Glow Up

A nodule sounded like a small thing when they told me about it on the phone. It got picked up on a CT angiogram on Jan 6th. ‘Your heart was perfect’, the lady said, ‘no furring of the arteries, no calcification’ but they did pick up a small lung nodule. I ask if it could be cancer and she replies ‘well, they are aware of your history’. So British. No one wants to say the word. I jave had numerous false alarms and expect it’s nothing so I stupidly go by myself, expecting an interim ‘well let’s see what this is’ appointment. To be fair it was a maybe appointment but the doctor serves it to me straight. He has grey green eyes and a coldish manner but I prefer it to sympathy. He says the trachea is inflamed and they don’t like the look of it. I note that the mass is ‘non-spiculate’, a term I have picked up in my endless googling and inaccurate reading of academic medical papers. He notes that I am Professor Chan and asks me what I am a professor of. I feel I have his respect for a moment till I shatter the illusion telling him ‘creative industries’. Well it could be worse. I could have said Geography. Any illusion of my intelligence is further shattered by him telling me that the computer model has calculated my lung mass as having a 25% chance of cancer in the Brock score. After some extended circular interrogation on my part I ask what the chances are it is not cancer. To which he replies dryly, ‘ well, 75%’. Fair. Back to media studies with me.

I push him a bit more. What’s the prognosis if it is lung cancer and in the trachea? ‘Not great’, he says bluntly. So I stop with the questions. He tries to reassure me by saying ‘you’re very young for lung cancer so…’. I’m not sure what the rest of his sentence is but I know I won’t like it so I divert him by making a joke.

By the time I have beaten him down with my ‘what if’ questions he says ‘look we are deep in the land of hypotheticals here’. So he sends me to Mark the sympathetic nurse. I note the soft seating room and panic slightly. I’ve been in a lot of hospitals over the years between my mum’s cancer, mine and my twins being born prematurely. The soft seating room is never good news. I ask more questions. The specialist nurse is used to being still and holding space. It allows me to have a little cry. He tells me that I will have a whole body PET scan, a kind of ‘GLOW UP’. You drink the radioactive dye, lie down for an hour ahead of the scan and any areas with cancer glow up as they absorb the dye. I laugh inappropriately and slightly too loud. ‘This has to be the weirdest kind of glow up I ever heard of”, I say. He nods and smiles wryly, well trained for inappropriate reactions to difficult things. I have this problem with modern language. Phrases get adopted and corrupted and then you can never quite see them the same again. I say hell yeah to the glow up and I leave, picking my way through a sad waiting room of grey looking patients much older than me, many on oxygen. The respiratory department is very different to the breast cancer waiting room and it scares the shit out of me. Exiting Charing Cross Hospital on a steel grey January day is harsh. I stop at a cafe called Truth and have strong coffee and a dense brownie that sticks in my throat and can’t hide the fact that I am crying alone at a table for one, filling it with snotty tissues. I can’t be bothered to hide it.

The PET scan is on a Saturday – just eleven days since the Big Surprise appointment where they show me I have a 2.6cm lung nodule. The nurses are nice and chatty and I have a great nap for an hour before the scan whilst I become radioactive. The glow up stuff is late arriving and eventually comes in a lead lined tin like a miniature coffin. I chat to the young nurse about her spectacular red hair as she tells me she has just been paid and got it done last week. We bemoan the difficulty of maintaining red dyed hair. She and the Asian guy on duty re so nice that by the time the PET scan is over, with its whirring and banging and freezing fan, I am disturbed by their lack of eye contact and their rush to get me out. The girl looks visibly upset. Gerard my husband says they probably just needed to get on but I trust my ability to read non verbal cues.

I am spat back out on to the grey of the Fulham Palace Rd and loiter in the Japanese cafe I’ve been promising myself since I had to fast. I eat prawn tempura and so much rice I feel sick.