'I discovered a lump when shaving, six weeks later a doctor told me it's cancer'
One morning, as I was shaving, I saw a lump in my neck. It was the sort of lump that you’re warned about in a public information film, in which someone like Ray Winstone says ‘If you get a lump like this, get it checked - NOW’.
So I went to the doctors, expecting to be told there’s no need to worry, it’s a harmless lump that could be cured by Vaseline and garlic. Or maybe necks often go solid like this, as protection against vampires. Six weeks later, after scans and blood tests and ultrasounds and a biopsy, I went for a meeting at the hospital with my son.
In a meeting about whether you have cancer, you study every facial movement of the doctor, the nurse and anyone who comes into the room for clues about what they know. ’Hmm’, you tell yourself, ‘he shut the door in a light and cheery way, that’s a good sign I haven’t got cancer’.
The doctor looked at his computer and fiddled with his tie, then said ‘I’m afraid it’s not good news Mr Steel’. It was delivered with slightly less emotion than a mechanic at Kwik-Fit saying ‘I’m afraid you need a new clutch’. The lump was cancerous, he told me, but it was secondary so there must be cancer somewhere else as well.
Mark Steel has opened up about his cancer battle (Instagram/marksteel7)So a firework display of crazy thoughts spun round my head. Along with the distress of how this would affect my son, daughter and partner, I wondered if I would last until next year’s Euro championship in Germany and whether it was worth getting the car serviced or was that now a waste of money?
Baby boy has spent his life in hospital as doctors are 'scared' to discharge him
And there’s nothing like being told “I’m afraid it’s not good news Mister Steel”, to make you realise, in a way you were never quite aware of before, that you really REALLY want to carry on living. To add to the jeopardy, I was in the exciting early slightly hesitant stages of a new relationship that seemed extremely promising. So one evening I had to say ‘By the way I might have cancer’.
There are countless books, websites and forums in which detailed advice is given on how to act, what to look out for and what to say in these first months of a potentially lifelong partnership. I doubt if any of them say ‘why not liven up a romantic evening by mentioning that you may have cancer’?
Mark has been feeding himself through a tube during his cancer fight (Instagram)
The author has been sharing updates online (Instagram)One of my partner’s qualities was she could explain that the doom surrounding the word ‘cancer’ no longer makes sense. In the 1970s if you heard that someone had cancer, that seemed final. You didn’t even ask if they had a chance of surviving. It would be like being told someone had been beheaded and asking ‘do you think they’ll pull through’?
But there have been so many extraordinary advances, that to think of cancer like that now is as daft as panicking that there will be no shops open on a Sunday.
On the day after I was told I had cancer, I had to meet the consultant who would deal with me personally. With my son, we sat in a waiting room preparing for these details. “I just want one win”, I said, to him. “I feel like a football team that’s nine games into the season and I’ve not had one win. Every meeting, every scan, it always gets a bit worse.”
“The first thing”, said the doctor, “Is we have looked at the scans and it has not spread anywhere.”
“There’s your first win of the season”, yelled my son. “Next I have for you a good draw”, said the consultant. “We think the primary cancer is a lump in your throat and that is very treatable, with chemo and radiotherapy.” Cancer in only two places and it’s treatable! What a result!
At one point he said “In the old days we’d have used more intensive treatment, but now it’s much less severe.” Then he said “By the old days, I mean five years ago.” I sensed that now, if cancer is discovered before it’s spread across the body, the world of medicine sees this as just another disease that they usually put right.
“It’s possible your voice will change a bit,” the consultant told me. “It would be funny if from now on you sounded like Jacob Rees-Mogg”, said my partner. Instead in the days after the operation, I sounded like a reformed gangster on a documentary, whose voice has been changed for his protection as he says ‘They used to call me ‘Handyman’ because I attacked people with chisels and a paint brush’.
Following the operation, it turned out a hole had been made in my epiglottis, which is a shelf in your throat that directs food and drink into the stomach, and if there’s a hole in it, everything you swallow lands in random useless places. This meant I couldn’t eat or drink and had to go back to hospital, on a drip for a week, unable to eat until a feeding tube was placed in my stomach.
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You know when you say you’re really hungry because it’s four in the afternoon and all you’ve eaten all day is a Scotch egg. I can tell you that is not the beginning of hungry. After a week of not eating, I watched the news on my little TV screen by the bed, and these aid workers in Gaza were providing small bowls of thin soup to these poor kids, and I watched that and thought ‘you lucky bastards. What I wouldn’t give to be able to eat one of those small bowls of thin soup’. I’m not justifying it, I’m just saying THAT is hungry.
So now I feed myself with a syringe into this tube, which can be awkward if someone comes round as I automatically want to offer them some. Because it’s rude not to offer food to your guests while you’re eating, even if you would have to carry out a medical procedure on them to do it. I’ve also come to realise that having cancer is a full time job.
Almost every day I clock in at the hospital to meet an assortment of cheery experts, and I quickly became resigned to submitting and allowing these wonderful people do whatever they have to do.
I’ve had so many canulas put into my veins, I expect it now everywhere I go. If I went for a haircut I’d assume once I was in the chair they’d tap my arm for a vein and insert a bloody canula. At one point I had four sticking out of me at once so my arm looked like a child’s birthday cake. I was prodded and poked so often I wouldn’t have been surprised if a nurse had arrived with a cheese grater and said ‘can you turn over Mi Steel, we just need to grate your thigh’, and I’d have happily let them.
I wouldn’t recommend cancer to anyone, but the response to my diagnosis has been astonishing and overwhelming. Every one of my friends has been amazingly warmly rudely brilliant, my partner has been extraordinary, my son and daughter glorious, countless strangers have sent beautiful funny messages and I’ve been attended to by so many surgeons, nurses, dieticians, doctors, radiologists and consultants from around 30 nationalities it feels as if the world’s health resources are all being used for me.
Surely no government would ever be so stupid as to try and undermine the NHS or complain about the wonderful people who come from other countries to live here to keep us healthy. At one point two speech therapists were teaching me a new way to swallow. King Charles may have someone to put toothpaste on his tube but I doubt if even he has a personal swallowing advisor.
Now I’m being prepared for radiotherapy, which has involved radioactive dye flushed through my kidneys, a mask bolted onto me, every part of me closely studied so I feel like a chicken being sprinkled with herbs before it’s whacked into the oven. I’ve never been so cared for. Maybe everyone should have cancer for just one day.
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