Yesterday I walked out the doors of the Crown Princess Mary Cancer Centre Westmead with a clean bill of health.
The CT scan I had taken showed my neo-bladder (a bladder surgically fashioned from a section of the lower bowel) was functioning as it should and there was no sign of cancer there or in any other part of my abdomen.
This was excellent news, just one step in a five-year long process that hopefully will lead to remission but definitely a step in the right direction.
For people with cancer that’s how success or otherwise is measured.
There are few climactic scenes. It’s incremental. Every scan, every visit. Week by week. Month by month. Tick them off. Enjoy the good news and deal with the bad.
There is always a jangling of nerves whenever I enter the place, stroll past reception and head up the corridor to Wards 2-3.
It’s a place where bad news can come unexpectedly and often against a superficial sense of well being. One doesn’t march confidently through these doors.
To the left is the infusion centre. By mid-morning, every seat is taken.
‘Two years ago I sat in those chairs’
People sitting in the blue vinyl recliner chairs are hooked up to the drip, drip of chemotherapy. A cocktail of poisons designed to kill cancer cells while taking healthy cells out by the billions simultaneously.
There are women in the headdresses, covering their embarrassment of chemo-driven baldness. Men play with their phones or lay back and nod off, knowing the worst of its effects won’t come for a day or so.
On the walls are advertisements for a company that offers make up services to women, extolling them to look their best in the face of the worst.
It was two years ago when I sat in one of those chairs.
I was one of the lucky ones. I had immunotherapy. Keytruda or Pembro as the nurses call it, abbreviating its long chemical name, Pembrolizumab.
It played havoc with my skin and to an extent still does and put my thyroid gland to sleep, but I didn’t suffer the unrestrained nausea and grinding fatigue afterwards.
After they pulled the cannula out, I ate a slice of cake and drank a Coke.
Keytruda has just been given the tick of approval by the US Food and Drug Administration as a first line treatment of metastatic or unresectable recurrent head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. It will save a lot of lives and may spare people the ravages of radiotherapy.
The drug has already brought people back from terminal lung and bowel cancers.
Alas, it didn’t do anything for my cancerous bladder. My time on the blue chairs was cut short and I headed off instead for surgery, a radical cystoprostateectomy.
‘As good as it gets’
This is a more fundamental approach to cancer treatment.
The surgical removal of any cancerous organs, taking out a bit more to try and catch the spread.
It wasn’t pleasant at the time but as of yesterday it has done the job. The report I received was as good as it gets.
But there are no fist pumps or joyous leaps in this place. The people still waiting to be seen by the doctors deserve respect.
It’s not a drab, awful place, a clinical environment where fun has taken a holiday. Administrative staff are invariably cheerful. Nurses and doctors are attentive and professional. In the waiting room sit sons and daughters quietly fretting while their mothers or fathers wait to hear their names called. Some sit with their wives or their husbands. Some are alone. There are people of every colour, shape and size. Cancer does not discriminate.
‘No place for triumphalism’
No one gets impatient when they have to wait a while to see a doctor. There are no raised voices, no tantrums, no shrieks of indignity when a nurse misses a vein. No one plays up at Crown Princess Mary Cancer Centre Westmead.
There is no place for triumphalism either.
Everyone waiting to be seen by a doctor in that place has been to the abyss and has looked long and hard into it. Some, like me are moving away. Some grimly hold on but we’ve all been there, and we know the score.
It’s not survivor’s guilt or some other tortured piece of street corner psychology. I left yesterday happy yes, joyful absolutely, but quiet and mindful of the understanding that comes from shared experience and knowing that some will walk away, others will not.
Obviously, I wouldn’t go there unless I had to.
And I look forward to the day when I never have to go back again. Still, when that day comes, I’ll miss my visits to the Crown Princess Mary Cancer Centre Westmead.
It’s a place where people facing the worst are at their absolute best.
This column was first published in The Australian on 14 June, 2019