Genevieve Fox - Milkshakes and Morphine: A Memoir of Love and Loss

After Genevieve Fox finds a lump in her neck, she turns up for the hospital diagnosis in a party frock and heels. I cant have cancer, she thinks, Ive done my hair. But there is another reason Genevieve cant countenance cancer her own mother died from the disease when Genevieve was nine years old, shortly after moving to England from her native New York. She was catapulted into an unsettling, alien world and moved from place to place, with no one to anchor her. She is in no mood for history to repeat itself, or to be lost to her own young children.

Genevieve weaves together stories of her cancer treatment with memories of her rackety, unconventional childhood. She recalls the advert placed in The Lady for someone to care for her and her siblings, her mysterious step-father who went AWOL, and the unfortunate woman who tried to take her mothers place.

Genevieve confronts her cancer with the same sassy survival instincts she used to navigate her childhood misadventures. She draws on humour, friendship and dogged optimism to chart a course, first through tortuous treatment, and then through the uncharted territory of remission and cancer etiquette. Do you have to be a nicer person just because you have cancer? No. Is it OK to do karaoke until 4am? Yes.

In this uplifting memoir, lifes precariousness is tackled head-on and turned on its head.

Born in New York, Genevieve Fox lives in London where she works as a journalist and editor. Milkshakes and Morphine is her first book.

For Richard, Reuben and Sebastian

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing

from East Coker, Four Quartets,
T. S. Eliot

It doesnt hurt, but I know it is there and I know it shouldnt be. Interloper. I have touched it a couple of times already, clocking the chutzpah of it: how, silently and without any warning, it has taken up residence, uninvited. Nasty.

Its nothing, I tell myself, getting ready for bed some ordinary November night. My hands, which are undoing my jeans, want to be up there, where the thing is. One hand breaks away, flies up to my face. The index finger zeroes in on my chin and traces a line across my neck from one side to the other, as if in mock execution. Halfway along, it meets the camber of the lump and stops, follows it over the top and down the other side. Whatever this is that has moved in is bigger than a pea, smaller than a Malteser, and as firm. Odd, I think, my mind having now caught up with my hand.

Richard is in bed, reading. I hurry over to him, tripping over two rolls of Christmas wrapping paper right in front of me. I am not usually nervy. Nerves have made me clumsy.

Feel this.

What?

I take his hand and place it on my neck, just to the right of my throat.

Cant feel anything, he says, his eyes still on his page.

He is doing that blokeish thing with his fingers, keeping them together like a paw. He pats half-heartedly. Nope.

Here.

He pats some more. No. Probably your glands.

I do occasionally get swollen glands; they have come and gone since I was a teenager. The medical term is lymphadenopathy, and its the lymph nodes to the right of my trachea that have been the ones to play up. Spooky, I think later, maybe they were a sign of things to come. Until very recently, I did not know the word lymphadenopathy and I have not used the word trachea since school. Ive never needed medical terms and always tried to ignore bodily functions. I am Gwyneth Paltrows worst nightmare. I have never listened to my body, pampered it, fuelled it with moon food and unprocessed bounty. I dont wear Lycra in public, drink liquidised kale or shy away from sugar as from something diabolic. I do my thing; my body does its thing. A temple it has never been.

My science teacher at school, Barney, was one of my favourite teachers. I especially loved him for letting me and a friend blindfold him on a lab stool and spin him ferociously, just for the fun of it, but I could never stomach physiology. Even now, just thinking about blood vessels and arteries and metres of colonic tubing makes me queasy. House renovations have a similar effect; when an old building is being gutted, the beams and plumbing and wiring horribly exposed, I see entrails. And so, Ive treated my body with the same disregard I do our old boiler: Ive simply ignored any niggling malfunctions and pressed on.

Unusual, then, that my body is the first thing I think about the following morning. What is it doing, housing this furtive, insensate lump? Although I try to put it out of my mind, by the third morning I feel the calling of that merciless oracle, Google. If I check out my symptoms online, I will be able to put my mind at rest. Then again, doing so could have the opposite effect, and so I spend the rest of the day resisting its siren call. By nightfall, I capitulate. I take my laptop to bed, shutting the door before furtively keying in lump in neck. Down comes an avalanche of possibilities. Swollen glands. Cyst. Skin tag. A goitre. Salivary calculus. Tuberculosis. Thyroid cancer. With a tap of the Next tab more and more unseemly possibilities descend. Snow-blind, I decide to pull out while I still can: I delete my search history, slam the laptop shut on my anxiety.

On the fourth morning, I decide Richard is right. The lump is a case of swollen glands, probably stress-related.

The trouble is, I am not stressed, unless one counts fretting over a house move and its renovation and having a puppy who uses the freshly laid oak floor as a litter tray. We did leave leafy Primrose Hill for urban Tufnell Park, so the move was traumatic, for sure. But Ive got over it. More than got over it. In fact, I am a bit Eat, Pray, Love, which is my personal shorthand for a novel feeling of being tethered, spiritually. As opposed to physically, as if I were a goat, say. The eating and the love were already sorted. I love to eat, really love it. And, to misquote the poet Geoffrey Hill, I love my husband and my children I celebrate the love-choir. Its the spiritual equanimity thats taken me by surprise; years of intermittent searching and questioning and very occasional prayer would appear to have amounted to something. Also, for a while now, I have wanted to delve inwards, to take the leap into silence and see what I can find there. Three months from now Ill be marooned inside my own head, unable to concentrate enough to read, write or even watch movies. Silence will feel like torture, and solitude something else I often crave its antechamber.

Five days since sensing the lump, I wake up to find it has had a growth spurt.

Richard is snoozing.

Feel this.

Once again, I place his fingertips on my neck.

I cant feel anything.

I take two of his fingers and place them on the little ball. It rolls beneath my skin. Take it out and you could play table football with it.

Oh, yeah. Its just your glands. Dont worry.

Hmm.

Go and see the doctor, if youre worried.

The first appointment is ten days away, which is fine. I am in no hurry. If the ball has bounced elsewhere by then, I have the spots of dry skin on my face that I can mention instead. I have been meaning to have these sun-damage blemishes checked out for a while. I become a cyberchondriac in the meantime. I go back to Google and key in lump in neck again. Various benign conditions come up, but I skirt over these; its the killer diseases I am after and so, alone in cyberspace, I catastrophise myself to death. The cyst, the stone in the salivary gland and the random benign lump all get short shrift as I move inexorably to an oropharyngeal tumour, a tumour somewhere in my head and neck, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, thyroid cancer (again), salivary gland cancer, nasopharyngeal cancer, cancer of the larynx, throat cancer. The possibilities multiply and as they do so, one thing, at least, becomes clear: if the lump doesnt hurt, isnt tender, moves about and is getting bigger, then it needs to be looked at. If it has been there for more than four weeks, the GP should refer me immediately to a hospital specialist.