My Blog
Back from the Dead
I was lying in my hospital bed, decorated with tubes that were variously draining, feeding and medicating me. I was dozing, although it was mid-morning, when a light touch on my leg awakened me. I saw my doctor, a consultant haematologist sympathetically smiling at me. It was the sort of smile you might give to a sick pet, or an ageing grandparent. I could guess what was coming.
“You know you’re dying, Chris, don’t you?”
There was certainly reason for the doctor’s pessimism. I had lost 50 kilos over the past two years and was then undergoing my second course of chemotherapy. As I have mentioned before, chemotherapy, though designed to relieve cancer sufferers, can actually make them wish they were dead. I had lost my hair twice and had become bed-ridden, unable to walk, only barely able to move. And yet somehow I knew I was going to survive. This was not due to any positive mental attitude, but caused by a certainty that I had work to do. But what?
But one day, shortly after my doctor had delivered her depressing prognosis, they were gone. Gone from my kidneys, my liver, my bones and all the other bodily locations the progeny of that one rogue cell had settled.
But spared for what? And why? For the past six months while I slowly recover I have been waiting for the call from Loki or some other messenger calling me to service. It is a disturbing belief to have, let me assure you, that you have some purpose. It’s perfectly okay in tales like The Lord of the Rings, quite acceptable, in fact, in all fairy tales and most fantasy fiction. But it’s an odd belief for a grown man to suddenly acquire. It leads to questions such as how will this summons come? Will my partner tell me one day that, “Someone called Loki called. He has a message for you.” Or should I be particularly alert for a modern day Paul Revere to gallop up, or even Nancy Wake, the famous White Mouse of WW2, to leave a note.
Or perhaps this belief resides only in my imagination, a rationalisation for what caused this spontaneous remission. I’ll let you know.