangerous cancer, my chances of survival weren’t great, but the treatment worked, and I am still here. However, I started to feel a sense of dread and suffocation around doctors. I barely saw a doctor for most of my adult life. I’d like to go back to that, thanks. I can’t for now, because as a result of diagnostics they’ve found things they want to look at, so now I am looking at a surgical procedure to take a lymph node out of my neck because the scan pinged it. I don’t think it’s anything. I hope it isn’t anything. It’s fun, isn’t it?
I have a little joke that oncologists cause cancer. “I was fine when I walked in there, I leave and I have cancer. I don’t make the rules.” I think it’s funny, fuck you.
My PCP (GP for the NHS people out there)…God bless him, nobody tries harder, but people keep asking me why I don’t go back to see him. Well, it’s because he is obsessed with things going up my arse. He’s become a colonoscopy salesman. Yes, I know I should, but there’s a key concept here: I don’t want to. Change the fucking record mate, I don’t want things up my arse right now. Maybe in a year or two I’ll feel the need. Until such time I’ll rely on the radiology surveillance and take my chances. No, I’m not being reasonable, it’s okay.
To top off what has been a stellar week, I was waiting in my car at a red light when a young man lost control of his vehicle, smashed into mine from the left side, then got out of his car and ran off, like a sort of crackhead Forrest Gump. Police caught him further up the road as a witness called it in almost immediately. So there’s that to deal with. Police and insurer have been great, less I have to deal with right now, the better.
Rant over.
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