CANCER CONVERSATION

Warning: do not read further if you have a weak stomach.

Last Friday, I had lunch with R. Funny how the moment we sat down, we began talking about cancer. I had anticipated a bit of teary moments so that morning I put on rather heavy lines on my upper and lower eyelashes. You know, sometimes a simple thought such as “DO NOT RUIN YOUR EYELINER”, repeated thousands of time with your fists clenched, is the only way to keep from crying.

R’s dad had colon cancer, and he stubbornly refused having a surgery. With cancers, actually, being told that you need a surgery is rather good news, because it means your cancer is still local, it can still be removed fairly easily. Once it’s spread too far, the doctors usually would recommend that you go straight to chemotherapy.

“But why?” I gasped. “Why not have the surgery, follow it up with a chemo to kill off the left bad cells, and get it over with?”

R put down her spoon and asked me whether I knew what ‘surgery’ meant when it concerned colon cancer.

“Taking off centimetres of your colon?” I asked her timidly.
“Which means,” she continued, staring into my eyes, “that you’ll be given a new opening, on your stomach, for, you know, you cannot pass-motion the ‘normal’ way when your rectum is cut off….for a few months…until you have another surgery to enable you doing so..”
Her voice trailed, I looked down to my plate, everything seemed a blur.
“I am sorry,” she said, gesturing to our plates, her expression said she was so sorry that her mention about rectum and motion-passing might have ruined my appetite.
“No. I am sorry,” I told her. I am sorry that your dad has to be in this situation, was what I wanted to say, but I ended up choking.

“Plus,” R said, “Sometimes two surgeries aren’t enough. One patient is said to have endured four surgeries to be able to pass-motion the ‘normal’ way…”

We were silent a few moments. She then asked me whether my dad was doing okay.

He’d had the surgery and is undergoing the chemo, I told her.

My dad wears feminine napkins now, because he passes blood often all day, even passing the gas means spurting out some blood, she told me.

It broke my heart to hear that. How hurtful it is for a man to wear feminine napkins, I couldn’t begin to imagine. How scary it is to see that you expel blood and can’t do anything about it. How fragile life is. How full of hurt and fear.

“I’m becoming paranoid,” she told me. “I now suspect myself of having breast-cancer. And bird flu and high cholesterol and diabetes…”

“And a neurosis,” I finished her off. “How true, R. Since my dad was diagnosed with the cancer I too was paranoid. I almost went to my dentist and demanded him to remove all of my amalgam fillings, because I was so certain that I’d get a cancer and..”

Something in her face told me I should stop right there. And of course, I picked up her clue (We’ve been friends for 13 years! I read her face. She reads mine.) and started talking about Mayangsari and Bambang.

“If anything,” I told her at the end of the lunch hour, “it’s a good time to start eating right, taking care of ourselves better. We’re only in our thirties; I do hope there’s still time for us – “

We stood up and left the table.

It was raining outside, and as we hugged and promised to have another lunch together soon, I jokingly asked her whether being in the rain could help me grow taller.

“You want to be taller,” she kissed me, “I want to be healthy.”
With that, I sprinted back to my office building, dripping wet.

Wouldn’t you know it? Once I was safe under the building’s roof, it stopped raining. So clear the sky became, that the running and skidding in high-heels that seemed a matter of life and death in one second seemed so stupid the next second.

What else could I say? All that running you do only goes back to the fact that life is indeed fragile.