Timmy and Me: Pt 2

I’m Probably Not Dying

I looked around me and saw embarrassment, discomfort and disgusting sympathy fall across previously cheery eyes. We were sat in the pub celebrating my partner’s birthday. She had dragged me kicking and screaming for my monthly venture out of the house for a drink and a brief play-pretend that I don’t hate people. And that isn’t a joke by the way, and it isn’t just my state of mind since the diagnosis. I genuinely fucking hate people.

The conversation had inevitably come around to the big old tumour that sits just a few centimetres above my arsehole.

They asked what the doctors had said. They asked if work were being accommodating. They asked all the questions that they felt you have to ask.

‘How are you doing?’

‘No, how are you really doing?’

I changed the subject. I acted dismissive. I tried desperately to get these humans to stop saying words to me.

I didn’t work. It seems they weren’t ready to laugh about my cancer, or they weren’t ready to believe that I was ready to laugh at my cancer. There was some sort of impenetrable wall built up in their collective hive mind; some neurons not firing between the bit of the brain that processes bad news and the bit that laughs at sphincter jokes.

This is a conflict that is reoccurring in almost every conversation I have. People hear The C Word and automatically get very serious and concerned. And I do my best to downplay the seriousness of my condition every opportunity that I get. Unless there is some sort of household chore that I’d rather not do, in which case I’ll be popping my clogs any minute now and just need someone to hold me.

The problem is, I don’t actually know how serious it is. None of the many doctors and nurses I’ve spoken to have mentioned anything about survival rates; none have mentioned my dying at all. They’ve told me that the chemo will be awful. They’ve told me it will hurt and give me nausea and diarrhoea and possibly infertility and maybe even a whole new kind of cancer. But they haven’t said that I need to get my affairs in order.

And they haven’t said that I don’t.

I occupy this weird space where I probably won’t die but I might. I have Schrodinger’s tumour weighing heavily on my anus. I contemplate, every day, a slow and humiliating death. My daughter growing up without a dad. My girlfriend left to raise her on her own; wiping my arse with one hand, holding a baby’s bottle with the other.

And in 3 month’s I’ll probably be fine

And this is why jokes are our most useful tool. You can laugh at good news. You can laugh at trivial, frivolous news. And you should be able to laugh at terminal news. If all is well in a few month’s time and the tumour has been chopped out and given its rightful place on the mantlepiece next to flowers, Yankee Candles and photos of the kids, then we’ll be able to look back at this time and laugh, like we’re remembering a holiday at shit hotel or Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister. Laugh with relief. Laugh because, as bad as it was, it’s over.

And if, by summer, I’m in a hole in the ground. If the chemo doesn’t take, or if they find that the cancer has spread, or if the surgeon leaves his keys and wallet in my colon, you can still laugh. Laugh that a man obsessed with toilet humour spent the last months of his life shitting his pants. Laugh that he has finally got a day off work. Laugh like you’re remembering Liz Truss’s time as prime minister; painful, bloody, and with faecal matter strewn absolutely everywhere.

Just please, please laugh. Don’t look down at the ground, don’t make sad cow eyes and don’t tell me how sorry you are. Unless you physically inserted the tumour up my bum, you don’t get to be sorry.

The next few months will be hard. I know that’s true because literally everyone I speak to insists on reminding me. There will be pain, suffering and misery. Things have been getting worse for a long period of time and one can only hope now that someone with a big knife comes along to cut the cancer out before the worst happens. Much like, as it happens, Rishi Sunak’s time as Prime Minister.

I’ll be going back to the pub in a few weeks, assuming the chemo and radiotherapy doesn’t affect me too badly. No doubt the same people will be there, showing the same concern. Asking the same questions. Being similarly disturbed when I dismiss their concerns with a joke about getting my arsehole nuked.

Actually, on second thoughts, this might be one of those chores that I desperately don’t want to do. I’m pretty sure I’ll be popping my clogs any minute now and just need someone to hold me.