Wednesday 7th January, 2009
Warning: Contains emotion
Issue #1396 [Feb 15th 2008]
A close family member was diagnosed with cancer last week. That will be the second diagnosis I’ve seen in my family in eighteen months. Sympathies aside, it’s become pretty mundane now. It’s surprising how quickly such things become trivial. Tears. Fear of the telephone. Hospital wards. Unassuming smiles. I travelled home, as all good family members do. A couple of hours on the train, and you’re on holiday again.
The train ride I take back is important to every journey home. The route I take melts London slowly out, like a boiled sweet, instead of amputating it with a thick swathe of countryside. Slowly, the greenery that I’m more accustomed to blends through like an Air Wick made of grass. But once you near the urban centres dotted around my hometown, that feeling of bland emotional deadness sets in. It’s that scene in every independent film where the protagonist returns to the site of their childhood. It is grey. That’s the problem with illness. It’s just so bloody depressing.
The journey home is never nearly as bad as home itself, of course. Eighteen months of cancer has the same effect on the house as it does on the sufferer. Things become greyer, the signs of life under the surface begin to fade and go cold. You look for successes on a daily basis, rather than measuring things in “ten-kays” or percentages. Things become more real.
We were feeling lucky, in fact. Our first sufferer in the family is doing well, allowing that taste of happiness to return to food, television and shopping. Even though there were still gloomy conversations to be had, fewer and fewer people bore witness to them over the four months past. A second case in the family, though, was something of a mood breaker.
The man in question is my mother’s father, an eighty-four year-old chap who worked three days a week full time at a metalworker’s, cooked roast beef every Sunday, and last Thursday collapsed at his home and was rushed to hospital. He was found to have a tumour the size of a tennis ball attached to his kidney. They had no idea what to do.
Statistically, something like one in three people have their lives affected by cancer, either directly or indirectly. As we all know, though, statistics rarely work out. I’ve been affected three times, and given that both sides of my family are now sporting tumours, I may face an even more direct experience of the illness in the future.
And so the weekend left some interesting questions cluttering up my travel bag on the journey home. Will my wife have to watch me die? Will my children carry the same chance with them, too? Yet, there’s the mundane feel I mentioned. Just as the lush greenery began to repeat itself after a few identical fields, so too do these questions and ideas.
I’m sure we all feel the same. It’s February at Imperial – and, indeed, everywhere else. The sun is unusual and all too strong, making the days feel extremely long. Added to that, coursework has become so dull and predictable that it begins to feel like a Nike production line, shuffling linear systems problems past lines of low-paid children who are just looking to survive to the next term.
The trick is to do the clichéd thing, and keep that head above water, those eyes on the horizon, and so on. As I’ve been told by so many family members, in their situation it is only possible to live one day at a time. But that’s generally the best way to be anyway. Whether you’re battling a terminal illness or fighting to scrape a third-class degree. Today is all you can live at the moment. Sod the interviews for that City job. Forget planning your entrepreneurial summer of innovation. It’s the worst time of the year, right now, and there’s only one way through it.
Much like my secret love of Avril Lavigne, and the fact that I have a pseudonym in Felix, few people at Imperial know that my family has such trouble. Those that do, say that we are “strong” to go through it, but there aren’t really many other options open. What can be harder is to keep going to four years of exams and study, with debts piling up and no certainty of what you want to spend the future doing anyway.
As they say: “Any idiot can survive a crisis. It is day-to-day living that wears you out.” Chin up this February, and March will seem that much sweeter for it.
Felix stalwart Gilead Amit tells me he is writing about me this week. I read the piece (sorry, Gilead) ahead of time thanks to my contacts. What he wrote initially made me think twice about putting this out to you. But then, after some thought, made me even more sure that it is the right thing to do. Not because I want you to see a vulnerable side of me – you’re still all jackasses, don’t worry – but because I want you to know that even the coldest bastard holds a burden somewhere in their pack. If any of you out there are affected by cancer, and fancy chatting to someone in confidence; indeed, if any of you have anything to say about my columns at all, I have an email address that was until now reserved for sending things to the Editor. I would like to open it to you all: anangrygeek@googlemail.com.
Thomas Lofthouse died in the early hours of the 12th February 2008. He was a Second World War veteran, a taxi driver, a metalworker, and an inspiration. He will not be forgotten.
The train ride I take back is important to every journey home. The route I take melts London slowly out, like a boiled sweet, instead of amputating it with a thick swathe of countryside. Slowly, the greenery that I’m more accustomed to blends through like an Air Wick made of grass. But once you near the urban centres dotted around my hometown, that feeling of bland emotional deadness sets in. It’s that scene in every independent film where the protagonist returns to the site of their childhood. It is grey. That’s the problem with illness. It’s just so bloody depressing.
The journey home is never nearly as bad as home itself, of course. Eighteen months of cancer has the same effect on the house as it does on the sufferer. Things become greyer, the signs of life under the surface begin to fade and go cold. You look for successes on a daily basis, rather than measuring things in “ten-kays” or percentages. Things become more real.
We were feeling lucky, in fact. Our first sufferer in the family is doing well, allowing that taste of happiness to return to food, television and shopping. Even though there were still gloomy conversations to be had, fewer and fewer people bore witness to them over the four months past. A second case in the family, though, was something of a mood breaker.
The man in question is my mother’s father, an eighty-four year-old chap who worked three days a week full time at a metalworker’s, cooked roast beef every Sunday, and last Thursday collapsed at his home and was rushed to hospital. He was found to have a tumour the size of a tennis ball attached to his kidney. They had no idea what to do.
Statistically, something like one in three people have their lives affected by cancer, either directly or indirectly. As we all know, though, statistics rarely work out. I’ve been affected three times, and given that both sides of my family are now sporting tumours, I may face an even more direct experience of the illness in the future.
And so the weekend left some interesting questions cluttering up my travel bag on the journey home. Will my wife have to watch me die? Will my children carry the same chance with them, too? Yet, there’s the mundane feel I mentioned. Just as the lush greenery began to repeat itself after a few identical fields, so too do these questions and ideas.
I’m sure we all feel the same. It’s February at Imperial – and, indeed, everywhere else. The sun is unusual and all too strong, making the days feel extremely long. Added to that, coursework has become so dull and predictable that it begins to feel like a Nike production line, shuffling linear systems problems past lines of low-paid children who are just looking to survive to the next term.
The trick is to do the clichéd thing, and keep that head above water, those eyes on the horizon, and so on. As I’ve been told by so many family members, in their situation it is only possible to live one day at a time. But that’s generally the best way to be anyway. Whether you’re battling a terminal illness or fighting to scrape a third-class degree. Today is all you can live at the moment. Sod the interviews for that City job. Forget planning your entrepreneurial summer of innovation. It’s the worst time of the year, right now, and there’s only one way through it.
Much like my secret love of Avril Lavigne, and the fact that I have a pseudonym in Felix, few people at Imperial know that my family has such trouble. Those that do, say that we are “strong” to go through it, but there aren’t really many other options open. What can be harder is to keep going to four years of exams and study, with debts piling up and no certainty of what you want to spend the future doing anyway.
As they say: “Any idiot can survive a crisis. It is day-to-day living that wears you out.” Chin up this February, and March will seem that much sweeter for it.
Felix stalwart Gilead Amit tells me he is writing about me this week. I read the piece (sorry, Gilead) ahead of time thanks to my contacts. What he wrote initially made me think twice about putting this out to you. But then, after some thought, made me even more sure that it is the right thing to do. Not because I want you to see a vulnerable side of me – you’re still all jackasses, don’t worry – but because I want you to know that even the coldest bastard holds a burden somewhere in their pack. If any of you out there are affected by cancer, and fancy chatting to someone in confidence; indeed, if any of you have anything to say about my columns at all, I have an email address that was until now reserved for sending things to the Editor. I would like to open it to you all: anangrygeek@googlemail.com.
Thomas Lofthouse died in the early hours of the 12th February 2008. He was a Second World War veteran, a taxi driver, a metalworker, and an inspiration. He will not be forgotten.
Link to this article:
If you were logged in, then you would be able to comment.