Cancer stalked me like an assassin for years

Excerpt from I Stood With Harry-A Memoir of a father, a son and cancer during a time of Covid.

Dear Dad:

I knew I wasn’t physically well during those last two years of your life. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but things weren’t right in my body. I ignored the warning signs, like I ignored the warning signs on our car when it flashed "check engine." I just put it down to exhaustion and stress.

I shrugged off any concerns that things weren't right with me, even from you when you asked, “What will happen to me if you die,” with “Mate, you and I are as indestructible as Yorkshire Stone.”

Besides, there wasn’t much time to tend to my wellbeing once your health began to fail. I had to put all my efforts into keeping you alive. So, It didn’t help that I had developed cataracts in both my eyes, which are critical for detecting blood in your stools. Being poor sighted, it’s much easier to dismiss shit in your blood as burgundy wine or the residuals of spaghetti Bolognaise.

So as my bowel habits changed subtly from month to month, I maintained a staunch defence of denial. My guts from your death onwards sent out warning alarms. But I couldn’t see anything, and no matter if I was in Toronto, London, Calais, Madrid, Greece, Alberta and in the Yorkshire dales. I’d shake away my doubts by telling myself; “it’s got to be the bloody wine, or I’ve got the piles that plagued Martin Luther.” I didn’t have the time or the financial resources to manage a cancer diagnosis. So, I kept ploughing on, until I couldn’t anymore.

My health all came crashing around my head, right after I finished campaigning for Labour candidates in marginal northern seats in the 2019 General Election. I’d gone back to Britain from Canada for the election because I deemed going the best way to preserve your legacy that I helped build while you were alive.

It was a horrible election campaign that consisted of me door knocking, writing essays for newspapers, giving some CLP speeches to volunteers, and detecting general disinterest in your name and books as well as zero interest in me trying to keep your mission to not make your past our future going. It became so farcical that my small speech, in Wakefield to Labour campaign workers about your life was bumped to allow Ross Kemp former B actor and B social documentary maker to talk to a crowd of fifteen that the causes of Brexit could be combatted with boxing clubs for young men in depressed northern communities.

 By the end of the election campaign, I was losing control of my bowels and fearful of soiling myself in the company of strangers. On Election night, I knew it wasn’t the results, the beer or curry served at a Unison event that drove me to the toilet with the urgency of a POW with dysentery in a World War Two, Japanese Camp. I couldn’t ignore it anymore; I was  extremely ill.

Upon my return to Canada, I had a scheduled colonoscopy conducted in a rural hospital 30 minutes from my apartment. I didn’t think anything was going to be found except haemorrhoids, so I took a cab there. After the procedure was done, I woke in tears because I had dreamed you were giving an NHS speech. I was groggy when the physician that performed my scope said he found something.

“Something,” I asked.

“Yes, it needs to be biopsied.”

“Is it cancer?”

“When I know, I will tell you.”

But I knew it was cancer because the doctor had also scheduled blood work, a Cat Scan and MRI during the Christmas break. You don’t do that, I surmised, unless you are almost 100% certain that the lesion growing in my rectum like a sprout on a potato was malignant.

I spent that holiday season drinking heavily and googling my symptoms to determine if I would survive until summer, need a colostomy bag, or dodge the cancer bullet.