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It was just perfect…
… mid morning, when the sun shone through the high window and spilled into the room.
A big room, panelled in cedar wood, floor to ceiling. Comfortable chairs and sofas. Six old geezers bathed in light, like a Botticelli painting…
… but far from angels.
We were at Maggie’s place. A cancer charity at Bart’s in London.
Their Centre is a new-build of concrete and glass. Catch it on the right day, and at the right time… with high ceilings… it’s like a cathedral.
Volunteers and professionals, are there, who help and council cancer patients… they're the real angels.
It was the Thursday ‘mens group’.
All of us with our lives rudely interrupted by prostate cancer. All except one of us with ‘the bleeding thing’, creeping slowly around our bodies.
We were an odd brigade. A road sweeper, and engineer, a manager or two, a warehouseman and … me.
The road-sweeper, we’ll call him Marlin, a West Indian, thin as the brush he sweeps the streets with.
Dreadlocks, with beads that jangle as he throws his head back in laughter.
Several times he’s tried to get back to work, only to be defeated by the blanket of fatigue that comes out of nowhere, and suffocates the day.
Sometimes he can’t feel his legs but still he insists, if he can, to push the cart around his beat.
A new member of the group, let’s call him Dave, is white, rotund, startled and just starting out on his journey with his lodger.
He’s the odd one out.
The others look at each other. How much should we tell him about what's likely to be in store for him?
The warehouseman, Ali, is struggling; cancer's moved into his liver. Obviously making him very ill. He looks dreadful, gaunt, hollowed out.
He summons the energy to curse his luck and the performance of the Hammers at the weekend.
His florid cursing makes us all laugh…
… including the blonde young woman, who looks like a model from the pages of John Lewis. Fashionable, tasteful, educated… we’ll call her Helen. She's our host. A former NHS worker, her speciality radiography and cancer.
Now, works at Maggie’s. She’s knowledgeable and informed and doesn’t bat an eyelid when the geezers get out of hand. She laughs with us. She knows the the placebo-power of a good laugh.
She helps us with diet, lifestyle and to recover the knack we had as babes-in-arms... to sleep.
She encourages us to walk, get out, do things. She is also there for the quiet moments of reassurance and help with untangling relationships and family life.
One of the group had seen me on the telly, talking about the NHS. That was enough to inspire a united view, we all have a lot to be thankful for.
We shared the tales of the appointment letters arriving a week after our appointments, the dislocation between the GP and the hospital.
How amazing the NHS App is.
The invaluable and unheralded help of the pharmacist and their preloaded dosette-boxes… a massive help if you’re taking 18 pills a day.
We admired the skills and care and attention we had all experienced. The moments of kindness.
Quietly, we’ll call him Bekele, came out of his shell to join in. It emerged, he wasn’t and old geezer, He was only 28. Metastatic cancer has somehow ripped through his fragile frame. He said he thought ‘chemo would kill him’.
He was a bag-of-bones. Lost his hair, and his big glasses somehow magnified his doleful, black eyes that that gave him a knowing look, beyond his years.
Actually, he was full of optimism, he told us about his new treatment and the future with his wife and daughter and how well she was doing at school.
Black, white, old, young… we all shared one thing. The misstep that has got us all on the same journey.
All of us could have been tested for prostate cancer. We all had good reason. None of us were. All of us had our cancers discovered by accident.
For all of us, it came too late.
None of us should have been at Maggie’s but...
... on that sunny morning, with a cuppa-builders, sharing life, love and laughter...
... we were all very pleased to be there.
-oOo-
This eLetter is based on true stories but the names and circumstances have been changed to protect the privacy of the brave men who have been through hell and back because they were never tested for prostate cancer early enough. Today marks the start of Movemeber, the mens' health charity. More here
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