Notes from an ageing writer
My cancer's worse than yours* (1)
It works this way… You go every three months and they tell you all is fine. Then you go home grateful to be able to get on with your life until the next time ‘worry week’ begins. At least, that’s how it is supposed to work. This time was a bit different.
Let’s start with worry week, which begins with what I call ‘sharp scratch day’, when I head to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London for blood tests that tell what my prostate cancer is doing. The phlebotomists are very good. I’m not. With me, they struggle to find a decent vein. I once had five of them trying, including one of their elite squad summoned from the chemotherapy unit. That was a few months after the death from secondary breast cancer of my wife Vikki Orvice, once a veteran of the Marsden too, and I had just been told that my own cancer had spread. Thus was I on new drugs and three-monthly check-ups had begun, frequency increased from six-monthly. I was tense, and teary because in this room V had once fainted when weak and near the end of her life, causing the hospital’s crash team to be called.
Eventually on that pin-cushion arm, five-person day, somebody asked if they could try taking blood from a vein on the back of my hand. It sounded painful and I was reluctant. What if they hit a bone? But they didn’t and it was actually less painful than from an arm. Just – as they tell you before they start – a sharp scratch. These days, now I am more comfortable with blood coming from the back of the hand, I dread it less than I used to, am less fearful of the room.
On this occasion, it did take two to find a vein, despite me drinking a litre of water in advance and them sinking my hand and arm in hot water– both activities supposed to highlight veins - but they did manage to get what they needed and off went four vials to be analysed ahead of a consultation with an oncologist from the urology team. So began worry week.
Most of the time living with cancer is routine. Life goes on. I’m not in any pain, which is often the thing people want to know about cancer. (It varies, with type of cancer and stage. Thankfully most people now know that you can’t catch it from other people.) The hormone tablets, combined with steroids, have a draining effect (along with bringing hot flushes) but not enough to spoil increasing personal commitments prompted by wonderful grown-up children and darling grandchildren, and dwindling professional demands prompted by being an ageing writer. It becomes a question of pacing yourself, exhaustion a non-occupational hazard.
In that week between blood tests and consultation the edginess within increases. I am taken back to being a Sunday newspaper journalist (no such thing these days, as what is left of print media is now a seven-day operation taking in copious website contributions). The pressure builds as the deadline of consultation approaches. The great sports writer Hugh McIlvanney (also a Marsden alumnus) once described delivering a big piece for a Sunday as being like the flu – a few sniffles early in the week developing into a raging fever come the Saturday.
Come the appointed day, I had a list of questions about the waning, once athletic, body that this skinny sportsman of his twenties and thirties nostalgically, mistily, recalls. Above all and first, I want to know what my PSA – Prostate Specific Antigen – level is. It can be a sadly unreliable guide to the stability or ‘progress’ of the cancer, but it is the best we currently have. Mine has risen from 0.6 to 1.5 these past three months, I am told. It is still very low but that percentage rise is something of a concern to me, if not the oncologist who of course sees much, much worse. We’ll monitor you, she says. See what it’s going in three more months. Perhaps the stress of a house move has provoked a ‘blip’. No immediate cause for alarm.
I was first diagnosed in 2009, two years after Vikki, declared fit to fight again after 35 days of radiotherapy. ‘It’ returned in 2012, spreading to pelvic lymph nodes. Hormone drugs and steroids were prescribed, then changed and increased in dosage after my PSA level had shot up to 17 in the months after V’s death in 2019. As I too have a secondary, cure is no longer an option. I am on a life-extension drug that will stop working at some point, to be followed by chemotherapy. That is not for today, though, thankfully.
Today, we discuss my breathing issues post-Covid, my highish cholesterol and glucose levels and what I need to do about them. Other blood test and blood pressure results are stable. I can’t, I tell the consultant, work out whether all the stuff going on with me these days is due to ageing, cancer or the side-effects of the many drugs I am on. (Vikki, an athletics writer, used to say that she was on more drugs than contained in the kitbag of a Russian middle distance runner and I am getting close.) The consultant smiles. The too-easy bruising, mainly to my arms and backs of hands and which depresses me, she says, is down to long-term steroid use.
She asks me if there is anything else. I have a sore right hip, I say, possibly due to the wear and tear of that – in his dreams - skinny sportsman’s youth. I limp a little now, but only occasionally, when I get tired at day’s twilight. I take a couple of Ibuprofen now and then, I add. She writes something down. She says she will see me back here in three months. I thank her and walk back to the car, it being too early for the soreness to cause a limp. My body does not allow me to run or hurry these days. I wish it would sometimes. I am on the clock as my parking expires soon.
I get back to the car, concerned about the PSA but grateful that it’s not worse and I can go home to spend time with children and grandchildren for three more months. I’m also relieved that I’m just in time to avoid a parking ticket. I am about to drive away when my mobile rings.
It is the oncologist. “Mr Ridley,” she says. “I wonder if you’d mind coming back to the hospital? We think we should X-Ray that hip.”
*After I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2009, Vikki suggested that we should write a book together, entitled ‘My Cancer’s Worse Than Yours’. Alternate chapters, each reacting to our own and the other’s cancer. We both had too much on at that stage of our journalistic careers, however, though after she’d died, I found some material she had written. Might even publish some of it on here. She was right by the way – her cancer was worse than mine. She, smilingly, used to call it ‘a bit of man cancer’. She always was right. Even when she was wrong.