The joy of cancer

The title isn’t a facetious attempt to make light of the ordeal that has befallen the royal family and hence us all.

On the contrary, I’m deeply saddened by the latest news of Kate’s diagnosis. We all suspected something like that, feeding on the miserly crumbs of information falling off the Palace table. Now our fears have been confirmed, it’s time for sadness, sympathy – and reflection.

I know that believers among you will join me in praying for the speedy recovery of King Charles and the Princess of Wales, while non-believers will join me in hoping for it. We need them back, continuing to serve us with the selfless abandon for which this family (with minor exceptions) is so justly known.

Nor is the title meant to belittle the blow of a cancer diagnosis and the agony of the subsequent treatment. The first is nothing short of shocking, the second nothing short of torturous, and if anyone tells you anything different, call him a liar and refuse ever to speak to him again.

Until relatively recently, a cancer diagnosis spelled an unappealable death sentence. Now medicine has advanced, and survival rates with many types of cancer have improved. (Less so in Britain than in most other civilised countries, but our private care is up there with the world’s best.) Yet survival and recovery aren’t the same.

Both personal experience and observation of others suggest that, though surgery, radiotherapy and chemo can combine to save one’s life, one never fully recovers. The massive invasion by alien bodies produces many adverse changes in the whole system.

Hair loss after most kinds of chemotherapy is the best-known one, but there are also many others. I shan’t bother you with details, but just take it from me: physically, a recipient of chemo may emerge as strong as before, less strong or perhaps even stronger, although that’s rare. But he’ll never again be the same.

In my case, it was radio that was more traumatic, to the point of almost killing me. I ended up not touching any food for a month and losing 3.5 stone (50 lbs), which made it the most successful diet I’ve ever gone on, although I wouldn’t recommend this method of slimming to my friends.

When I asked Bob Phillips, a wonderful man and one of the world’s best oncologists, whether I was going to starve to death, he told me not to worry. “You have enough subcutaneous reserves to last you a while,” was how he put it. We both had a good laugh.

Then came the chemo, which I tolerated marginally better than I had expected. So much better that I asked Bob whether he should increase the dose. He said he couldn’t: it was already at a maximum.

That experience was spooky. I’d sit in an armchair for seven hours, a needle stuck into my arm, poison dripping in drop by drop. Penelope said it was like watching evil spirits invading my body, with me transforming before her eyes. She didn’t specify what it was that I was transforming into, leaving me to wonder whether I myself was turning into an energumen.

Neither Bob nor the other consultants thought I’d live to tell the tale, but at the end he was both surprised and delighted to say the words oncologists hardly ever utter: complete recovery. Usually they opt for the more cautious ‘remission’, but Bob knew what he was talking about, which I can testify to 20 years on.

So where does the joy come into this? In correcting those who bowdlerise the Juvenal quote and repeat “mens sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind in a healthy body). In fact, Juvenal wrote: “orandum es tut sit mens sana in corpore sano” (you should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body). This surely makes sense, while the popular abridged version doesn’t, as proved by the joy of cancer.

In fact, it’s a ravaged body that usually ends up housing a healthy spirit, if metaphysical clarity is accepted as a factor of spiritual health.

People always say that the best way to die is either instantly, say from a massive heart attack, or in one’s sleep, say from a pulmonary embolism. I disagree. Such an abrupt or unconscious end gives one no chance to come to terms with one’s death, and therefore one’s life.

I’ll spare you the clichés about one’s whole life flashing before one’s eyes, although perhaps that’s what some people experience. But whatever the initial reaction on hearing the diagnosis, cancer kindly gives one plenty of time to reflect, and there is no need for instant flashes.

The time bestowed may be measured in years, months or weeks, but never in seconds. That’s long enough for the spirit to heal, and it can always do with such shock therapy.

That healing does bring joy beyond one’s imaginings. The chaff of the trivial peels off the wheat of the vital, the truth emerges, floating out of the fog and into sharp focus.

Many cancer survivors say their first reaction to the diagnosis was “Why me?” That question is a bit too vulgar to have crossed my mind. And weeks later, in hospital, I didn’t ask it either. Why ask the question if you already know the answer?

By then I had understood many other things as well. I suppose I always knew them vaguely, or rather was aware of their presence somewhere in the background. But as I was wasting away at the Lister Hospital, my mind’s eye acquired prescription glasses, the vision became sharper and surer.

Every once in a while a psychologist would poke her head into my room, asking me how I was and preparing to give me a lesson in mental wellbeing. I’d always send her on her way by replying, “Never better, thank you.”

She took that as either stoicism or macho bravado, doubtless explicable by my subconscious desire to kill my father, copulate with my mother and gouge my own eyes out. But in fact I told her the truth: I had never felt better.

After the lifelong Sisyphean labour of trying to make sense of life and my place in it, suddenly that immense boulder rolled uphill as if all by itself. I still didn’t know what I’d be able to do with that deliverance, or indeed whether I’d have any time to do anything with it, but that new understanding was its own reward.

I had received a precious gift, which I’ve since mistreated and squandered in any number of ways. But not all of it: some of it went on to make my life fuller, deeper – and therefore so much more enjoyable.

No man was an island to John Donne, and “every man is a piece of the continent”. That may be, but we are all individual pieces, and no one can claim that his experience applies universally. But cancer brings some sort of catharsis in all who suffer from it, of that I’m certain.

It teaches us that, even as there is death in life, there is also life in death. And if one cheats death that time, it loses its sting for ever. Some of its sting, at any rate.

So yes, we should all pray and hope that King Charles III and the Princess of Wales swiftly recover from their physical illness. But also that they experience the joy of spiritual healing that’s inherent in fighting that deadly blight. God bless them.