So my perspective faltered quite a bit. It started at 17 months, then after a very good scan it was longer. And now I got the results of another scan.
I wasn’t nervous. I almost got into an argument in the Blood Collection Department. As a cancer patient, your form will have a yellow sticker with the word ‘Oncology’ on it and an exclamation mark behind it. Then you get priority (the oncologist wants to see the most current possible blood values).
Soon it was my turn. Next to me at the counter a lady said softly that I crawled forward. Sorry, ma’am, I said, but I have cancer and you get priority here. Besides, I’m not talking about the numbers.
I also have cancer, she said, and I also have a special number. Her husband, a giant of a man, happily stayed in the background. I looked at her number – C 2007 – and said I had C 2006 and it would be her turn in a moment. Apologies, she said, not very cordially.
I wasn’t even in the oncologist’s waiting room before the woman and her giant came in. She kept quiet, he immediately joined the conversation that was already going on.
What do you run into the most, the giant asked the shaven man of a young family. I tire easily, the man replied. No, but in your head, I mean, said the giant. That you die, with such a young woman and a child, that must bother you, surely?
I just heard my bald companion stammer that he was trying to see everything as positively as possible when the oncologist walked into the waiting room and called my name.
He was a serious but not unfriendly substitute oncologist, who immediately turned his computer screen towards me so that we could view the results of the scan together. It was a screen full of medical terms incomprehensible to me, but I saw a word somewhere from which I deduced that something had been ‘taken’.
So it looks like the tumors in your lung are no longer detectable and that the tumor in your kidney has shrunk further, the oncologist said soberly. I was on chemo free for now and they would monitor me with blood work. Possibly I could get another round of chemotherapy, or immunotherapy (a chemo is Putin, immuno is NATO, I have visualized it for myself). I was allowed to fill in the life expectancy myself.
After closing the door behind me, I was hungry. I bought a tuna sandwich and sat down at the table in front of the takeout counter in the hospital. I was neither happy nor sad. I thought: what a rollercoaster of emotions and immediately dismissed that thought as an unbearable cliché.
Outside I smoked a cigarette. At home I started writing like mad.
Volkskrant journalist Eelco Meuleman (61), who has been diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, writes weekly about his life.