Why on earth would I write a book?
London, Autumn 2018.
A nurse walked me from my room, down the hospital corridor, to what looked like the bridge of the Heart of Gold spaceship from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. Bright blue light saturated the entranceway to the “Hybrid Theatre” as the glass doors swooshed open in a way Douglas Adams would have particularly admired. I was ushered into the prep room.
The floor had been painted an especially improbable shade of neon green. I was busy pondering the reason for this alarming colour choice, as the delightfully chatty anaesthetist talked me through the epidural and other things she was going to …
I awoke to find myself mysteriously back in the hospital room I had left five hours before, the only immediately noticeable difference being that my tongue no longer appeared to be attached to my brain and I had an urgent but unfulfillable need to blow a massive fart. Tubes connected me to several machines that went “beep” at annoyingly regular intervals, and my wife Kirsten hovered about, trying to get me to drink some liquid or other. The feeling of having been “minimally invaded” by a five-armed robot is a curious one. I am vaguely conscious that deep rummaging has occurred in hitherto un-rummageable places. It is exactly the same technology that allows a drone flying at 25,000 feet over Afghanistan to blow an ISIS Landcruiser into 10,000 pieces, while being flown by pilot named Chuck, sitting in a windowless converted shipping-container on the outskirts of Las Vegas.
Taking a look under the sheets, I see a tube has been recklessly inserted where one should normally avoid inserting anything - especially of such startling girth. Well, hello Mr. Catheter. Clearly this entire procedure involves a lot of firsts for me, I thought, as I vigorously pumped the button labelled “press here for intravenous heroin”. Immediately feeling very much better, it was all Kirsten could do to restrain me from enthusiastically hopping on a quick conference call with some clients and replying to some emails.
“Heroin and conference calls are a really bad combination, darling”, she pointed out gently, much to my irritation.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said happily. “I feel marvellous!” and promptly fell fast asleep for six hours.
As you are about to discover, I have been on many journeys in my life, but this was a journey of a different kind: a journey that resulted in a number of important things unexpectedly shifting in flight, so to speak. This was a journey through prostate cancer. Specifically, mine.
I was a symptomless fifty-nine-year-old male who had, quite randomly, decided to see my doctor for an overdue general health check, blissfully unaware that deep inside me a virulent cancer was exploding out of my nether regions in not-so-slow-motion. As you might well expect, things went progressively downhill from there. It was a complex and challenging six months, juggling work, travel, research and tests, while trying to maintain an outward impression of normality, when all was very far indeed from normal. During the process, they discovered I also had an early-stage lung cancer that, left undetected, would probably have also killed me in in a few more years. Kirsten, an ever present and vital part of the journey, selflessly undertook to do hours of research into doctors, hospitals, procedures, chat forums and ground-breaking new techniques in the field. She intelligently sorted and analysed all this information, spoke to numerous people and delivered succinct and useful summaries. I had no desire to do any of this, preferring to focus in trying to lead a normal a life as possible and continue my work through it all. Her help was invaluable.
Six months later, with surgery only recently behind me, Mr. Catheter and I went for a walk along the river in Battersea Park. By all accounts I seemed to be well on the way to recovery, although walking involved adopting the posture of an octogenarian man with a very bitey ferret down his trousers, which happens to be asleep but could wake up at any moment and, on waking, would likely to be both hungry and agitated. The importance of walking in a way that would not disturb said ferret cannot be overstated. Of course, walking in public places carries with it enhanced risks, such as being greeted by a young and bouncy chocolate Labrador who has decided you might just possibly have a ferret in your crotch that requires urgent investigation, and to whom the concept of asking permission is entirely foreign.
As I walked, reflecting on my circumstances, I began to see my life through a very different lens. I was both altered and unchanged, in equal measures. I had no regrets, nor did I bemoan my misfortune. On the contrary - I was still here, having dodged not one but two bullets, thanks to a single blood test. Suddenly and acutely aware of the tenuous hold we all have on life, I began to consider the extraordinary things I had done, the opportunities I had been given, the people I had met, and the places I had been. These were important milestones in my life, these stories, these travels, these adventures. It struck me that I had not appreciated every detail of them as I could – and should – have, especially in recent years, increasingly encumbered as we are by iPhones, social media, and the relentless connectivity that is now the ever-twitching superstructure of our lives.
And then it came to me. I realised how vital a part of me all this travel was, and how diminished I would be as person, had I not had these experiences. With precious few photographs and almost nothing in writing, I felt suddenly compelled to revisit my experiences before they inevitably faded in the cloudiness of age. I wanted to shout from the rooftops “For God’s sake, get a grip people! A selfie tells you nothing 30 years later, except that you were there. Appreciate every golden moment and - most importantly - the bits in between. Keep a journal, write it down, let none of it escape!” I realised I should probably set an example and damn well write it down myself.
So, I did.