In the ward of Damocles

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

Part II of Under the knife of Damocles

LAST SATURDAY I underwent surgery to remove a tumour from the end of my gullet…but even though you’re reading this column now, I wrote it before I went under the knife. So neither you nor I have any idea how the operation went.

Hopefully it wasn’t one of those procedures doctors describe with the words, “The operation was a 100-per-cent success. Regrettably, the patient didn’t survive.”

It’s an odd thing, to prepare yourself mentally for major surgery, and mine certainly qualifies as major. It’s going to involve four principal medical people – operatives? – and will take six-eight hours. If that’s not major surgery, it’ll do until major surgery comes along, as Cormac McCarthy’s characters say. It’s not going to be a walk in the Savannah grass.

And then I’ll be in the ICU for a couple of days (just in case they need the machines kept there) and in hospital for five-seven.

It’s easily the most challenging medical procedure I’ve ever had in my life. But, then, I never had cancer before. (Or, to appease Geoff F and other medical pedants, I’ve never had cancerous cells in my body before.)

As you read this, it’s all over (though, hopefully, I’m not) but, as I write it, it’s all yet to happen: six in the morning, next/last Saturday, I go/went into hospital. The operation starts between 8.30 and 9.30 am and ends six-eight hours after. I’m hoping to watch England v France at 3 pm but the surgeons probably won’t be working to that schedule. In any case, I’ll probably sleep through it. Chances are.

To hopefully catch any spread of the cancer undetected by the CT and PET scans, one surgeon will cut out a significant portion of my stomach. (I will be getting,
en passant, the stomach reduction an Arab Trini friend described as “the Syrian Diet.”)

When he’s done, another surgeon will turn me on my side, cut me open, notch a rib, deflate a lung for access and then slice the tumour out of my oesophagus. He’ll also cut out a goodly portion of gullet above the growth, again to improve the chances of removing any undetected spread.

And then I guess they’ll take a little break, maybe smoke a cigarette, talk about Argentina v Holland and thing, before each grabs one end and they stretch my reduced gullet down to my reduced stomach. Then, I guess, the chest guy will hold stomach and gullet together and the abdominal guy will sew and/or staple both. My stomach will go from being a bag that can stretch to accommodate a typical barbecue-leg-and-thigh-plus-three-starch Trini meal to a tube that can hold a phulourie.

This worries my wife, the yoga teacher, who can put her ankles behind her head, because she thinks I’ll be slimmer and, ergo, more attractive to that massive group of young women who fantasise about hooking up with a short, bald, married, middle-aged cancer patient.

I won’t ever be more attractive to women than she will be to men, but I still haven’t the heart to tell her that the post-surgery chemo is when most people are transformed from their boot camp to their Camp Auschwitz selves.

Throughout my illness – or, for Geoff, the illness of the cancerous cells I have in my body – I’ve been reminded to be positive. Friends who survived cancerous cells in their bodies told me to simply cut wholesale negative people out of my life (a kind of a surgical approach). And I have been entirely positive about the entire thing. Even when things went wrong, I remained focused and, largely speaking, corrected glitches.

My subconscious, as usual, did the bulk of the work. I had, eg, watched three full seasons of my favourite reality TV show before I burst out laughing when the significance of its name hit me: Survivor! Again, I had five times this week the peanut butter and pineapple jam sandwiches I haven’t eaten for years, perhaps decades; PB&J is the comfort food I could make myself in childhood.

Even at the back of my mind, I know the importance to my own survival of staying positive.

But is it negative to look at reality? There’s a line between being positive and being foolhardy and I don’t want to jumbie myself by crossing it.

Hopefully, I didn’t.

BC Pires is still alive and well. With luck. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at
www.BCPires.com

EIC's note: I can confirm that BC Pires is indeed alive, if not altogether well. JR