I keep bursting into tears at the most random moments, like a video showing how somebody utilised a sample in a song I used to love.
Repression, right? Must be.
I've got cancer.
That doesn't seem to illicit any emotion in me. Why not? Because the truth is I probably don't believe it. I'm in denial. I was diagnosed three years ago with a rare type that we've been monitoring, which can stay dormant for a very long time, or maybe, if I'm lucky, forever?
And I'm feeling fine.
CUT TO:
The fatigue is kicking in. I can't get up off the couch some days.
The misdirected sob sessions keep coming.
CUT TO:
Just had the big talk with my haematologist. Chemo starts this Monday. No more denying it.
Where the tears are now?
I've always thought that I've had a pretty good grasp on my emotions but then I go and snap at my wife over some menial shit and I know that I'm taking the path of least resistance.
Anger's the easiest one.
There's something deeper.
DISSOLVE TO:
Two sessions in and a new emotion is taking hold; guilt. All in all, it's been pretty smooth sailing. I'm in the middle of a TV show that I haven't had to quit. Apart from some nausea and the hair loss, my body is handling the medicine pretty well. I've had an outpouring of love from family and friends making me feel so special and the truth is I feel okay. I'm not suffering that much. So now I see someone who's really tormented with it and I immediately well up. They've really got cancer. Mine's only the showy kind.
I thought it would be worse.
Is this is more denial?
FADE TO:
Four doses in.
The pillar is wobbling.
Can't do anything without feeling nauseas. Completely knackered some days. Cognition is shit. Confused and disorientated like I've got dementia. Getting fat and can't do anything about it. There's a constant attempt to distract myself from feeling just incase that feeling is nausea, so I'm never really present.
Still no tears.
SMASH CUT TO:
The money's run out.
I'm on the phone trying to get a nurse to give me a cert so I can apply for illness benefit. She asks me my PPS number which I've known off by heart since I was twenty. I draw a blank. I apologise. I tell her I'll email it to her. Barely holding it together, I hang up, then completely break down.
There it is.
I'm afraid to ask for help.
Somewhere along the line I decided that I'd be the strong silent type. Stoic. A rationalist. Don't complain. So that's who I was going into this. Let the women in my life worry.
Bullshit.
The random sob sessions had coalesced into a complete meltdown! It was obviously about my diagnosis but I was unwilling to confront it.
It seems that the connecting thread was nostalgia.
I hear a song that transports me directly back to a time when I was an ambitious young lad, forming his personality, who'd laugh at you if you said he'll have cancer twenty years later, and though he'd already started to act the strongman, he was still free to be vulnerable.
And maybe a part of me understands that after this trauma, a new self will arise, one with new hair even, who'd laugh himself at the hopes and ambitions of that cocky young person who came before him.
If I don't die from some infection or complication, I'll be entering a new stage of my life; approaching fifty, weathered by cancer, and in no mood to continue trying to be the hero that little nipper wanted me to be.
And you know what? It's fucking liberating!
THE END
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