When I got there the doctor said, “You know when we call you in at seven in the morning it’s not good.” She had called me in at 7.15am on Friday to give this news. I have cancer. She used words like ‘chemo’ and ‘metastasize’. She emphasised that these are words I may not need to learn. In my head there was only room for three words, the same three words recurring all weekend.
She gave me the name of a surgeon I’m to meet today, Monday, who will try to cut all the cancer out. She said, “You’ll be reassured to know that everyone’s going to be treating this as the utmost urgent priority.” I sort of half-laughed. “That is not reassuring,” I told her, wryly, and she made a comical face. I am proud of that wryness and that half laugh. Those are my courage.
She said she thought what they first found might have been inside me maybe a year. She said, best case scenario is I go into surgery this week and the new doctor, a man, cuts all of it out, he gets the lot, and after that I keep getting scanned and checked and tested for the next five years then for the rest of my life I will have to keep an eye on it and keep meeting from time to time with these doctors (“you’ll get sick of the sight of us, I promise you.”) Then there’s some spreadage and there is no cure so we irradiate it or poison it with chemo which doesn’t poison just the cancer but the host as well — me, in my body — and then at the far end is, the scans reveal it’s in your blood or lymph glands or your organs are riddled with it, we are sorry, there is nothing we can do, you have a few months, set your affairs in order.
Until the first tests come back there is no way of knowing how much cancer is in my body at this stage nor how far it may have spread.
The call from this doctor’s receptionist came as I walked out of the hospital from seeing Mum. That morning, Thursday four days back, I woke to texts from Mum at 4.30am saying hello I am very very sick and then from my brother at dawn, we are at the hospital with Mum, pneumonia and it’s not looking good. I went straight in to see her and I’ve never seen anyone so sick. She was shivering with fever and delirious and vomiting up coiling tubes of bright yellow foam like a pool noodle, like those batts you put into ceilings for insulation. We thought she was going to die. The doctors seemed to think so, too, and they told us, the family should come. When I came out of my own appointment next morning Mum had turned a sharp corner and by some miracle of resilience was sitting up in bed eating a sandwich. I was thinking what if she dies, what if she really does, what if she is dead already and she is gone and she’ll never know I have this. Instead, Mum seemed so much calmer and stronger and I visited again and made her comfortable in the too-short bed and listened to the doctors and my mother told me a story about her aunt, my great aunt, who died only two months back at 96. This great aunt had cancer, and I never knew. She had it cut out, and recovered to live this long life. Since returning from Africa at the end of 2022 I had been asking when could we drive up to see her. Instead, she died, and the day of her funeral I happened to phone and Mum said, Can’t talk now darling, we’re all in the car on the way to Warwick, and I said, Why, what’s happening in Warwick, and she said, “Auntie Berta’s funeral.” I said why — but why — how come I, and she said, smoothly, your brother put his foot down. He told us, if she goes, I’m not coming. And he’s a pallbearer.
I don’t know the source of this estrangement and no one can explain it to me. Soon it may be immortal, as far as anything human. I don’t know why my mother’s 84th birthday in November was held at this powerful brother’s house and I was not invited. I had been lured back from Ghana on the promise of the long-overdue reconciliation I had been asking for and working towards for more than a decade. That she let one of her last birthdays be celebrated without me, the whole family gathered just down the road, when I had been gone some twelve years and was actually living under her roof at that stage — I cried for days. And, in an aching gap in the crying I went to my first decent painting class and worked round the fire in my throat on my first decent painting. The boy’s name is Atta Bonye and his wry, thoughtful, sweet and spiced expression speaks to my heart. All I know is we are humans here together and life is turbulent and short. All Ghanaians know we cannot heal nor even address these painful things if the other party does not want them resolved. All we can do is cling to those things which bring life and give health, and try to distance ourselves from toxins, from cruelty in others and the impulse to cruelty if it should surface in ourselves, try to balance painful honesty with life giving kindness, try to be as real and as present as we possibly can, though it cost us everything, as they say in Accra, you have to “happy yourself.”