A date with destiny – and chemotherapy

I was shown to a room divided into three cubicles, each with a reclining chair and bed table. In the first, a nurse was vacuuming fluid from a man’s lungs. He was large and physically helpless with a beautiful smile. He had no voice but croaked breathlessly over the whirring noise of the machine. I set up shop in the middle cubicle and peeked round the partition to greet my other neighbour, a bird-like woman with a black head wrap. Her smile too was bright, with a suggestion that in her case chemotherapy is no longer the disaster it once was.

Six weeks ago my colon was resectioned. While she was at it, the surgeon laid a tube from my heart to an opening on my neck to facilitate the administration of any future chemotherapy. When people ask what the bulge is in my neck, I say it’s where they will insert the funnel and tip in the red diesel.

But I purposely haven’t formed much understanding about what chemotherapy is or how it works. Nor have I hunted around online for the full starting prices. I like to find out as I go along. I do, however, have a list of possible side effects of chemotherapy given to me by the oncologist which, left in their original French, sound almost glamorous. Beyond these he has remained deliberately inscrutable. Some finish the course as strongly as they begin, he said. Others can’t stick it. Any debilitating side effects are usually experienced in the first of the three intervening weeks. That’s all I know. I have nine sessions scheduled over the next six months.

I sat in my cubicle listening to the mucus being sucked out of the old chap’s lungs and his breathless conversation with the nurse.