Diski Jenny - In gratitude / Jenny Diski

In Gratitude

In Gratitude

JENNY

DISKI

CONTENTS

The future flashed before my eyes in all its preordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises.

I got a joke in.

So wed better get cooking the meth, I said to the Poet, sitting to one side and slightly behind me. The Poet with an effort got his face to work and responded properly. This time we quit while the goings good. The doctor and nurse were blank. When we got home the Poet said he supposed they didnt watch much US TV drama. It was only later that I thought that maybe, ever since Breaking Bads first broadcast, oncologists and their nurses all over the Western world have been subjected to the meth-cooking joke each time they have applied their latest, assiduously rehearsed, non-brutal techniques in 2014 for telling a patient as gently but honestly as possible, having first sized up their inner resilience with a few apparently innocent questions (Tell me what you have been expecting from this appointment), that they have inoperable cancer. Perhaps they failed to laugh at my doubtless evasive bid to lighten the mood, not because they didnt get the reference, but because they had said to each other too often after such an appointment: If I hear one more patient say they should start cooking meth, Im going to wrestle them to the ground and bellow death into their faces Pay attention, Im fucking telling you something important! I was mortified at the thought that before Id properly started out on the cancer road, Id committed my first platitude. I was already a predictable cancer patient.

Then again, what if I had taken the other option, and sat in dignified silence for a moment collecting myself, which Im sure is how one would describe the short hiatus, and then asked serious, intelligent questions about the nature of the treatment the Onc Doc was suggesting, not to cure me (he had slipped that in right at the start for me to run with or blank out, as I chose), but which had a 20 to 30 per cent chance of producing a remission for an unguessable period? After listening as carefully as my muddled head could manage to his answer (three cycles of chemotherapy, a scan, a course of radiotherapy, taking us up to Christmas, almost, then we would see), I would then be obliged to ask the next, inevitable how long question, hedged about with all the get-out clauses for Onc Doc, who after all wasnt to blame for my cancer.

Of course, I understand it would be unreasonable of me to expect you to know, with any certainty, when Im likely to die if I have the treatment. Im sure its different for everyone, and only based on statistics, but could you perhaps give me a general idea: years... months... weeks?

The print size in my mind decreased with times incremental decline, and as I arrived at the last word weeks it suddenly struck me, with all the force of the fullest sense of the word struck, that this could actually be his answer and not just the logical next time period in my sentence. Every cell in my body, except those responsible for maintaining a reasonable, calm exterior, was now lindy-hopping at that possibility, the only one that hadnt occurred to me until that moment. Weeks. Still, the question itself was there waiting in line for me in the ready-made scripts file, for this unique to me but culturally familiar diagnostic moment, just after the Contemporary International Smart Cancer Joke.

Not that Ive asked yet. I am getting ahead of myself. In fact, the Onc Doc, my Onc Doc as I now think of him, was drawing little circles, the results of my PET scan and bronchoscopy, on a ready-made outline map of a human torso, skinned and boned to show the lungs and lymph nodes, so that I could see the smallness of the tumour (good) in the lower left lobe, but also that it was too close to the pleura to be operable (not so good), and how its somewhat active cells (rather bad) had already travelled along two lymph nodes up to a third beside my oesophagus (more than rather bad). With that careful insertion of to treat, not to cure in his suggested plan of action, he had in effect just told me I was going to die in his care, sooner rather than later. Now I had to decide, do I want to ask that obvious next question? And the one after that? (How long, then, without treatment?) I believe he knew exactly how these appointments went. Why should I make it easy for him? I now thought. Its quite hard to rapidly absorb the notion that someone forecasting your fairly imminent death might not be your enemy. More than that, the great weariness combined with the previously mentioned embarrassment, at the idea of asking question B or no. 2 and thereby setting the expected ball of clichs rolling, was overwhelming. Instead of complying, I imagined I could instead nod a thank you and take my leave of the doctor and the nurse. The Poet would leave with me, and wed never mention it again. The Woman with No Name approach. A short shriek of Morricone, after the door has closed behind us. But that wouldnt do, either. After the heroic moment there would be the hour-by-hour living. Everyday life, even a shortened one, doesnt permit heroic blankness in the way film does. Say, Leones long, long close-up of Eastwoods or Fondas impassive face; the Warhol movie of John Giorno sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes; Jarmans seventy-nine-minute single shot of saturated blue.

Or I could do nothing. I could sit in sadistic silence waiting for whatever is next on his list of diagnostic appointment moves for all occasions.

Yes? And?

Sullen rudeness is a possible option handed to us cancerees. It would institute a period of bad behaviour as ones own private glumly-gleeful saturnalia, world turned upside down, lord-of-misrule regulated havoc, for a short period before the great slog of getting on with it began again, cancer or no cancer. I probably couldnt sulk unto death, no matter that Im one of the foremost sulkers on the planet. Id get hungry. Or want to watch TV. Or even have an itch I had to scratch, and any such desire immediately and fatally cracks the implacable wall of sulk. Another route through the carefully tended maze of standard responses looks like the most spontaneous, although it really needs to be yelled by Jack Lemmon, tortoise-style, sticking his neck right out, inches from Onc Docs face. Youre telling me Ive got CANCER? That Im going to DIE, because dont think I dont know that INOPERABLE means itll spread along the tracks from lymph node to nymph load. (Id apologise for that, but Im not sorry.) Youve just said you reckon, with all your hedging and ditching, that Im going to be DEAD IN THREE YEARS. If Im LUCKY. Have I got that RIGHT?

Actually, he said two to three years with treatment. (The weeks moment passed, leaving me less cheered than I ought to have been.) But Ive taken the long view to stop any quibbling. I do wonder, now hes laid the numbers out, with all the ifs and buts and maybes, how he manages his probability predictions. Does he pop an extra year on after or, for luck, like one for the pot? Or does he shift the lower end of the prediction a little towards the future to soften the felt brevity of a single year to someone whose time is slipping past at the speed of a sixty-seven-year-olds perception. Perhaps hes always as scrupulously accurate as possible in these situations, because, although he would like to offer a false glimmer of optimism which is said to be as good as a placebo, he doesnt want to risk my ghostly or my of-kins litigious fury if I died a day short of his overgenerous soonest prediction. So I should believe him because fear of a lawsuit makes doctors realistic and therefore trustworthy. This not crazily short but vague two-to-three-years is a difficult real-life calculation for me. On the one hand, to die pushing seventy years of age is no great tragedy, even if my id would like to know what the fuck age has got to do with being rubbed out. Even so, such reasonableness doesnt take account of the kind of thoughts that run swiftly through my mind. Two to three years. Will the battery on the TV remote run out first? How many inches will the weeping birch grow, the one planted by the Poet for my sixtieth birthday (soppy old radical versifier)? I suppose I wont need another cashmere sweater to keep me warm come the planets apocalypse, the ones Ive already got will survive the moths for a couple of years or even three should it come sooner than my own apocalypse. I very much regret the disappearance of a website I once bookmarked called Sensible Units. It took a scientific unit of quantity and resolved it into units that are much more easily or entertainingly imagined. Who knew that 1 cm of depth is equivalent to 29 human female fingernail thicknesses? Or that 80 gigabytes can be visualised as 110 CDs or 25 human genomes? So, when my Onc Doc announced that I had cancer, inoperable cancer, and that there was no cure, but some lengthy and famously unpleasant treatment that might get in the way of its speedy (the word aggressive comes to mind but wasnt actually said) progress, I chose the threadbare joke, from the already ready possible options. Because I had to choose something. But, as well as doing what I had to do in my new role, and for more than any other reason, it was a short-term panic-stricken solution for the flood of embarrassment, much more powerful than alarm or fear, that engulfed and mortified me at finding myself set firmly on that particular well-travelled road. I am and have always been embarrassed by all social rituals that require me to participate in a predetermined script. It may simply be that I am not a natural actor. That would account for the funk. Perhaps, having been handed this inescapable part, I was suffering from stage fright. It goes deep. I can perform at other peoples dinner tables like a chattering magpie, arguing and picking up on the conversation to make a joke or say something smart. Then I go home covered with a layer of self-disgust as if Id been rolling in donkey shit, and for a day or two afterwards, I stay in bed with the covers over my head in shame. In public and prescribed ritual, I have no easy get-out, but I cant just get on with it. The only way I can manage gracelessly is to keep my head down, my eyes low, dig my fingers hard into my palm and move my mouth a little, like John Redwood singing the Welsh national anthem, while other people enjoy themselves intoning the required utterances. Ever since I was a child, its been like that.