It’s the math that scares me

I’m angry. Ticked off and just plain upset. Two or three times each month, LOML and I visit a friend and his wife (she’s a friend too, by the way). The roundtrip takes longer than the actual visit. But the drive isn’t the issue. We’ve known this man and his wife for 40 years. We’ve shared many meals, coffees, beers, and walks home from parties where one of us got to be the designated walker. Our youngest son and their only son were born during the same summer break. We’ve teased each other and practical-joked like fiends. We’ve celebrated birthdays, graduations, holidays and life, together. And, if you really knew me and LOML and really knew them, you’d probably wonder how a friendship could have grown amongst us, since we don’t have very much in common.

They love basketball—he played a good game and coached many a team. They love fishing and off-roading on their 4 X 4s. We are into cycling, canoeing, running and the arts. Our best guess is it’s the very lack of common ground that has cemented the bond of noisy, quirky friendship. We all beg to differ every time we get together. It’s a good friendship. It’s seen us through lots of good and bad, sickness and health, births and deaths.

But it’s the sickness and the death that really makes me angry and greedy and fearful. When we drive home from a visit, LOML and I hardly speak a word, but we both know we’re wondering if it’s the last time we’ll see him. He has cancer and it isn’t the made-fortelevision- movie kind of cancer. You know the kind I’m talking about. The movie kind with birds chirping, the fiery sunsets and starry, starry skies. The movie kind of cancer is all about the patient looking deceptively healthy, but the music gives it all away.

He has the kind of cancer that has invaded his brain and robbed him of his peripheral vision. At first, the worst part seemed to be that he was not able to drive with his wife in his beloved truck or be able to commandeer his off-road vehicles into the back-of-beyond, just for the hell of it. And then, the worst part began, the treatments and surgeries that seemed to be worse than the disease. And the long, long hospital stays. He has the kind of cancer that makes him forget what we were just talking about and he hates being lost in a conversation; in fact, he always loved to steer the conversation directly into a friendly begging-to-differ.

What’s not to like about a guy who likes to argue about everything from foreign cars to music and from politics to child rearing? His type of cancer won’t let him be in control of the direction the conversation takes these days, and the arguments are pathetic, if you know what I mean. His peripheral arguments are all screwed up.

He has the kind of cancer that makes his hands shake. This is a guy who could pound a nail into a stubborn floor board with three whacks and could build a home from a dream and a rough sketch on some graph paper. This is a guy who tried to fix my foreign car with a pipe wrench and a screwdriver and laughingly told me, if I’d bought North American, the car would have been more receptive to his mechanical prowess.

He is a crazy-arsed artist, whose medium was leather. When he gave up leather work, he focused on home building, Eventually cancer made it impossible for him to work his construction magic and he began giving away all of his tools. He has the kind of cancer that has made him physically and mentally weak. These days he’s confined to a hospital bed in the home he and his wife bought and rebuilt from the foundation up. He has the kind of cancer that requires steroids, chemotherapy, radiation and makes him a bit cranky when he doesn’t mean to be.

He doesn’t look like an actor in a made-fortelevision movie. The “cancer” actors always wear natty scarves or shave their heads to make you think bald is beautiful. The “cancer” actors never have a puffy faces, bloated abdomens or swollen feet. Cancer actors never slur their words and spill an ounce of their beloved coffee on their bib. Jeez, he wears a bib when he’s trying to eat and now doesn’t say “no” to assistance with a meal.

Cancer makes me angry. Cancer affects everyone. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, two in five Canadians will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime. Of the four friends, one has cancer. The funny thing is, for years he talked about how he thought his knees, from years of basketball, would put him on the sidelines. Simply put, I don’t like the mathematics of cancer.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca