Waking up gives you cancer

If you believe the paper you’re reading, waking up gives you cancer.

Barbequed food gives you cancer, or God does. Cancer’s in the air, in your mobile phone, in the stuff you clean your oven with. If it’s not mutating those cells then it’s mutating those other ones. It’s patronising you from your box of cigarettes; it’s picking off your kids. It’s there or it isn’t. It’s got you or hasn’t.

It’s taken your loved ones or it’s about to.

So it’s a funny thing, cancer, in that it’s not at all. Everyone’s either got it, known it, or been really really pissed off by it. It’s like rain. It’s always affecting someone someplace. And cancer, well there’s some weird bias to it — it’s billed as the worst thing that can happen to a person but then again seems to happen to everyone anyway.

So why’s it still so surprising when it turns up? How come we’re still so gutted by it? And we are, and no mistake. We are devastated by it, ravaged by it. Even now it’s making me dead sad, and I’ve known about cancer since I was little. I know that sometimes it changes everything, brings mortality into sharp focus. Other times I know we’ll crack jokes or throw a different spin on it. Always we’ll write books about it; we’ll write brave memoirs of battling on, battling through. Remission, repeat, return. Terminal or not terminal — that’s the question. We’re totally obsessed with it. I’m totally obsessed with it. Morbidly. It’s called the big C, like that swear word, and it can get you there too.

You go without hearing ‘cancer’ in a day and you’ve not left your bed. Why? Because it’s the paradigm for about the only suffering we understand. We’re not being massacred or genocided, so our newspapers, they’ll bang on about cancer. We’re not being annihilated or oppressed or anything else, so cancer’s what we’re given to fret about.

Only people with cancer aren’t like that.

Cancer, it’s a horribly common way to go. It’s horrible because it ruins you and it’s common because when you get it, people just don’t care beyond your close family. Old, young, surprisingly middle-aged. Cancer, it claims and carries on, and sometimes it’s beaten and mostly it’s not. Is it luck or isn’t it? Is it just a risk we run for being advanced at everything else?

Some cranks, they blame cancer on you. Some cranks believe you get cancer because you’re not thinking positively enough. That’s what they say. They tell you you can beat cancer by thinking nice things. Thinking life’s not just living — it’s for enjoying. Strife doesn’t affect these people, because they’re too busy wishing cancer on people who don’t think like them.

These are the people that cancer gets, not the other way round. That’s one of my favourite jokes about cancer.

I’m a candidate for cancer. I’ve fairer skin than most, and the kind of moles you’ve got to keep at least an eye on. I drink, smoke, eat burnt toast on occasion. I’ve got an acid reflux condition I’ve never had diagnosed and my medic friends worry I’ll get the cancers in my eosophagus. But cancer doesn’t scare me, because some of the bravest people I know have cancer — and they’ve shown me that you don’t have cancer. You HAVE sex. You HAVE babies. You HAVE fun.

You don’t have cancer. You treat cancer. You irradiate cancer. You fight cancer. You beat it.

These people I know with cancer, they have made cancer a joke. It’s made them bald, made them cough blood, but they’re so fucking brilliant about cancer you can’t even explain it. One of them will die soon. The other will make it, but to them that’s cancer. Comes and goes. Wins some, loses some.