My Cancer surgery was cancelled during Covid and it almost broke me.

Excerpt from "I Stood With Harry." Life with Harry Leslie Smith, The world's oldest rebel.

Our healthcare system is in a state of collapse. It has been overwhelmed by Covid because of the government’s intent to keep profits rolling in for the 1% at the expense of our health and mental well being. Cancer care, cardiac care and all sectors of healthcare have been delayed because of the pandemic. People are dying prematurely or getting cancer diagnoses too late for them to live a good standard of life after their treatments. I feel for everyone that has dealt with a cancelled procedure. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, my cancer surgery was also cancelled. In my book, I Stood With Harry, I wrote about this experience. Below is an excerpt from that chapter because I want everyone who isn't facing a healthcare crisis to read this and understand how devastating a cancelled operation is for the patient. Take care, John

“During my radiation treatment, death was so close to me I could almost smell its rude breath. It brushed past me like a man at a crowded pub, squeezes impatiently through patrons standing around a bar rail to return to his seat. Death was in me, and everyone who waited for treatment in the hallways at that Odette Cancer Centre.

Being treated for cancer made me acutely aware that I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live and finish what I started with you during Harry’s Last Stand. I wanted hope and to enjoy the morning sun, for as long as possible. I would accept cutting, amputation, burning, baking, or being sickened by chemotherapy to barter some more life out of my diseased body.

I did not want to be divorced from my flesh, because the hereafter is either the sleep of nothingness or the ennui of eternity separated from your body, floating in the ether like an amoeba rides the tides of an ocean.

On the final day of my radiation treatment, as I waited for my radiologist to discharge me, I looked at the faces sitting near me. I wondered who of us would be alive in the next month or year? Many of these people, maybe even me, could soon have their voices, memories, essence erased by cancer, like an angry sea overcomes and drowns a sailor swept from the deck of his ship.

My train ride home had a different vibe from when I arrived at the beginning of the week. My business class car was deserted, and a pallid sun cast a sickly light against the window beside my seat.  Food and drink service was suspended, and train attendants nervously and repeatedly cleaned the baggage compartments. 

My train clattered past towns and cities, made stark by covid because ordinary life was absent.  I saw no pedestrians on walkways, no cars driving along streets because everyone was bunkered inside their domiciles sheltering from the pandemic.

Each time I inhaled the train’s recycled air, I wondered if stray particles from the virus had made contact with me and were now in the process of overwhelming my immune system. Considering I had heart disease and cancer, the virus to me was what a wounded antelope is to a lion, easy prey.

The days before I was scheduled to be cut open dwindled quickly, like a candle that has burnt well past a dinner party. I couldn’t shake from my mind that a malfunctioning section of my body was going to be amputated soon, from my person.

When I took a shower and washed my abdomen, I stared at the tattoo marks inked like a bullseye on a dartboard by the radiology department. In a few days, I said they shall stick a scalpel into my skin by the tattoo used as a target to aim beams of radiation into my gut. They will slice through my rectum like it was haggis. They will bin the cancer and the surrounding margins, drag the colon down, and then staple it to the shortened cancer-free part. My stomach will be sewn together as if were a stuffed turkey stitched up by a cook.

There was so much chaos and anxiety on the news, in the voices of my friends and in my heart that I stopped talking to people. I faffed away my time drinking and listening to music.

I wanted to pretend that this was not happening to me. And what made it worse was that Covid had complicated everything. I was afraid to shop for the things I needed before, during, and after my operation, because I was concerned that being in a shop would guarantee me getting the virus. I knew if I got covid before my operation, I’d die or be too sick for my operation, making me as good as dead.

And then to add to my anxiety and chaos swirling around my head, my surgery was cancelled forty-eight hours before my scheduled operation. My surgeon’s secretary informed me the hospital had cancelled all “elective surgeries,” because they were concerned that people newly infected by COVID 19 would overwhelm their ICU like in Italy, Spain, and Britain. I knew I was fucked because without surgery in a timely fashion, the cancer inside of me would grow, making it more difficult to eradicate the malignancy from my body.

My life seemed to have little worth to anyone but me. I had no idea how long I’d have to wait for a new date for my surgery, or whether in the meantime, I’d get covid and be dead or become debilitated from that. All I understood was that each day my surgery was delayed was another day for malignant cells to multiply and grow within me. If it hadn’t already happened, it would be soon, but my carcinoma would breach the outer wall of my rectum, like the Knights Templar at the walls of Saladin’s castle in Jerusalem. Without an operation, the cancer would travel through the conduit of my lymph nodes to settle on my vital organs as easily as milkweed blows on the wind and lands in your hair.

In desperation, I spent that afternoon and evening drinking wine, and drunk tweeting my fury and outrage at having my cancer operation cancelled. By bedtime, I was spent, and I began trying to convince myself that postponement was simply an indication that my cancer wasn’t as bad as originally imagined. It could wait. Something inside of me was also relieved because I wanted more time to pretend, I wasn’t ill. I didn’t want that damn operation and what it was going to do to my body despite knowing it was the only way to save my life.

In the morning, I woke with the hangover of a university student after final exams. In despondency from the drink the day before, I made a full English breakfast for myself, and while eating said, “feed cancer starve Covid.”

Go well all of you in these days of omicron because what lies ahead of us in the post pandemic world won’t be pleasant either.