What's cancer really like?

You are nauseated, coughing, your skin peeling, your mouth ineffably foul and goopy. You can't eat, can scarcely swallow. You hallucinate, see strange gremlin-like figures lurking around your hospital bed.

It's the drugs at work, doing their damnedest, the first with one of those mad-scientist names: VP-16. This isn't just chemo but high-dose chemo: poisons that will kill you without the return of your own stem cells"“ extracted earlier, brought back in a beer cooler, your saving grace.

Even eight years later"“ and nearly 40 since my first encounter with cancer"“ I still get lightheaded just writing about it. The grisly details come from a diary I kept during my last round of treatment, which I'd compare to a war diary if words like "war" and "battle" didn't make me cringe when applied to cancer.

Sure, it's a battle. But all cancers aren't created equal, and it's often not a fair fight. It feels so arbitrary, who lives and who dies. But we all do it, this romancing of cancer: simplifying, humanizing, finding nobility in a grim business.

A national hero, frozen in time

I'm originally from Philadelphia but now live in Toronto, where Canada's icon of courage and indomitability in the face of cancer is a curly-haired kid named Terry Fox. It was Terry's outlandish idea, after losing a leg to osteosarcoma, to hop-step across the second largest country on Earth"“ a 26-mile marathon every day"“ to raise funds for cancer research. That he didn't finish the journey— going 3,339 miles before the disease spread to his lungs— in no way diminishes his heroism. He died 30 years ago at age 22.

And so Terry remains, forever frozen in time, in statues and in the minds of the multitudes who run in his name every year, raising more than $500 million thus far.

Terry Fox is a symbol and an altogether worthy one. But he was also an angry young man, trying to cope, to help others. We do him a disservice, as we do all cancer patients, if we see the fight but not the rage, the fear, the full storm of emotions that strikes mortals facing mortality.

Here's the truth: We fight because, really, what other choice do we have?

Take my doctor, please

I know about rage. The doctor who first diagnosed me, those four decades ago, was a portentous moron who'd watched too much "Marcus Welby" and read too few medical journals, who took one look at my X-rays and unleashed the voice of doom.

I had "lymph nodes the size of baseballs," he told me. I might have two years to live, "maybe five or six if you're lucky." I should start "living life quickly," he said, favoring me with a fatherly gaze that made me want to slug him. I was 18 years old.

That encounter, in a small hospital in the American Midwest, is one of my essential stories, a kind of cancer creation myth"“ recalled, repeated, burnished, a moment by which to gauge time. (Meaning I'm as guilty as anyone of romancing cancer.)

I was treated for Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph system, by doctors back East who actually had a clue. Undergoing surgery, radiation, chemo, losing weight, hair, wind, barfing my guts out into an old pot"“ it was miserable and I raged throughout, but by the end I was convinced, with the certitude of a teenager, that the disease was gone for good.

The dreaded phone call

But cancer, apparently, isn't for gloating. Fast-forward a baffling 29 years. By then I'd acquired a career, a wife and a son and moved to Toronto. A needle biopsy showed the cancer had returned. More chemo, a year disease-free, then a call at work: It was back again"“ a third time"“ like the creature in a fourth-rate horror flick.

"I'm so sorry," my doctor said.

A "salvage case" "“ that's what doctors call it, as if I were an old junker they'd try to get running again. The prescribed treatment sounded apocalyptic, and I briefly considered declining and leaving things to fate. Briefly.

"Do you have people out there actually walking around?" I asked my doctor. "Who've been through this and come out the other side?"

Yes, he said.

OK, I said.

My wife in a mask

Which is how, after some preliminary chemo and the stem-cell extraction, I ended up in that Toronto hospital bed. The treatment, as a charming male nurse warned me, "burns you from appetite to asshole." He didn't lie.

As if that experience weren't creepy enough, Toronto was in the grip of an epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome"“ SARS"“ so only one visitor was allowed each patient. My wife wore a mask, as did all the doctors and nurses. I recall saying to her, "If this is how I'm going to feel, what life will be like, I'd rather check out now."

We all know cancer stories: if not our own than those of relatives, friends, people we read about, like Terry Fox. Some of the endings are hopeful and heartwarming, but others"“ the ones that begin "after a long battle with . . .""“ are impossibly sad. And, often, seemingly random.

Doing better, it seemed

I made a friend during my last treatment"“ my cellmate, I joked. We were on the same schedule but he always seemed to be doing slightly better: more hair, more energy, buzzing around the hospital halls while I lay half-comatose in bed.

We kept in touch afterward, compared notes. The last time we talked he said his disease had returned. When I called a few weeks later, his wife said he'd passed away.

I have no idea why I'm still here and he's not.♦


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