The silence was thick, bristling, expectant. The words the consultant had uttered seeped into me like ink on blotting paper, staining my day. I knew its spread would soon contaminate all who knew me.
“How soon can you operate?”
My question was like a bomb blasting through the quiet. The consultant rushed to assure me that I could seek a second opinion but, in those seconds, I had made my decision. I was prepared to lose my right breast to rid myself of cancer. It was a no-brainer.
Fast forward two months. The operating theatre was a hive of muted efficiency, soft bleeps and inaudible murmurings. Light bounced off clinically clean tiles. I braced myself for the injection that would conk me out.
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The surgeon crossed towards me. Gowned and masked, he looked like something from a sci-fi movie. Solemnly, he asked, “Do you understand what is about to happen, Martina?”
I nodded back, equally solemn, “I’m going to get a weight off my chest.”
A moment, then a ripple of laughter spread throughout the room. “You are indeed,” he agreed, grinning.
He later told me that his team had chortled about my comment all day.
To paraphrase Sean O’Casey, a sense of humour lightens the way through life, making it merrier for ourselves and easier for others. During those dark days of 2016, I certainly found it so.
It was not easy being told I had cancer but throughout my life, humour has always been my friend and never more so than at that time. While others might have found solace in yoga, reading or meditation, the storyteller in me actively sought out moments from this euphemistically-titled ‘cancer journey’ that I could laugh about.
I know my gallows humour didn’t suit everyone but the liberating thing of being on the receiving end of a serious diagnosis means you don’t really care.
I have dined out on my cancer tales. “Have you heard the one about the anaesthetist who on finding out I was a writer informed me that he had watched a documentary on writers and that they all died young?” I usually begin. Then it’s on to the one about how, upon being called into yet another endless list of appointments, I had whipped off my top only to be hastily told that it was unnecessary. Or the time when my consultant informed me that my tumours would be sent to America for testing and I joked that at least some part of me was getting out of the country that year.
During that time, I learned a lot. For instance, my breasts were not ‘small’, they were just ‘less generous’. Less generous than what, I asked one day? A pancake? A brussels sprout? A bit of clarity, for God’s sake! I also learned how to spell mastectomy and even more importantly, how to pronounce it – because for a while in the beginning, I kept telling people I needed a vasectomy.
Others along the way shared the laughs. One woman, who had overheard me say that a perk of having cancer was that people insisted on paying for my coffees, had scoffed loudly. “That’s nothing. I got my husband to agree to a new kitchen.”
For me, laughter was the best medicine. Taken along with the painkillers and the radiotherapy, it helped me cope, it diluted the fear and blocked out the harshness of the diagnosis. And I’ve always enjoyed a good story even if it is at my own expense.
And so to 2019. After abandoning the novel writing for three years, I’d unexpectedly found myself writing a new book. My twentieth, it was very different to what I had penned previously. But then again, I was different. I had seen another side of life. I had become hyper aware of time, of existence, of beauty and of the transitory nature of everything. I knew now for certain a truth that I’d only ever had nodding acquaintance with before, that nothing in life is certain, things can change in a moment and life turns on a heartbeat. The only control we have is how we react to it.
And probably because of this, I had written a murder story which was also a meditation on the randomness of things. A book about a man shaped by events and shaped by his perception of events. It was also a novel about a flawed woman and mother, DS Lucy Golden, who had learned some hard lessons along the way too but who still believed that there was order to be found in chaos.
I gave a very shaky first draft to a detective I’d been lucky enough to meet.
His verdict. “You know nothing about police procedure but by God, I loved the humour in it. The banter in the station is spot on.”
I’d been afraid my detectives would be seen by him as too flippant, to jokey but he had waved this away. “The gallows humour helps us do our job, if we didn’t laugh, we’d be gone-ers.” And then, he added, “The police procedure stuff will be easy to fix but if you hadn’t got the banter right between the lads in the station, there is probably nothing I could have done.”
As it turned out, the police procedure stuff wasn’t that easy to fix – but I got there! Three books into the series and my fictional detectives, who now know police procedure, are still shining the light of laughter into the abyss. I often ask myself if the books would be the same if I hadn’t gone through cancer. I think that maybe I might never have written these books. I think that if I had, while the stories might have been similar, the person writing them would have been different. My life experience has always bled into my narratives, soaking in like ink on blotting paper, colouring everything.
And my cancer stories? Well, they still continue to entertain. For instance, have you heard the one about the consultant….
The Reckoning by Martina Murphy is published by Little Brown
