Turning 30...

A funny thing happens when you turn 30. Aside from suddenly being ineligible to be a new writer (according to many organisations whose business it is to find and develop new writers) you also start to deal with things you never even had to think about in your 20’s.
My 20’s passed by in a blur of DJ’s, destinations and daydreams and I wouldn’t change a second of it but in your 30’s you find you have to start making decisions, hard ones and sometimes irreversible ones and you can’t help but long for the carefree life you'd got used to living. Saying goodbye to your 20’s is hard but it's because, deep down, you know that from this point on things will only get harder.
You suddenly have to make choices about the kind of person you want to be and who you will spend your life with. About whether you get married, have children, change career, move to another city, buy a home etc etc etc In your 20’s you think these decisions will be made in beautiful moments of clarity, perhaps mid conversation with your closest friend or a moment alone watching a sunset over a beautiful vista.
As far as I can tell they’re not. You don’t get that movie-montage moment where you realise who you love and run to the airport to tell them or walk off into the distance to realise your dream. What you get is crap flying at you from all angles and the decisions you make are usually just ways to make sure the crap doesn’t completely drown you and result in you winding up on some internet list of humiliating ways to die. Hannah Rodger – deceased due to accidentally drowning in the crap that she didn’t want to deal with.

I recently coined a phrase for all this (sometimes I make up weird phrases for things so that they seem less scary) and that phrase is ‘crap attack’. It’s perhaps not the most mature use of the English language but it is one of the most honest. I was barely 6 months into my 30’s when my first crap attack started and this is the story of how it went...

Friday 11th March 2011 is, for many reasons, a date I will never forget. I had two things to do that day. I had to go for a routine medical test at the hospital which I was told would take about an hour or so and then I had to drop a script in at Soho Theatre. It looked like a relatively easy day ahead.
At the hospital they looked at my symptoms and my family history and they suggested I should have a more thorough test than the one I was scheduled to have. The registrar advised me that although I hadn’t had the 24 hours preparation or the sedation for this other test I should go ahead with it. I was in agreement. I mean, if you are going to get naked and have an embarrassing test done then you might as well go the whole hog. The last thing I wanted to do was to have to come back to the hospital...oh the irony.

So we went ahead and had the more thorough test (which was a colonoscopy). Though I’d really rather not, I feel I should explain what it was like. I was awake, lying on my side, looking at a TV screen which showed the images the fibre optic camera was seeing as it travelled along my colon. In the first part of it they found some abnormal tissue growths (about 8 polyps) and removed them. I wasn’t exactly happy to see them there but I was relieved. It made sense of the symptoms I had been having and they were easy to remove. Well, I say easy but I watched this doctor in awe. He would move the camera near the growth, open an electric loop, capture it then burn it off and extract it. Imagine the hardest computer game you’ve ever played, then imagine it taking place inside someone’s body, then imagine them watching you as you do it.
If we had been doing the test I was scheduled to have we would have stopped there and we all might have thought we’d got what we came for. But he kept going. At this point they kept telling me to pass wind, that it was natural due to the procedure and probably the only time anyone would be happy for me to lie there and repeatedly fart. I was still laughing at this when the doctor asked his colleague to go get a surgeon. Even though they were running over by half an hour and the visibility was getting poorer the further they went, they had found something else and needed the senior surgeon to take a look.
He came in and told me that I had a nasty tumour and would need surgery to remove it. I nodded at him desperately trying to pay attention to everything he was saying but actually wondering how on earth I could have a tumour.
They kept asking if I was in pain and although it wasn’t exactly comfortable it wasn’t painful and I somehow managed to joke that if they thought this was painful they’d obviously never had a bikini wax. Afterwards they took me straight up to get a CT scan. If it was cancerous they wanted to see if it had spread to other parts of my body. If. Such a small word, such a big meaning. The technician at the scan came out and told me I had to drink a jug of a sweet, pink contrast drink and that I could take all the time I needed to drink it. I sat there and made the 1st decision – not to let the crap overwhelm me. I pretended it was my mates laying down a drinking challenge and I drank it as quickly as I could. What else is a misspent northern youth learning how to down pints useful for if not things like this?
The scan itself was over rather quickly and easily and they said I could go home. I walked out the hospital across Westminster Bridge and even though I was stood in a massive crowd of people I felt incredibly alone. Sure there were people I could call - and my family and friends have been nothing short of amazing throughout all of this - but I wanted someone to make it all better and the truth is no one could.
So I made my 2nd decision. Having spent years as a Production Manager I was trained to think of the worst case scenarios for a shoot and come up with ways to cope if they happen. I decided that this was not going to be like that, that it was all still to play for and that I just wouldn’t worry till I had something to worry about. I walked over to Soho Theatre and handed my script in, then I went home, had a late lunch, told my family the news and got ready to go see a friend of mine in a play.

As I was getting ready to go to the theatre I got a phone call telling me I had been accepted on to the Old Vic New Voices TS Eliot US UK Exchange. I was extremely delighted but I’m sure I didn’t sound it to the lovely lady giving me the good news. I wanted to sound excited that I would be one of 7 writers selected to have a brand new short play on at a theatre in New York but I had no idea if I would even be well enough to go. Though I didn’t say anything to them at the time I was worried that I might end up letting them down and was taking the spot from someone perhaps more deserving of it simply because they were healthy. But I also felt like I had earned it and I experienced a very calm determination to take part in it, no matter what. In the morning I discovered the biggest battle I would ever face and in the afternoon the Old Vic New Voices gave me a reason to fight it.

A couple of weeks later I saw my surgeon to assess my condition and schedule the operation. At this point the biopsies and CT from that day had not shown any cancer but he told me in no uncertain terms that we couldn’t be sure that I didn’t have cancer and would not need chemo until they completely cut it out of me so they wanted to do it as soon as possible. He also told me a more conservative surgeon might also perform a colostomy so all in all I felt like I was in good hands. I asked him if we could at least schedule the surgery around my trip to New York. Luckily for me he only did this surgery on Mondays and due to Easter and the bank holiday weekend the first Monday after my trip to New York was also his first available slot. There was a bizarre divinity to the whole thing. Oh, how the universe likes to give with one hand but take away with two.

So I went to New York and I had an amazing, mind-blowing, life-altering time. Then the following week I went in to hospital and had about 15 inches of my colon removed with a laproscopic right hemicolectomy and appendectomy. The night before I went into hospital I joked that I would soon be as good as qualified to script my very own episode of Holby City or Greys Anatomy and I was rather blasé about the whole thing. I kept telling concerned friends that I would be fine, I was just going to spend a few days doped up on Morphine and then I’d have a few weeks of watching movies to recover. Oh, how I was wrong.

It was painful. It was hard. It was frustrating not to be able to do anything. It was humiliating to have to ask a nurse to help put your slippers on. It was horrific just going to the bathroom. Overall it was just terribly humbling.
In the first few hours after the operation the nurses would ask me to take a deep breath and assess how much pain I was in. They did it to make sure I was getting the right amount of pain relief. They would also remind me to do this when the pain was too much. Like the first time I got out of bed they said I had to keep breathing through it. I made my 3rd decision to never forget this and I still do it now. It’s a great way to be aware of what’s going on but not let it take over. To breathe in, be aware of the pain but to then breathe out and carry on regardless.

The funny thing about recovering from this type of operation is that there is very little movement you can achieve without moving the middle of your body. That’s why they call it the core. So to sit up and take a drink, to reach for something, to change position, to walk, laugh, cough, sneeze or cry it all involves using your core. Coughing was the worst. You spend so much time lying down that you have to cough to clear your chest but at one point it hurt so much to cough that I was in tears. And of course I couldn't give in to the tears because it hurt just as much to cry. So my 4th decision was that every time I wanted to move – no matter how little the movement was – I had to go for it. I realised that if you think about how much it might hurt you’ll spend ages trying to find a way to do it so that it doesn’t hurt and you just end up in a dull but more destructive kind of pain. So I went for it. Sat up, got up, coughed, went to the toilet, showered and went for a walk. Whatever they said I needed to be able to do before I could go home I did it, despite the pain. And the more I did it the more the pain started to go away. The metaphor of finding a way to live your life whilst the people around you save your life was not wasted on me.

After 4 days I was allowed to go home to recover but after a week at home I got an infection in my wound. Though it might sound strange this was the worst part of the whole thing. It was like going back to square one, like falling down the biggest snake on the board in snakes and ladders. I could barely move again, I was on 2 different types of antibiotics as well as 5 different types of painkillers and I was miserable. For the first time in a long time I felt like my body had betrayed me. I didn’t mind that it had grown a tumour without telling me and had done so about 30 years too early. I didn’t mind I had to go through a painful operation to get rid of it. But I badly wanted it to heal and it wouldn’t, at least not as quickly as I wanted it to. So my 5th and final decision of all of this was something I wish I had decided years ago. I decided that I would stop focusing on the outcome and instead look at the progress. I stopped asking myself if I was fully healed but if I was more healed than yesterday and consequently things got better every day. Instead of trying to be somewhere I couldn’t be I was perfectly happy about where I was instead. Eventually the infection went away and with it went the pointlessness of the anger and frustration that it had brought.

A few days ago I got my full test results. I don’t have cancer. I have a syndrome that creates these polyps and if left untouched can turn into cancer so I will be monitored by specialists and by geneticists for the rest of my life to make sure my body and my family stay healthy and risk free.
I had waited quite a while to hear this outcome and obviously I was really pleased with the results. But it’s a strange feeling. It’s like getting a gift that as soon as you get you want to give to other people too. I want to give the same gift to my family who are also at risk from this syndrome. I want to give it to the girl opposite me on the ward who had a similar operation as me but, even as I was leaving the hospital, had still not been able to get up out of bed due to the pain. I want to give it to the woman next to me on the recovery unit who was told that despite coming through a painful operation to remove a blockage in her bowels would still die in a few months because her cancer was so advanced. I am totally and utterly relieved that this painful episode of my life is almost behind me. But I am acutely aware that for many others it has only just begun.

In the last 3 months I have made 5 decisions that have helped keep this crap attack at bay. The 1st was to not let it overwhelm me. The 2nd was not to worry until I had something to worry about. The 3rd was to remember to breathe. The 4th was to commit wholeheartedly to whatever I was doing and the 5th was to focus on the progress, not just the outcome. They weren’t made in moments of clarity during beautiful sunsets (although the picture above, taken from my hospital bed, was not exactly a terrible vista) they were usually made in moments of sheer panic and if they were hard to make, they were even harder to stick to. But they got me through and they stopped me from drowning in the crap...in this case both metaphorically and literally.

So why am I writing all this embarrassing detail on a publicly visible blog? Because cancer is a silent, deadly disease, it invades and attacks, it is stealthy and scary and perhaps if we all talk about it a bit more, about our losses, our battles and our near-misses then we might just beat it at its own game.
Since this happened to me lots of friends and family have told me about similar experiences, symptoms, worries and I keep saying let’s not wait till things get like this for us to share. Let’s not hide, let’s not be embarrassed and maybe we can all be more aware of what’s going on in our own bodies and with each other.
I was lucky, really lucky with early detection and prevention. I was lucky because I recognised that the symptoms (often diagnosed as IBS) might be serious, I asked my GP for a referral, not once but twice, and I was treated by some of the best doctors and nurses in the country. Whilst I wouldn’t wish any of what I’ve been through on my worst enemy I hope that we all might be so lucky because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
And if I start to go there in my head then I go back to those 5 decisions to help keep that crap attack at bay too.
The truth is I still have a lot of those hard, grown-up, life-defining decisions to make but you know what? I’m not as scared of them now as I used to be.
In a way nothing has changed yet everything has changed.
Maybe that’s what your 30’s are about. Yes, things get harder to deal with, but once you deal with them, really deal with them that is, then they get a hell of a lot easier to live with after that...