![]() ![]() It didn't help that we seemed to be at the centre of a cancer cluster: one friend was dying of leukaemia in Hammersmith hospital, another was in the process of being diagnosed, a third had had half his throat and jaw chopped out. I could just about manage the basics: the feeding and dressing of our two younger children, and the forcing upon her of increasingly unwanted cups of tea. I felt distracted and doomy I was a dilatory carer – and at times seemingly wilfully inept. If it was 25 years ago, or I was somewhere else in the world, I'd've just received a death sentence." I was less sanguine – metaphorically speaking. As we walked down the grotty staircase of Guy's Hospital Tower from the consultation where she'd been informed of how radical her surgery would need to be, she turned to me and said: "I'm so lucky. My wife bore her illness in a manner that demanded nothing but admiration. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2010, had a mastectomy in August, followed by a gruelling autumn then winter of chemotherapy and a silent spring of radiation. And during the preceding year it had been nipping at my 47-year-old wife, trying to drag her down the sable strand and into the salt, chill waters that lap against life. It scuttled away my father and mother, the latter at 65, an age she would've described herself – also facetiously – as "getting younger". I was on the lookout for the crab – but then I always am. ![]() This is not, I stress, because I'm especially neglectful of my health – at times I can verge on hypochondria – but rather because they didn't strike me as obviously cancerous. I had no intention of doing anything about my pink-and-yellow striped hands. When I took my gorged hands out of my jeans pockets the tight denim hems left equally vivid bands smeared across their backs – these, I facetiously observed, were the colour of those yellow Marigold washing-up gloves. I didn't pay it much attention – mostly because I didn't realise it was happening, the only perceptible symptoms being a certain livid tinge to my face and to my hands, which, I joked to family and friends, had started to resemble those pink Marigold washing-up gloves. ![]() S ome time over the winter of 2010-11 I began to be gorged with blood – or, rather, my blood itself began to be gorged with red blood cells, with haemoglobin. ![]()
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