[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Christopher Hitchens: Topic of Cancer

[John W.]

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009


*First Person*

*Topic of Cancer*

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, *Hitch*-22.
The next, he’s throwing up backstage at *The Daily Show,* in a brief bout of
denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit,
martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.

By *Christopher
Hitchens*<http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/christopher-hitchens>
•

Photograph by *John Huba* <http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/john-huba>

September 2010

*JOINING THE RESISTANCE?*
The author at home in Washington, D.C., July 18, 2010.

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing
prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness
feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of
my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with
slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage
to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too
little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It
took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and
summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved
with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they
needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now
that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm
deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark
frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had
to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians
at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior
and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist.
Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.

Read the comments on Christopher Hitchens’s cancer announcement, and leave
one of your own.<http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/an-update-from-christopher-hitchens.html>

The previous evening, I had been launching my latest book at a successful
event in New Haven. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go
on *The Daily Show* with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at
the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman
Rushdie. My very short-lived campaign of denial took this form: I would not
cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of
selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone
noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary
combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each
show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still
hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.

The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly
and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit
prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on
merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and
repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the
worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of
its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that
contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some
unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an
official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your
neck. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes,
and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or
collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when
your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this
stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works
cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more
slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my
clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local
Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results
disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable
truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught
my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a
bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had
been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and
very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In
whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a
finalist.

In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a
finalist.

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses
from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss
of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way,
I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the
candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for
precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear
myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper
into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to
something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be
beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a
gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d
worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children
married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed
write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph
Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is:
sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on
the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter
the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience
at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United
Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is
my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant
to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office
turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the
tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return
the reply: Why not?

The *bargaining* stage, though. Maybe there’s a loophole here. The oncology
bargain is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful
years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with
that, to radiation or even surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around
for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These
things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your
ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a
reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the
most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People
don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher
omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for
cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died
after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about
long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in
a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just
being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that
when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people
bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you
either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties
itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is
the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity
and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

It’s quite something, this chemo-poison. It has caused me to lose about 14
pounds, though without making me feel any lighter. It has cleared up a
vicious rash on my shins that no doctor could ever name, let alone cure.
(Some venom, to get rid of those furious red dots without a struggle.) Let
it please be this mean and ruthless with the alien and its spreading
dead-zone colonies. But as against that, the death-dealing stuff and
life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter. I was fairly
reconciled to the loss of my hair, which began to come out in the shower in
the first two weeks of treatment, and which I saved in a plastic bag so that
it could help fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico. But I wasn’t quite
prepared for the way that my razorblade would suddenly go slipping
pointlessly down my face, meeting no stubble. Or for the way that my newly
smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it had undergone electrolysis,
causing me to look a bit too much like somebody’s maiden auntie. (The chest
hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn’t yet wilted, but so
much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it’s a rather
patchy affair.) I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penélope Cruz were one of
my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must
term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.

These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to
resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most
advanced advice. My heart and blood pressure and many other registers are
now strong again: indeed, it occurs to me that if I didn’t have such a stout
constitution I might have led a much healthier life thus far. Against me is
the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me
ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and
selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both of
these I hope to write next time if—as my father invariably said—I am spared.

*Christopher Hitchens<http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/christopher-hitchens/>
* is a *Vanity Fair* contributing editor. Send comments on all
Hitchens-related matters to hitchbitch at vf.com. <hitchbitch at vf.com>
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