OPPONENT OF GROWTH

 

The Death Suite 8: Opponent of Growth

From September 2024 onwards I had regular scans to check on the progress of my tumour in the mesentery, and the development and subsequent progress of any other tumours. I was feeling generally good until the summer, when symptoms started to appear. A scan then showed that I did have small but fast-growing tumours in my mesentery, abdominal wall, bowel, and lungs. That fed into the decision – which concludes this section - to have palliative chemotherapy from October 2025. That aims to shrink the tumours or, at least, slow their growth, but cannot eliminate them entirely.

Numbered for reference when seeking images

 1

Set aside the economy

my savings and relationships and knowledge and mind –

in the new language of growth,

I’m against it!

 

2

When someone I don’t know

asks how I am,

I’m not sure whether to treat that as vatic

or land them with cancer straight off.

3 

It’s easy for me

to tell Steph not to worry:

I won’t be around

to deal with what comes after.

4 

It's one thing to listen to time

another to know how best to respond

when you hear how loudly

it's ticking.

5 

What’s the point of learning things

if you’ll soon be gone?

It’s better than staying ignorant,

only to hang on.

6 

Is it time to stop saving

for an old age I’m not going to get?

Or should I resist significant spend

on what is likely to prove short term?

 

7

I think I’ve had it

with ‘dying of cancer’:

time to move on

to the ‘living with’ phase.

 

8

I may be twelve years younger than Trump

but I must be too old already

if the world is making the identical error

for a second time.

 

9

As we’re all doomed

setting aside any afterlives of quibble,

it doesn’t much matter

how the rest of this thought runs.

10 

I’ve put on a few pounds

but it’s hard to take dieting

all that seriously,

just to look better in the coffin.

11 

What I resist 

is trying so hard

not to be dead

that I leave no room for being alive.

12  

According to the surgeon

I am ‘several standard deviations from the norm’.

I have to remind Steph

that he’s talking about my health.

13  

It seems I’ve survived

the first three spins.

Would I be good

at Russian Roulette?

14 

I do not suffer from ‘scanxiety’

as our doctors terms the effect

on a life that hangs on images. 

But that could be a pretence.

15 

When the time comes

to fuck the future and live in the past

I will say nothing –

so that cannot be yet.

16

I might be tempted to hit it

with money, but cancer –

to, I suppose, its credit -

isn’t so easy to bribe.

 17

'Exist or otherwise' 

may be the ultimate boiling down

of what we're here for - 

if there is a what.

 

18 

Is it easier to leave

than to be left behind?

So far as I know

neither require any effort.

19 

Will he or won’t he?

Spoiler alert: he will.

I’m getting fed up 

with wondering when.

 20

I'm getting ambitious 

Two years back I'd have taken 68,

now I'm starting to wonder about 70.

Where will it end?

21

Do I want to know

what only the dead can?

That would be of interest,

but I think it can wait.

22 

Could I get fed up

with having to tell people every three months

that the scans show no change?

Perhaps, but not yet…

23 

I almost feel guilty

I keep meeting people

who suffer from cancer,

while I’m feeling good.

24  

I was driving  a car

but I couldn’t see anything

out of the windscreen.

That dream felt about right.

 

25

You only live once…

Twice if you count the period

after you’ve been diagnosed

with terminal cancer.

26  

I never thought I'd live to see

a second term of President Trump.

There's part of me

that wishes I had not.

27 

I’m feeling normal

which doesn’t feel normal in my condition,

but I like how I’m feeling

and how the paradox sounds.

28 

Perhaps I will have time enough at last

right now, though,

I seem to be making

a rather-too-frenetic job of dying.

29 

Having survived

four episodes of scanxiety,

is it time to hope

I might die ‘with’, instead of ‘of’?

30 

Unless you count this

I haven’t thought about death

for several days.

Does that mean I won’t die?

31  

Woody Allen

is famously against death.

I'm in favour,

but not until, say, 2058.

32

Now I have stomach ache

and a new form of hypochondria:

connecting every little thing

to cancer. 

33

This is a dead letter day

Being the first on which

a medical communication

uses the term ‘palliative’.

34 

When the Big C

meets that foreboding P

it doesn’t sound as good as, oddly enough,

I continue to feel.

35 

I plan to defy

the medical terminal-ology

that would have me doomed.

I just need to work out how…

36  

A world of pain

and hunger pangs and sleeplessness

tells you what a good world is:

full of ease and rest.

 

37 

If one in two gets cancer

that sounds like a lot,

but one in one get death:

maybe that’s the way to go.

38 

If there’s a moment and location

to suit all events,

how do I calculate

the best time and place for death?

39

Ahead of the scan result meeting

I imagine the death sentence:

‘I’m sorry to tell you

that there has been considerable growth.’ 

 

40

If I’ll soon be ‘quite dead at last’

as Beckett had it,

doesn’t that mean that I’m quite dead already,

it being no more than a matter of completing the process?

 

41

Is it time to start behaving worse

so Steph doesn’t miss me?

Or would that just

contaminate her memories?

42 

I do accept

that it’s simpler for me:

I won’t have to deal

with my absence.

 

43

‘Stuck in the middle with you’

comes to mind

when the scan results indicate

how many tumours are stuck in the middle of me.

44 

Tumours to the right of me

tumours to the left of me…

To where

were the six hundred headed?

 

45 

Steph doesn’t want me to die

Whereas I want to live -

which isn’t quite as similar

as it sounds.

46  

Is it true that if you have one cancer

you can't get another?

I'm keen on advantages

but no, that isn't one.

47 

Do you want to know full details

of my bowel movements?

What am I talking about?

I don’t want to know full details of my bowel movements.

48 

‘May the illness’

I am wished, ‘pass soon’.

But the only way that’s going to happen

is by passing soon myself.

49 

I won’t get down before I die

apart from getting these thoughts down -

on the grounds that, post-demise,

they won’t be very easy to record.

50 

If you’re going to die -

and I’ve heard the stats

are overwhelming -

you might as well make the most of it. 

51

Never mind my last words

I can predict those,

even if I’m wrong.

What will be the first words I can’t hear?

 

52

Perhaps

too weak to tell them they are wrong

I’ll even hear the question

‘has he gone?’

53 

Does an afterlife make any sense?

If not, I'll have none of it:

I wouldn’t be seen dead

existing outside logic.

54 

It seems this chemo

isn't a matter of life and death,

only of its timing –

although, I suppose, that is the matter.

55 

Madame de Defland was so scared of death

she wished that she’d never been born.

But isn’t post mortem

the exact same state?

 

56

I’m not petrified of death

but, I suppose,

am happy to be petrified afterwards

if I haven’t already been burned. 

57

Do you want proof

that our natural state

is not immortal?   

Dying is a skill that needs no practice.   

58  

It must be time

for a corny cancer love poem:

my wife has a PICC line

to my heart.

 

 

Notes:

‘It’s easy for me’ – Steph is my wonderfully supportive wife.

‘It's one thing to listen to time’ - written just prior to hearing the results from my scan on 11 Sept 2024 – this and the following two quatrains are probably down to ‘scanxiety’

‘I think I’ve had it’ – in fact, no further growth was revealed.

‘I may be twelve years younger than Trump’ - Donald Trump was re-elected US President on 5 November 2024

‘According to the surgeon’ - I had a follow-up appointment with Mr West on 10 December, and he was very positive about how my health was going)

‘It seems I’ve survived’ – those three spins being sepsis and my two operations

‘I never thought I'd live to see’ - Donald Trump was inaugurated as President on 20 Jan 2025

‘I’m feeling normal’ – as of 27 February 2025, a feeling that lasted a few months.

‘This is a dead letter day’ - as in a letter from Dr Rees to my GP, but copied to me on 10 June 2025)

‘Steph doesn’t want me to die’ - Those different emphases fed into our joint decision-making for when to start chemo to slow things down. Start too early, and you may miss out on a period when you could have been living well; start too late, and you might be too weak to tolerate the chemo that would have extended your life. It’s a tricky call.

This and the following poems stem from my diagnosis update in July 2025: four areas of tumour big enough to show up on the scan, three of them new, but increasing slowly. I have been having some symptoms – extra tiredness, stomach aches, back ache, bowel irregularities – but not yet bad enough to require palliative chemotherapy. Consequently, the decision to strat chemo followed on from the next scan, six weeks later.  

‘It seems this chemo’ / ‘It must be time’ – My palliative chemo started in October 2025, for which I was fitted with a PICC line – a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter is a long, thin, flexible tube inserted into a vein in the upper arm and advanced until its tip rests in a large vein just above the heart. It is used to deliver the drugs for long-term intravenous treatments.

 

References:

‘Madame de Defland was so scared of death’ - Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand (1696 -1780) was a French hostess and patron of the arts, famous for the literary quality of her letters, and her close friendships with such as Voltaire and Walpole.

‘Tumours to the right of me’ - ‘Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred’ according to Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, 1854

‘If I’ll soon be ‘quite dead at last’’ quotes the first line in Samuel Beckett's novel Malone Dies, 1951: ‘I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all’

‘You only live once’ - Ian Fleming: ‘You Only Live Twice’, 1964

A world of pain: effectively references Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 1943. Hunger pangs even when I’d just eaten were a curious symptom at this stage.

‘Stuck in the middle with you’ is the title of a song by Stealers Wheel, 1973

‘What I resist’ may be an echo of ‘I was trying so hard to be myself I was turning into somebody else’ from ‘Out of the Blue (Into the Fire)’ by The The, 1986

‘Perhaps I will have time enough at last’ - The Fall: ‘Time Enough at Last’ 2003

‘Is it easier to leave’ - this popular sentiment is, for example, a line in REM’s song ‘Leaving New York’, 2004

'Woody Allen' - his summary in 2010 of decades of deadpan negative views was: 'My relationship with death remains the same: I'm strongly against it.'