Julie Middleton: When they told me I had cancer

COMMENT

Here, I think, is the most feared combination of words in the English language:

You Have Cancer.

They come in the neutral, comfortless tones of a doctor who remains rigid on the other side of his desk. None of the mental moat-building you have been doing during weeks of tests prevents his words from dragging the Earth to a stop.

In the heavy silence, you remember watching someone who also heard those words transformed into a desiccated, morphine-addled skeleton. You substitute your face in the place where those memories lie. And you wonder who would turn up to your funeral.

Merry bloody Christmas.

Shock becomes anger: you've been betrayed by your own body. Despite heeding advice to live carefully and avoid brain cell-leaching extra-curricular activities - you have been a particularly pious Girl Guide health-wise - your body has turned on you, making a battle zone of your bowel.

In the days after the bomb, you feel you no longer fit your skin. For at least a year, as you have gone to work, on holiday, to shoot the breeze with the dearly beloved, a tumour, a silent assassin, has been quietly hitching a ride.

You become a revisionist historian of your own body, working out at which events in your life - a wedding, that trip to Bali, your birthday - you were thinking kindly of it while it permitted your downfall. What have you done so wrong that your cells could become so aberrant?

Of course, you don't expect your body to be a faultless machine. You would like it to be more in appearance like [insert name of current favourite top model here].

But, hey, it's the only body you'll ever have, and what a marvellous machine it is. So you've learned to appreciate it. And you've even personified it a bit, seen it as a trustworthy, long-time best friend.

That best friend has now committed an insurmountable, irrevocable breach of trust. You wonder if this is how you'd feel if, say, your beloved sister ran off with your husband out of the blue, leaving nothing but swinging coat-hangers and the tang of bile.

Others' (endless) descriptions of somebody-who-had-cancer-and-is-fine-now are no help: they remind you that you've been drafted into a club you never wanted to join.

Optimism, generally in ample supply, turns into bleakly ironic humour. You chortle like a drain upon hearing that your anti-nausea drug is called Domperidone. And that you, a 30-something female vegetarian, has landed a disease typically associated with elderly male carnivores.

You try to wrest back some sense of control as you await surgery. So you strike a sort of pact with your body: let's get rid of the tumour and we'll start afresh.

So maybe you give the tumour a name, something to do with its size, or its shape, or where it has made itself at home. You view it differently from the rest of your flesh.

Utter relief accompanies your groggy awakening after surgery: it's gone. In the long and sagging hours afterwards, where everything is an effort and there is too much time to think, you feel like you've undergone some sort of rebirth. At any rate, walking and eating have become a major effort and you feel like you have to learn how to do both again.

But there will be no peace pact: several weeks later comes the news that the cancer has left a one-fingered salute in your lymph nodes.

Thus begins chemotherapy, the emotional and physical roller-coaster that makes you feel like you've got a permanent hangover. As a poisonous cocktail is pumped into a vein in your hand, you imagine cancer cells being napalmed, hoping that a bit of attitude will assist.

And you wonder about the future, and whether you'll ever trust your body again.