The world you inhabit now is different to the one from just a few weeks ago. You miss playing football, planning ski trips, thinking of going climbing again. Even the mundane things, like walking to work, getting a coffee in the atrium, bumping into a pal and having a moan. Most of all, your world now is older. So many people around you, in the places you go are retired, or sick. You are in and out of hospital, the GPs, Macmillan, the pharmacist. As Withnail's Marwood put it - we are drifting into the arena of the unwell.
Waiting for X-Rays, you make polite chit-chat with people twice your age, 80 year olds, whose race is run. They have what you have, or something else, or another cancer, and therefore maybe, just maybe, a chance. From nowhere an unworthy thought wells up inside you, and you push it back down. Whatever the thought is, it's a waste of time. Everyone deserves their chance, and in the end you think - good luck to them. If there is anything cancer has taught you, it's that there is no point in bitterness or jealously - or to be more specific, there's no time for it.
Someone arrives and has their x-ray done before all of you, without queuing. One of your new friends says - "They're from the ward, they get priority. I don't know why they should". Perhaps he hasn't read the script. Then he says - "I shouldn't be sat here. Think of all the things I could be doing". And you say nothing, think - too fucking right.
Waiting for X-Rays, you make polite chit-chat with people twice your age, 80 year olds, whose race is run. They have what you have, or something else, or another cancer, and therefore maybe, just maybe, a chance. From nowhere an unworthy thought wells up inside you, and you push it back down. Whatever the thought is, it's a waste of time. Everyone deserves their chance, and in the end you think - good luck to them. If there is anything cancer has taught you, it's that there is no point in bitterness or jealously - or to be more specific, there's no time for it.
Someone arrives and has their x-ray done before all of you, without queuing. One of your new friends says - "They're from the ward, they get priority. I don't know why they should". Perhaps he hasn't read the script. Then he says - "I shouldn't be sat here. Think of all the things I could be doing". And you say nothing, think - too fucking right.
