Dark Laughter

There's a lot about cancer that's terrifying. You can give yourself all the positive talking-tos and try all the diets and alternative therapies you like, but if you're me, anyway, there'll still be at least a few minutes every day when you think about your death.

You wonder if you've made sufficient preparations for it, particularly financially so your loved ones don't have to sell the family silver to see you off. You wonder if you've made your funeral wishes clear enough, and if they're achievable.

You think about your past too. All your mistakes. The way you misunderstood and misjudged so much. All the people that you've hurt. You wonder if there's time to say sorry. And you feel an aching nostalgia for old places, old scenes, your childhood -- everywhere you know you will never go again. Or might never go again.

That's the kind of emotional world you live in (it occurs to me it's not dissimilar to the torment of a severe mid-life crisis). And for me, humour acts as a balance to all of that. I deflect the impact on me of dread and sadness by what Sherwood Anderson called, in a different context, dark laughter.

Some thought it distasteful or unsettling when I called the cancer in my bowel my 'meatball'. Or when I joke about having had a multitude of fingers and cameras in my rectal passage during my treatment. But it's my way of making it easier for me to deal with, temporarily anyway; my way of taking back some of the power that the cancer, and what I've been through since I was diagnosed, both have to rob me of my peace of mind.

Please excuse me if I ever seem like a flippant, insensitive so-and-so.

Bruce Hodder

Poem: Written Before Surgery to Take My Cancer Out

Before my bowel operation I convinced myself I was going to die on the operating table. It was having to sign that form acknowledging death as one of the risks of surgery. I wrote this poem about some important people just in case.

Written Before Surgery to Take My Cancer Out

If the operation doesn't work 

and I die under the surgeon's knife,

let my lost loves and my old friends know.

I would want to hear the same of them.

When they cut my body open,

if I die remember me to Helen.

I loved her as a teenager,

but I didn't have the nerve to say.

Remember me to Shirley too.

I knew her in my twenties.

She held my hands to warm hers once

in the Wimpy Bar in Wellingborough.

Remember me to Katie R.

The toy cat that she gave me

for my birthday many years ago

is still there on my bookcase

by the Green Man and a music box.

And don't forget to tell Martyna,

my companion through my uni years.

She let me feel her daughter move

inside her pregnant belly.

Remember me to everyone

because each and every one was precious,

and tell them all my ashes

will be scattered on the River Nene.

Bruce Hodder, late May 2022.

When Things Go Wrong with the NHS

I keep hearing these horror stories about people spending inordinate amounts of time in A & E because there are no beds available on the wards. Their experiences remind me of something I went through, and the dilemma those of us who strongly support the NHS find ourselves in when things go wrong. Should we be too vocal in our complaints when we know the enormous pressure the service is under? Isn't that why mistakes are made? And with the underlying ideological antipathy to the NHS that still exists on the Right, are we playing straight into the hands of those who would privatise the service at the drop of a hat if we make its shortcomings too obvious?

I don't remember exactly when it was; so much has happened to me this year, I get the chronology of some events mixed up. But there was a time when I spent twelve hours lying on a trolley in A & E because they didn't have a bed for me. The cancer in my bowel hadn't been sorted out; I hadn't had my stoma created. So I was particularly prone, without being overly graphic, to sudden and bloody discharge from my backside. And that's exactly what happened because I was put behind a screen and couldn't get the attention of any of the nurses moving rapidly back and forth along the corridor. The screen was there for my benefit, undoubtedly, but it didn't work out that way. I had to suffer the embarrassment of a nurse probably 35 years younger than me cleaning my bum because I couldn't get to the toilet.

That wasn't all. After twelve hours they found a bed for me, and when the porter wheeled me there an extremely irritated nurse said they'd been waiting for me for ten of the twelve hours I'd been lying in the corridor.

'I'm so sorry,' he said, 'you shouldn't have had to go through that.'

When I was well enough I thought about making a complaint but I didn't do it. I considered making a complaint about the junior doctor who told me I was terminal before all the treatment options had been explored, and I didn't do that either. On both occasions it was for the reasons outlined above. But when I think about it now, and when I think about some of the media stories and the experiences of family members and friends in hospital, I kind of wish I had made a complaint now, or at least I wish I'd been more public about what happened to me.

We have no control over the ideologues who want to privatise the NHS, and presently, at least, it seems there is still broad support for the service in the country, although the approval rating amongst the public is said to have slipped post-Covid. And my suggestion that mistakes happen because staff are under intolerable pressure is unarguable, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to throw anybody to the wolves. But I don't want vulnerable patients to face double-figure A & E waits or misdiagnosis or discharge to the wrong home address either; and if we never talk about how the NHS is failing, either on a patient level or a structural level, how is it ever going to improve?

Bruce Hodder

Today is a Win

I had some good news today. The District Nurse told me that I no longer needed one of my five post-operation wound dressings. And sure enough, when I mustered up all the bravery I have in my timid heart and looked at it, the wound has gone. Somehow, miraculously, there is skin again.

That wasn't the only thing to come out of her visit. By the time she left I felt cautiously buoyant.

I made the fifth wound in my abdomen myself, a week after I came out of hospital. There had been the inch-or-so-long snaky track of an incision coming up over the curve of my stomach from my belly button. In the hospital, where I languished longer than I should have done because of an error by a senior nurse on my ward, the scar was already starting to scab over and heal.

That's what I thought anyway. Back home, I split the scar open one night, presumably when I was turning over in bed, and made a hole in my belly 1.3cm deep. I have the precise number because after a few nurses just put a dressing over the hole, a more diligent, or perhaps just more experienced, nurse measured it.

She packed the hole so it would heal in the right way and dressed it. For about a month now other nurses have done the same. But today the nurse examined the area her colleagues had been packing and said there was no longer a hole. I didn't look too closely at that one because I could see out of the corner of my eye that my skin hasn't properly healed yet over what was once a black miniature Grand Canyon. I can wait. The important thing is that it no longer needs packing.

When you have cancer, or any chronic condition, you learn to appreciate the little victories. I had two drainage bags and two dressings stuck fast to me when I came out of hospital. Then I made a hole in myself and it became two drainage bags and three dressings. Now it's four dressings covering wounds that are all, according to the nurse, showing signs of recovery. And the hole in my body has gone.

As a wise friend once said to me, 'Today is a win.'

Bruce Hodder