While I perch restlessly waiting
my turn alongside fellow cancerees, I will swallow the dreamlike memories that seem to send Pavlovian blades
of ice through my heart, and will flick blindly through an old issue of a tacky
magazine.
By the time a nurse calls me in, I’ll be so stricken with embittered
adrenalin that I won’t be able to smile. I shall come across as supercilious as
I take my seat in the consultation room and wait for the oncologist to enter. Yes,
I know what’s coming because I’ve done it all before, many times over the past
ten years. Yet still, I never know the full story.