Matt Beaumont - Staying Alive

Sorry, techie, but I hate any machine that tells my medical team I’ve got great big bloody growths in my lungs and liver that will kill me very soon.

‘There must be something you can do,’ I implored .

Yes, they’d like very much to lop off my left testicle and then subject me to an aggressive course of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or both, but they feared that the cancer is so advanced that it wouldn’t achieve anything other than prolong my life for a few extra months.

Well, I supposed, under the circumstances—death staring me in the face and all that—a few extra months sounds pretty good. ‘Let’s do it, give me drugs,’ I cried—no, screamed —in utter desperation. That was when they sat me down and took me through what it is to go through chemo and radiotherapy. I got all the ‘cancer may be grim but the treatment is invariably grimmer’ stuff. You don’t want to know.

I know I didn’t.

‘But I don’t even feel ill,’ I said. (Which was and still is pretty much the truth. I have a painless lump on my testicle. And a tightness in my chest, which is more than likely due to a heavy dose of hospital-related stress.)

They didn’t say much then. They simply looked at me, their expressions doing the talking for them: ‘ You don’t feel ill now? You will, boy oh boy, you will. ’

The choice, of course, is mine. To be treated and last maybe a year: time spent feeling sick as a dog. Or not: enjoy a better quality of life for a shorter time. Quality of life. Ha !

You really should talk to someone , they said.

I haven’t talked to a soul.

Instead I came to the web, the first resort of sad, lonely twonks . I came in search of…What? An understanding? A miracle? I haven’t a clue and, besides, whatever it is I’m no nearer to finding it.

No, the Internet has made things worse. The sites that have freaked me out the most are the ones that are there to console and inspire. The ones filled with personal testimonies from fellow sufferers. Brave struggles in the face of overwhelming pain. Stubborn refusals to accept the verdicts of the doctors. The worst are the ones where I read a memoir of courage and endurance and then at the end a caption: So-and-so died on 19th June 2003.

So hang on, let me get this straight. After all that teeth-gritting, bloody-minded effort you went and died anyway? Please tell me there’s a point here.

I haven’t seen myself in a single one of these sites. I am not brave or stubborn. Never have been. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about death—panicking, actually—and the only way I could cope at all was by reminding myself that while it was a cast-iron certainty, it was a long way off—I could think of it as hypothetical .

Not any more. Now I’ve got a date. I’ll be gone in four months, give or take. I’ll expire incoherent, incontinent and saturated with enough morphine to keep all of Glasgow’s junkies in a permanent blissed-out fug. And while I wait for that to happen I’m staring numbly at my PC as a fresh site downloads. Pretty graphics in shades of pink and lilac. Pictures of smiling doctors and nurses who look like they know what the hell they’re playing at. I read the menu.

ABOUT US

LATEST TREATMENTS

UNCONVENTIONAL ALTERNATIVES

YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS

WHERE CAN YOU TURN?

I click on YOU AND YOUR FEELINGS.

A diagnosis of cancer comes to most people as a shock. Your mind may well be confused with many different feelings, some of them conflicting. Some may be very negative feelings…

It has been written for me .

…This should not worry you, because all of them are part of the process of coping with your illness.

Phew , that’s OK, then.

The remainder of the page is written as bullet points.

You may experience:

Shock

Disbelief

Denial

Anger

Guilt

Depression

Isolation

I could put a big fat tick next to every item. Jesus, in the past few days I’ve gone through more mood swings than a country and western album. Just for starters I’ve done a lot of denial. Only tonight I was buying it by the gram. And I still have moments of disbelief. Moments when I think—I really think—pixie Morrissey is going to leap out from round a corner, probably in clown make-up, and trill, ‘ Da-daaa! We really had you going there, eh? ’ Actually, the disbelief is overwhelming. More than anything I can’t believe my bad luck.

While a drowning man supposedly reviews his life at lightning speed, I can afford to reassess mine at a slightly more leisurely pace. I’m doing a lot of looking back and all I can see is a catalogue of lousy fortune. And look at me now: up to my neck in credit-card debt, in a job that makes me loathe myself, and I’ve lost the only girl that ever mattered. That is not the description of a lucky guy.

Well, at least I’ve got my health.

Can’t say that any more, can I?

I’ve got a cancer that only a couple of thousand British men will succumb to this year. And while the overwhelming majority of them will make full recoveries, I’m one of the forty or so who won’t.

Why me ?

Why couldn’t I have found that lump months ago, before its vicious mutant cells had begun their journey around my body?

And while we’re at it, why that particular cancer out of the dozens on offer?

Why not a little melanoma on the small of my back? A slice with a scalpel, a quick zap of radiation and I’d be back on the streets in no time. Then there’s colorectal cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, mesothelioma and multiple myeloma. My chances would almost certainly be better with any of those. They surely couldn’t be any worse. I’d happily number among the one per cent of male breast cancers. I could put up with the sniggers. Or how about bowel cancer? Let them hack some of my stomach out. I’d put up with that. I’d put up with pretty much anything over the deal I’ve been dealt. A tumour on my arm like Jakki’s uncle. That’s a nice treatable one. Just cut off my arm. Hack off both to be certain.

At least I’d be alive .

But, no, I’ve got cancer in my testicle, my liver and my lung and I don’t even smoke . I can’t even shrug and admit I was asking for it. Well, thanks a million, God, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, the fairies at the bottom of the garden, whoever the fuck.

I thought I’d plumbed the depths of my self-pity in the days after Megan left.

I had no idea.

And I’m terrified . The website doesn’t mention that one, does it? All-consuming, mind-curdling fear . More than anything else, I’m frightened…Of the impending pain…Of losing my dignity (not that there’s much to lose)…Of losing my life , obviously…And, strangely, of telling people. Making it real. Official.

You really should talk to someone.

Yes, but who?

I click on WHERE CAN YOU TURN? More handy bullet points.

· A counsellor

I have major issues with this one. I know, I know, issues —as in the raising of and the dealing with—are what therapists are all about. But I’ve known me for thirty-one years, and I have trouble talking frankly about my feelings with myself in the mirror. It would take me an age to feel sufficiently comfortable with a stranger and, well, an age is something I don’t have.

· Family

I’m trying, but there’s no reply at Casa Mama . Anyway, how is Mum going to comfort me? I know only too well how she will react. Remember the gashed shin? She will take all of the emotions listed on this website and fuse them into an incandescent ball of hysteria .