Well, how do you get cancer? For me it started with a phone call from a nervous hospital employee, who asked if I could come immediately. I couldn’t because a friend was having lunch with me. Then she asked if I could sit down because she had bad news: a spot had been discovered on my kidney.
I had expected the results of an examination into bladder problems that had already passed.
It doesn’t scare me. So many places to be discovered. I also remained calm during the next consultation with the urologist. She drew two kidneys on a piece of paper, put a large cross through the judge and said: Gone kidney, gone cancer. Bright.
Yes, unless it has metastasized, but I’m not assuming that at your age.
Three weeks and as many spots on the lung later, I had transformed from perfectly healthy to terminally ill. I decided not to make a drama out of it, but was mainly curious about what was to come.
In that respect, my oncologist was a good one. He got straight to the point: so you have incurable cancer and we will tackle it with basically two remedies. Then you have the cisplatin, it makes you stuffy, dizzy, nauseous and tired, but we have good medicine for that. Saying that you usually endure that well. Then we do the gemcitabine, which is a bit milder, then a two-week break, then we start again and we say that…
Ehm, question in between: I understand (I googled that) that I have to count on another year or two? And is that with treatment?
That’s nice of you to say that, said the oncologist, it’s 17 months to be precise. That’s according to a study from Oxford that I just received. And yes, it is lawezeg with treatment, without it we just really don’t know what those lung tumors are going to do, yes, we know you will suffocate in the end.
Two days later he apologized for those 17 months, which would have been a bit rough on my roof. There were indeed people who actually lived a few months longer.
It might make you mad, but I didn’t. I saw a perhaps somewhat confused but friendly man with a safe word, who does nothing all day but put together chemotherapy for patients who can no longer be cured. Not a job to be jealous of.
He is a master at it. With his miracle cures, he makes me feel better than ever. As long as that is the case, this oncologist can say whatever he wants.
Volkskrant journalist Eelco Meuleman (60), who has been diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, writes weekly about his life.