"A Few Glasses of Red"

“You are too young and healthy to be going in for this.”

Cindy said it while she fastened the band onto my wrist. Soft North American accent, older, probably verging on retirement. She admitted me in slowly, following her steps. The day had already drifted off its rails. “Can you get here 30 mins earlier tomorrow, we want to push you earlier.” And then, by the time I was actually admitted, later than I’d been told. But I’m not the one who knows how the system works. I only guess. I notice they ask you the same questions as the first day I met any of them. It’s on the screen, but maybe it’s faster if they ask? Once again, I can only guess.

Knowing the process now, I returned to my seat in the waiting room where Lucy was, but some trigger that Cindy set off must have prompted the nurses behind the doors to call my name again. I quickly hugged Lucy goodbye. She was to be the key communicator to everyone else. I followed the next nurse through the doors, and stopped her before she explained how to put the two gowns on. “Ah, not your first rodeo.” “Nope!” And went to the change cubicle. I was just admiring my new attire again, asking it to tell me this is real life, when I heard my surgeon calling out for me. “Yeah, just getting changed!”

My surgeon, Dr Spartacus (let’s call him), was standing in scrubs, asking me to follow him. I asked him what was next and he said “who knows here!”, which I wasn’t sure how to follow through on, other than to sort of chuckle. He led me to the small room with the bed. “Wait, my surgery is now?” I asked. He looked a little surprised. “Ah, yes?” I explained further, that Cindy said they had me down for 12pm, and it was only 9:15am. Dr Spartacus didn’t seem surprised. “No! Now!” And he headed off.

The anaesthetist smiled down at me in the pre-room, the lobby before the operating theatre. Her face gave me naturopath vibes, but here she was about to drug me up. The usual questions were asked, and I felt like the good student. I was prepared for the answers. No, I don’t smoke. No, I have not woken up mid-surgery before. She was just the sort of person I needed, had a chuckle and a chat, and said she was going to give me something to make me relax. “It’s like a few glasses of red.” As if I were being walked to a long lunch rather than wheeled toward a surgeon and whatever I wake up to. There’s a particular intentional thought process in someone choosing the lightest possible words for the heaviest possible thing.

She then asked me to take a few deep breaths, and I said goodbye. Then nothing.

Then the recovery ward, and the slow climb back up into myself. I heard myself moaning, incredible cramping. Lots of voices around other recovery beds. I heard that same moaning voice, that was me, ask if I had a stoma. Someone said no. While others rushed to inject me with pain relief. While I processed the update of no stoma after just getting mentally prepared for one.

Two hours went by in the recovery room. Someone handed me my phone, but I could barely look at it, or at the overwhelming list of notifications. I found myself in a quiet room with one other person.

I didn’t look beyond my chest, not ready to absorb whatever had been done yet. I would discover gradually the five different tubes coming out of me. And the five different incisions. The first night was the hard one. A kink in the catheter, waves of intense cramping. Fully understanding what the pain button was for. And underneath all of it, threading through the discomfort, this strange bliss of sleeping. Surfacing, sinking, surfacing again. The body insisting on rest even while it complained.

The next day arrived as darkness outside. I watched it come. The wall opposite my window lit flat and colourless by some security light, and then, so gradually, each brick glowing up out of that wash until it was morning and I’d done nothing to make it so. I checked my phone and found a selfie I had no memory of posting, telling everyone I was OK. I looked high, not OK.

I was introduced to clear fluids while I had a few FaceTimes from people who’d been holding their breath.

I quickly got used to when meals were delivered. And that sweet sleep that just kept on coming. In between that, some lovely friends and family visiting me.

What I noticed most, and talked about before, is how it felt to be looked after. I’m the one who manages me. The capable one, the one who doesn’t ask for help. And here I was being checked on, watched and fed, and instead of resenting it I allowed it. Four days later, when I so quickly left the ward, I felt like it was the last day of a holiday, the dread of going back to a world where I’d have to be the one holding things again.

The discharge came fast, the way they do. Drains out. Daily checks led to everyone being happy I was up walking. I wasn’t old, so off I go. I was told to go home and rest, and that the next stage of management would be booked in for if I needed chemo.

And then: home. My own front door, met by my good buddy Joe, who had flown from the US to be a support and stay with me. Keith, unbothered and delighted in the way only a cat can be both at once. With Joe staying, he was running the show, doing the lifting so I don’t have to, literally and otherwise. The first day home tired me out despite my having done nothing, which apparently is the most normal thing in the world.

So I wait.

The flat stretch afterward where there’s nothing to chase and nothing to decide. They will meet about me without me. I will soon sit across from someone and find out what the tissue they took had to say. Between here and there, the only job is to heal, which turns out to be the hardest job of all, because it can’t be hurried and it can’t be done well by trying harder.

Here is the thing I haven’t said out loud to many people. I find myself wishing for chemo. Which sounds insensitive, I know, wishing for the harder thing, the sicker thing, when so many people would give anything to be told they don’t need it. But it isn’t that. It’s the inside of me trying to grasp some security. Chemo would mean everything is being done. A clean surgery and then “off you go, get on with your life” hands all the uncertainty back to me to carry alone, with nothing to point to, nothing active. The relief I’m after isn’t the drug. It’s not having to trust that what they’ve already done is enough.

Because the stories arrive almost daily. Dropped in by one source or another, one friend or a Reddit post. So-and-so was fine, and then it turned up in the lung. So-and-so moved on with their life, and a few years later there was another one, somewhere else. It’s always a next time or another scare. Never a finale. I’ve joined a community, who probably nod reading this, who have been handed a future tense we didn’t ask for. Now I run the maths on it in the quiet, in my overthinking brain: maybe another cancer in a few years, a different organ, a different scan. "No," you say. "Think positive! You'll be fine now!" And I've stopped arguing it. The relief, when it comes, isn't from being told I'll be fine. It's from the few who don't need me to be.

And then the thought that undoes the maths entirely. Death could come from anywhere. Not just the lung, not just the next scan. A car, a clot, a cat. Most people get to not look at that. I don’t anymore. The diagnosis took away my ability to not look, and some days that feels less like a curse than the only honest way to be alive.

And against all of that, the luck. I’m told how lucky I am, indirectly, mostly. The way people tell you these things. That it’s just a surgery and then I move on. Lucky I don’t have a stoma. And then, almost in the same breath, people worrying they’ve offended someone with a stoma by being glad I don’t have one. So somehow I end up holding everyone’s comfort about my own body, reassuring the room about a thing that happened to me. Lucky, lucky, lucky. The word doesn’t fit the inside of me, which is confused and overwhelmed and not at all sure this is over. Or even real.

That’s the contradiction I can’t put down: being told I’m lucky while bracing for a next time.

And that, I think, is the wait I actually mean. Not the dated one, the appointments with their reassuring squares on the calendar. The other one. The open-ended one with no follow-up booked. The held breath that doesn’t get released by a single piece of paper from the specialist, because even good news is only good until the next scan. I keep wanting to skip to the answer. But there’s no answer to skip to, not the final kind. There’s just now. Keith on the end of the bed. Joe in the next room. And the strange ongoing fact of being alive, and looked after, and not, for once, shutting everyone out. While quietly, underneath all of it, waiting for a finale that this kind of story may never actually give.