But This Now?

Thanks to Allan Cavanagh of Caricatures-Ireland.com for the great artwork.

This weekend I’m posting two tales from my new collection of autobiographical short stories:

Kill Me Now.

In one life could not be better; in the other, everything, including my life, is under threat. charlieadley1@gmail.com

But This Now?

You sit in the waiting room of Galway Hospital’s chest clinic.

Due to Covid it has moved out of the central building. Beyond tall glass windows the July sun burns high, in an ocean blue midsummer sky.

Today you expect to meet the lung consultant, with whom you’ve dealt for the last seven months, and meet the surgeon, to discuss plans.

These appointments are usually punctual affairs, but the surgeon is late because he’s performing an emergency operation.

Your phone vibrates in your pocket. It’s a text from your landlord. He asks you to call him at your earliest opportunity.

That doesn’t sound good.
In fact that sounds desperately worrying.

At other times in your life you might not react with instant despair to that text, but after the past four years your reflex now lurches towards the negative.

You’re sick, weak beyond exhausted, nerves in tatters.

Please, not your home.
Not now.

You text him back:

‘Hi. In UHG Chest Clinic, waiting to find out if they’re going to cut off a chunk of my lung. Will call you when I’m back home. Hope all good with you. Cheers.’

Your physical health has finally collapsed under emotional and mental stress: the loss of your marriage; your house; your dog; both of your income strands; three of your best friends.

You’ve been in hospital three times in the last seven months. First there came pneumonia and pleurisy, creating pain that made smashing your femur at 17 feel like a splinter in your finger.

Then after a Winter at home coughing up vile mucus for twenty hours a day, they admitted you with a massive empyema, and over ten days drained a litre and a half of pus from your chest cavity.

Since Spring, whenever faced with even the minutest of emotional pressures, you cough up blood.

There comes a gurgle, like a tap that’s been turned on inside your chest, and you rush for the kitchen sink, and splatter it scarlet.

A friend of thirty years is upset with you for reasons unknown. He wants to meet and talk about it, but you can’t cope with that.

After that phone call you drench a patch of lawn red.

An email from your wife about the divorce puts you on the toilet, painting the bathroom basin bloody for seven long demoralising hours.

You’ve seen so many movies when blood appears on a handkerchief, the soundtrack shifts from major to minor, and the character is dead minutes later.

However, because your present life is an unrecognisable horror, you look at the blood and think

Okay, so I do that now too.

What does scare you is the way the experts don’t know what’s wrong with you.
That means they don’t know how to treat you.

You have countless X-rays and CT scans. You have bronchoscopies and inconclusive biopsies. They send you to the posh private clinic for a PET Scan, which seeks out cancer.

The level of care you receive shows the medical types perceive your condition as extremely serious.

Finally you’re shown into the consulting room.

You’re nervous. You’ve never met this surgeon before.

Despite saying he’d be here, your lung consultant, who’s a great guy with a calming manner, is not around.

Months later, after the surgeon has performed his magic on you, you see him in fine form.

Unfortunately, today he is exhausted.

You remember your lung consultant said something about the possibility of foreign bodies in your lung.

“Do you think it might be caused by a foreign body?” you ask.

“Foreign body? No foreign body!” shouts the surgeon, “You don’t breathe in foreign bodies. You not a child.”

Well neither are you, but you’re behaving like one! you think to yourself.

“Three possible causes.” he explains. “One: infection.”

“Hmm, antibiotics don’t seem to clear it up so - ”

“Two: inflammation.”

“But my CRP markers are down to fourteen from over eighty, so what’s the third?”

“Cancer. We have talked and want to cut off half your left lung. You okay with that?”

Half?
Half of it?

Up to that moment you imagined surgery will involve the removal of the atelectasis, a golf ball-sized inverted collapse, down the very bottom of the lung, which the lung consultant showed you on a CT scan.

Half a lung?

“Do you agree to the surgery?”

Half your lung?
Your spirit drains from your toes.

“Er, of course. You’re the expert. Whatever it takes. After surgery you do a biopsy?”

“Yes. Then we do biopsy.”

You sign a consent form, stumble out of the room and head for your car, where you have a little cry.

You call your sister, because you know your mum's round there. Saves saying it all twice.

“They want to cut half my lung off. They still think I might have lung cancer.”

When you hear yourself saying it, everything becomes real.

Drive.
Get outa Dodge.

You need to be the other side of your hour’s journey, so you can take a valium.

Back home, before you even call your brother, you speak to the landlord. You explain that you’ve just found out you’re losing half a lung, and you might have lung cancer.

He says he’s sorry to hear that. He won’t be renewing the lease. You've until December to move out.

Afterwards you sit in your chair and try to make sense of it.

You’ve very possibly got lung cancer, although you’re still a fat bastard, and there’s not many fat bastard cancer patients.

You’ve got a divorce coming up; a messy affair: shouldn't be, but it is.

You’ve been unable to earn anything for seven months, due to your illness and Covid. Your savings are almost gone. You have only enough left for a couple of months’ rent.

A brutal illness, no money and a divorce.
That would be enough.

But this now?

Now a house move, that shoves the global pandemic down into fourth place.

How will you find another new home, if you have no way of paying rent.

Your landlord wants you out, but you aren’t physically able to execute a house move.

After surgery you will be debilitated for several months.

For months your lung consultant has told you he feels strongly it’s some kind of infection.

Now cancer is very much back on the menu.

If you have cancer you cannot stay in this house.
You're too isolated; too far from the hospital.

In fact, if you’ve got lung cancer, you might even want to go back to London, to be surrounded by friends and family.

Back to London?
Have you gone insane?

You love the West of Ireland and never want to live anywhere else.

Yeh but that’s it.
You want to live in the west of Ireland.
Maybe you’d rather die in London.

Well, not really.

You'd rather not die, but in the meantime, you have to make decisions.

Too much stuff.

Cruel.
Fuck.

Too much big stuff.

Do you have lung cancer?
Where will you be living come December?
How bad will you be after surgery?

Breeathe in

Breeeeeeeathe out

Breeeeeeathe in

Breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeathe out

What feels right to you?

If you don’t know the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.

Distract yourself to avoid a panic attack.

Build a fire.

It may be July but you can still build a fire. Do something that makes sense. Sweep out the ashes and put them in the metal bucket.

Wait.

You can’t decide where to live until you know if you’ve got lung cancer.

That will define everything.

Firelighters. Break one into two and lay them on the grate.

Use the axe to chop a turf briquette into kindling.
Careful.

Keep your mind in the moment.
Eyes on the job.

Good.

Wait for the biopsy. Find out if you’ve got cancer, and then decide where you live.

Strike a match and hold it to the firelighters.

Yes, of course.
Sit back in the chair and breathe.

In the meantime do something that makes you feel better.

Do some work. Be a writer. Finish these stories. That makes all the shite easier to deal with.

Life should not be a senseless charge from confusion toward pain.
It’s for living, walking, fireside talking. Writing makes you whole.

Throughout all this shit, you don’t indulge misery. You battle on, praying to your atheist god for a change of luck.

Never do you waste time wondering what you’ve done to deserve it.

You joke that if reincarnation is real, you must’ve been some kind of special arsehole in a previous existence.

But this now?
The house.
Your home.

Breathe.

Take it all on board, and decide only what feels right.
More nuanced and subtle decisions can follow in time.

You do the exercises they give you, to prepare your body for major surgery.

The operation goes well.

The biopsy shows that while you don’t have lung cancer, you do have Actinomycosis: a very rare, potentially lethal, often indomitable bacterial infection.

This bug has been causing all your illnesses, and created the abscess that made you cough up blood.

Now you will be fitted with a plastic line that runs into your arm and across the inside of your chest.

Through it you will administer intravenous antibiotics to yourself at home for 6 weeks, followed by a year of oral antibiotics, with no guarantee that’ll wipe the bug out.

Antibiotics for a year?

If the treatment fails, this infection creates abscesses and fistulas, gradually dissolving your insides into lumpy pus.