Further Confessions of a GP

Maggie II

Maggie had come back to see me after seeing the cancer specialist again.

‘He was very nice, but he soon discharged me when I decided that I wasn’t going to have any chemotherapy.’

‘How are you coping?’

‘Everyone keeps telling me how brave I am. They tell me I’m a fighter and that I’m strong. I’m fucking dying and they just talk to me about staying positive. The problem is, Dr Daniels, I’m not that brave or strong or positive. Right now I’m scared. In fact, I’m thoroughly terrified. It’s as if I’m not allowed to admit it to anyone because I have to be so godforsaking brave the whole bloody time.’

‘It’s okay. You’re allowed to be scared.’

‘How about fucking terrified?’

‘Yup, that too.’

‘I’m all right when people are around or when I’m busy, but when everyone else is out and I’m alone in the house, I can’t stop myself from wondering about the end. How will it be? Will I be in pain? Will it be next week or still months away? Will I stop breathing first or will it be my heart that stops? Will I already be in a coma or will I feel myself dying? I need to have some power over this. Sometimes I wish I could piss off to Switzerland and end it all now. I just want to wrestle back control over this whole sodding thing.’

Regardless of the person with the cancer, the same clichés seem to recur time and time again. One of which is sufferers of the disease being universally thought of as ‘brave’. The public image is of ‘brave’ cancer sufferers heroically running marathons while defiantly sporting their chemotherapy-induced baldness. It’s as if the brave label arrives the moment you are diagnosed with cancer and you’re not allowed to be anything else. Reality TV personality Jade Goody morphed from being a national hate figure to being some sort of serene martyr the moment she was given her cancer diagnosis. In fact, such was the furore when she died that some people were calling for cervical cancer to be renamed ‘Jade Goody disease’. I thought I was going to have to start telling people that their smear revealed some abnormal Jade Goody cells on their cervix or that the Goody had spread to their liver. Jesus, as if breaking bad news isn’t hard enough already!

It wasn’t that Maggie was any less brave than anyone else. She was having a thoroughly normal reaction to the knowledge that she was going to die. We hadn’t really known each other well before her diagnosis, but she seemed to have acquired an immense trust in me since I spotted that she had cancer. To be fair, it wasn’t some sort of clever diagnosis worthy of House, but she clearly appreciated me sending her straight into hospital that first afternoon. There was no cure, but we were going to do everything we could to ‘keep her comfortable’. There’s another classic cancer cliché that Maggie hates.