Every three months I have scans, to find out what’s going on with my cancer. Before one of the scans, I am injected with a small amount of radiation. I can’t be around my children that day in case it has an adverse affect on them. “I’m radioactive,” I tell them and they run away in mock fear. For the other scan, I’m injected with a purple dye, and sometimes this makes me vomit in the middle of the scan. Most people who have that same scan do not get sick. It’s just the luck of the scan draw.
About a week after the scans, I have a meeting with my consultant. At this meeting he or she will tell me what’s going on with the cancer. So far, it’s been the same thing: the cancer is “stable”. There is a moment of relief, I won’t lie about that. But I don’t celebrate or do a little internal jig. I don’t feel like I’ve been given a precious gift, or some extra parcel of peace of mind. I walk out of that door and my mind turns from the existential to the everyday.
It’s important to me, how I digest the news. I treat it with the equanimity I learned about on those 10-day silent meditation retreats. I went on three Vipassana courses, the first to deal with a broken heart and then two more with my partner, now husband. They are intense experiences. And I think, at some cellular level, they must change a person. I think they changed me. When I was going through the worst days and months of my life, finding out about my diagnosis and then moving through treatment and various unexpected happenings, I seemed to naturally find a Kiplingesque way of meeting triumph and disaster and treating “those two imposters just the same”.
“Are you living scan to scan?” is what people sometimes ask me. And I can tell them, honestly, no. That doesn’t feel like living to me. Because what I am doing is what I’ve always done, I’m living moment to moment. It’s an aspect of my personality that has helped me to cope with the uncertainty of a serious medical diagnosis.
And perhaps I am more in the moment than ever, because I’ve been forgetting appointments and commitments lately. Future plans seem to float in the distance, like they are written in water, not in my online diary. In the last couple of weeks I’ve missed or nearly missed three lunch appointments with great friends. I’ll be sitting there, in my kitchen, and I will notice, because someone has texted “see you soon”, that I am supposed to be somewhere else.
I was feeling sad about this, about letting people down for no other reason than poor time management, when a sparrowhawk and a pigeon had a fight in my backyard. It wasn’t a fair one. We heard the commotion from another room, two birds in mid-air, banging against the glass. The pigeon lost, flapping for a while until it expired and the sparrow hawk took position on top of its fresh corpse. My daughter, at home studying for her Junior Certifcate mocks, witnessed the whole thing. There were feathers, she reported, all over what we call Fintan’s Furniture.
Recently a friend, at a lunch I nearly missed, talked about how in her 50s, with so much life experience behind her, something wonderful has happened. She’s not afraid anymore. She’s not afraid when she runs alone along Dublin’s canal in the dark. She’s not afraid of making bold career decisions. She recalled a recent walking holiday in Slovakia, with her teenage son. They were given a special whistle to blow in case they encountered any bears. She told her son: “If the bears come, you run away, I will handle the bears.” She meant it. I could see it in her eyes.
I wish I was more like her. But as the sparrowhawk picked at the pigeon, myself and my daughter huddled in another room, not wanting to engage. There was nothing to be scared of, really. It wasn’t an us against wild bears situation. I did steel myself to go down there at one point to make a short video of the sparrow hawk having a pigeon for brunch, like I was making a nature programme. Then my husband came home and cleared all traces of the brutal encounter away.
[ There were many remarkable things about my Uncle Christy. I’ll mention just twoOpens in new window ]
That week, my daughter told me about a helpful event reminder app called Countdown, which keeps all your future happenings stored vertically, in colour-coded segments on your phone. I spent a morning inputting all my commitments. I can see everything more clearly now. Deadlines, medical appointments, dates with friends. Everything appears more concrete. Less fluid. My daughter sees the app as a way to look forward to things, such as her longed for Billie Eilish concert: 158 days and counting. I am hoping it will help me with all the forgetting.
I don’t know if I’m more fearful or more fearless since all of this happened. If I’m living with more clarity or with my head in the clouds. But I do know that even the best event-reminders cannot alert us to all the things we don’t yet know are going to happen. Which is the colourful mystery we all must live with. The parts we cannot see.
