I was having this conversation on Saturday, with a stranger who pointed out that having cancer at 28 is pretty fucking unlucky.
Cancer is massive. It dictates what you’re physically capable of each day, and takes up your time with hospital visits and health-related admin. It insinuates its way into every thought, and leaves temporary and indelible marks on your body. It is brutally clarifying, like being yanked out of ice water. It divides your life into a before and after. “I’m lucky” is an attempt to make my cancer smaller, to see round it, beyond it into a future. “I’m lucky” is actually, “I’m not going to die, I’m not going to die, I’m not going to die.”
It’s also a way to cauterise sympathy from loved ones and strangers alike. On a bad day kindness leaves me raw. “Lucky” moves the conversation on, away from fear and biology. It’s also a favour to the people I’m talking to. What’s the right reaction to being told somebody has cancer? I still don’t know that I would say the right thing to a friend. This narrative of luckiness allows for an exhaled, “That’s good to hear.”
But I didn’t feel lucky when I passed out from pain during a bone marrow biopsy. Or when I had a ten-day migraine after a lumbar puncture, which could only be relieved by lying flat. Or when I was vomiting into a washing-up bowl in the back of a cab on the way to A&E. I don’t feel lucky when I’m alone at home for 12 hours a day, receiving messages from friends but fixated on the fact that some people have disappeared during the worst time of my life. I’m furious that I got cancer, CANCER, just as I was starting to feel recovered from a frightening depressive episode that lasted for over 6 months.
What I actually feel is a deep sense of unfairness which sits uneasily alongside a new appreciation of just how random life is. Nobody knows what causes Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. One day I was well, the next my body made some sort of mistake which made everything terrible. And although it looks very much like I will be cured in the next few months, there’s a real risk of relapse and of a second cancer which will haunt me for the rest of my life. I’ve always thought of myself as an unlucky person, the sort who would get cancer. Maybe, by repeating “I’m lucky”, I’m tipping the scales back in my favour. But when I tell you how lucky I feel, you should probably take it with a pinch of salt.
