Up Shit Creek

June 15th, 2005

December 15th and I travelled to the Calderdale Royal Hospital to see a consultant bowel surgeon, fully expecting to be told I had the polyps that my kind, cheerful and infinitely reassuring GP had told me were so often associated with diabetes.

No hospital waiting room is a cheerful place but this one seemed to be full of a gnawing apprehension far more than others I’d been in. Perhaps it was because everyone was so old? I seemed to be the only person under 75 in the entire room which also seemed choked & crowded with a long line of pale, skeletal people sitting uncomfortably in wheelchairs with drains and drips protruding from every orifice. Far more such distressing sights than I could ever remember in any waiting room I’d been in before. The last time I’d been so disturbed in a hospital was in 2003 when I’d visited Aunty Florence in Christie’s, Manchester’s cancer hospital. The heart clinics I’ve frequented in the past 9 years or so had been glamorous by comparison & I had a fleeting longing for ante-natal, full of young women full of life if not laughter. Looking as clever as I’d felt both times round and amazed by their abilities, rather than anxious, defeated and despondent as the patients here appeared to be.

Rejecting the piles of “Hello” magazine and wondering whatever happened to the piles of “Readers’ Digest” you used to find in hospitals I looked instead at the health promotion posters on the wall with their 6 point guides on how to prevent bowel cancer. I met 5 out of the 6 requirements for a cancer free bowel and so began yet again to forget easily how the slight blood loss of the past 12 years had become more like a torrent and now more worrying still, had begun to pop out as clots. A period type blood loss when I had no womb left. Briefly I forgot how having to lie down to recover after emptying one’s bowels isn’t really normal behaviour either.

Someone who’d never been constipated in her life, who “went” as often the bowel cancer free African tribes do, who’d not eaten meat or even fish for 23 years & not much of either at all for over 30, who lived on wholemeal bread, brown rice, museli and up to 10 portions of fruit and vegetables per day, not the measly minimum 5 the health promoters demanded, someone who’d never even tried a cigarette, let alone smoked one, someone who swam 40 lengths per day almost without exception, someone who ate organic food & whose home was cleaned by ecological products not carcinogenic chemicals. Someone like me could not have cancer, especially not of the bowel. I was too old for FAP which might have caused it. There had to be something less sinister than cancer wrong with me. It just could not be. Why even Dr. Davies had told me he’d only fast tracked me because of medical protocol rather than from a belief that I had cancer. “You can’t have bowel cancer Elaine,” he’d said with that cheerful look he always has, “not with your diet. I think it’s diabetic adenomas.”

Relieved to be promptly called in by an Irish nurse, away from all these poor, old, pale and yellowing people who either had or had more reason to fear they had cancer. I answered a short questionnaire, admired her Galway accent & the discreet way she left as I undressed and donned the gown with hospital property written all over it.

Mr. S, a short, cheerful Indian with a difficult name tag entered the room, glanced at the questionnaire and asked me a little about my symptoms. He seemed surprised that I should know about such an illness as FAP, rather disconcerted by my use of medical terminology & as reassuring as my GP about the likelihood of my having it. “You’re too old for it to be FAP,” he said as he prepared to examine me, “if you’d had it and not had your colon removed, you’d be dead by now. 42 is the oldest anyone’s been known to live to with untreated FAP.” That was consoling & definite. Cancer receded even further from my mind.

Lying on my side with the Galway nurse holding my hand and the Indian doctor trying to probe up my backside it went briefly through my mind how much scorn the English imperialists has poured on their ancestors as “thick”, “superstitious”,”bog trotters”, “feckless” & too “lazy” for responsible jobs. What would we do now without these by blows of Empire and oppression? What were all those intelligent, rationalist, responsible, active English people doing with their lives right now?

Mr S was grunting as heavily as a woman in labour and the Irish nurse kept asking me if I was, “Sure you’re all right, love?’ “You’re doing very well.” Whilst the consultant kept panting that, “I just can’t see it. I can’t get the right angle for it. I need to get a sample . It’s no good I can’t see it.” He removed his instrument which clattered into the metal tray on the trolley and said he would have a discussion with me when I’d got dressed. He and the nurse left the room. I climbed from the table relieved that the examination had neither been as painful nor as embarrassing as I had feared but worried about the looks I saw on both of their faces. She looked appalled and he looked like someone who hadn’t found mere diabetic adenomas. But surely I was imagining it because people with my healthy life style do not get cancer.

As I climbed down I hit something slippy, and nearly falling had to throw my arms back on to the exam table to steady myself. I looked down and saw that my foot had landed in the hugest clot of blood I have ever seen. Surely that couldn’t be mine? But the room had been clean when I entered and the doctor and nurse in pristine uniform and starched white coat. I briefly recalled extensive blood stains on his angel white coat. Grabbing at a paper towel from the wall dispenser, crouching down l picked up the huge clot from the floor and placed it in the bin. I had placed a tissue in that bin as I’d arrived in the room. It had been completely empty. Those bloody towels and swabs all loomed up at me like memories of a First World War battle hospital. All of that waste material was connected to my examination and I have never seen so much blood in my entire life, not even during childbirth. Nor when I’d had fibroids “as big as a seventh month pregnancy”. Not even when I was first on the scene at an accident involving a motor cyclist.

Closing the lid, I turned back towards the examination table and saw the sheet I had been lying on as the staff had left me to dress. It was as blood stained as a bed in a labour ward. “Who would have thought the old woman to have so much blood in her?” Always a line from Shakespeare available for any situation. I removed that too, placing it in the bin along with its gory cousins and wondered just how anything in the rectum could cause such a massive blood loss. But as I dressed I realised that I felt better, the pressure that I’d been having in my right lower back had all but gone, maybe all that blood was what had been causing the backache, the feeling of incomplete defacation and the occasionally explosive diahorrea I’d been having more and more of and trying to ignore.

As I washed my hands the Nurse popped her head round the door & in a lovely, musical brogue invited me into Mr S’s office as if she were conducting me to the finest seat in the house of some grand opera house. Going through the door I noticed he did not, nay could not look me in th eye. From this lack of eye contact and the agonised expression on the nurse’s open Irish face. I knew now that I had cancer.