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Opinion by Matt Burrows
OPINION
It was just days before Christmas 2017 when veteran New Zealand Herald journalist Simon Wilson got the phone call that would change his life.
A routine blood test had revealed a very high level of prostate-specific antigen, his doctor told him. That was a tell-tale sign of prostate cancer, and subsequent scans would confirm the illness.
Instead of shielding his private life from public view, however, Wilson opted to bring readers on the journey through the publication of his Cancer Diary, which he wrote over a series of weeks while he received treatment.
In an illuminating new interview with re_covering – a Media Chaplaincy NZ podcast produced for RNZ, in which New Zealand’s top journalists discuss the stories that have most impacted them – Wilson spoke candidly about the diary, his cancer journey, and the lessons that have come from it.
Wilson says diving head-first into writing at the time of his illness had “a kind of therapeutic value”.
“I read a number of literary writers on dying,” he told re_covering host Rev Frank Ritchie.
“I took a lot from these writers about how you manage this, and I thought, ‘Well, could I do that? Can I do that for others?’ And so it wasn’t just for me – it was for readers.”
Wilson used what would go on to become his Cancer Diary as a way to interrogate his fears around his own mortality, distilling what it’s like to be a cancer patient into a coherent story.
The diary entries, written for the Herald while he was going through his surgery, came as a great comfort to others who had been unwell, or been close to those who had.
“I’ve heard from a lot of men, saying ‘thank you for expressing how I felt and thank you for explaining it’. And I’ve heard from a lot of partners, wives, daughters … who’ve said ‘you’ve explained to me what my husband, my father couldn’t tell me and couldn’t talk about’.
“When you’re a writer, you just think, gosh, thank you. I’m so pleased that it helped.”
Writing the diary changed Wilson’s outlook, too. He can’t remember what his mindset was before his diagnosis, but says the threat to his life made him more thoughtful about how he spends whatever time he has left.
Simon Wilson's life changed with a cancer diagnosis. Photo / Supplied
“When I was diagnosed, one of the things I tried to think about was, ‘well, now you’ve got to make every day count’. You know that old cliche? It’s easy to say, [but] what does it mean?
“You’re asking yourself a deeper question – it’s not just ‘am I going to be busy today?’ … You’ve got to recognise ‘I’m really tired today, so today will count by my looking after myself and resting’, you know?
“That’s a change for me, because I do get more tired than I used to.”
Wilson is technically in remission, after undergoing a brutal treatment schedule spanning several years that included a radical prostatectomy, hormone therapy and radiotherapy – the latter of which he decribes as “terribly depressing and difficult”.
But he’s realistic about what the future holds, and has made peace with the realities of his illness.
“It’s not that uncommon, particularly prostate cancer. They say that most men die with it – It’s not what you die of, but you have it when you die, in other words.
“I’m lucky that the illness I have, which may or may not be the thing that kills me in the end, is not painful – I don’t have to live with pain because of it. Lots of cancers are painful, and maybe this one will become painful one day, but I’m lucky about that.”
For now, Wilson is enjoying his work for the Herald and has his eye on writing more books. He still loves journalism and isn’t interested in becoming a prostate cancer advocate, despite the success of his Cancer Diary.
“I kind of felt my contribution was in the writing… I’m going to continue to be a journalist and writing about other things.”
Listen to the full re_covering interview with Simon Wilson here.
