[THS] Christopher Hitchens: Topic of Cancer

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009

Topic of Cancer

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The
next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before
entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and
hard bargains of people who have cancer.
By Christopher Hitchens•
Photograph by John Huba
September 2010

JOINING THE RESISTANCE?
The author at home in Washington, D.C., July 18, 2010.

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared
me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were
actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed
to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly
hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating
either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required
forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my
New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great
dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to
wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup
equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and
firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that
marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of
emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post
had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my
immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was
throwing itself across the negatives.

The previous evening, I had been launching my latest book at a successful event in
New Haven. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y, on
the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. My very short-lived
campaign of denial took this form: I would not cancel these appearances or let down
my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both
gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an
extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before
each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly
clinging to their old domicile.

The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and
there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and
those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work.
As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost
no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The
country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and
difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as
well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example,
an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That’s
how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of
these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big
enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from
the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the
primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and
treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles
were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local
Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results
disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word
“metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien
had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its
original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my
esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He
was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly
become a finalist.

In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from
denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of
“acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose,
I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends
and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see
myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so
unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and
have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed
by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d
worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To
watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the
obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I
understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of
course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of
news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person
(to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a
million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to.
But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less
poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-
office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac?
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply:
Why not?

The bargaining stage, though. Maybe there’s a loophole here. The oncology bargain
is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to
submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even
surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going
to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability
to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly
appears to be a reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of
the most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People don’t
have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the
combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one
might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with
mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney
failure.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good
cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely
endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room
with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison
and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom
sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or
revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with
passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

It’s quite something, this chemo-poison. It has caused me to lose about 14 pounds,
though without making me feel any lighter. It has cleared up a vicious rash on my
shins that no doctor could ever name, let alone cure. (Some venom, to get rid of
those furious red dots without a struggle.) Let it please be this mean and ruthless
with the alien and its spreading dead-zone colonies. But as against that, the death-
dealing stuff and life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter. I was
fairly reconciled to the loss of my hair, which began to come out in the shower in the
first two weeks of treatment, and which I saved in a plastic bag so that it could help
fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the way that
my razorblade would suddenly go slipping pointlessly down my face, meeting no
stubble. Or for the way that my newly smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it
had undergone electrolysis, causing me to look a bit too much like somebody’s
maiden auntie. (The chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn’t yet
wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it’s a rather
patchy affair.) I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penélope Cruz were one of my nurses,
I wouldn’t even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the
immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.

These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist
bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice. My
heart and blood pressure and many other registers are now strong again: indeed, it
occurs to me that if I didn’t have such a stout constitution I might have led a much
healthier life thus far. Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some
who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of
brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both
of these I hope to write next time if—as my father invariably said—I am spared.

Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Send comments on all
Hitchens-related matters to hitchbitch at vf.com.