The Dignity of Indignity

Cancer is like any other major illness in that it tends to make a lot of people very eager to have a good, close look at your body. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of these are in the medical profession and their interest is in a professional capacity. If they're not poking around inside with an array of instruments that could have been derived from a particularly feverish fantasy of the Marquis De Sade, then they are attaching things to your torso or sticking a clothes peg on your nose or dumping you on the scales - which in my case produce a gargantuan figure which could conceivably be taken for an international telephone number. 

If you're anything like me, then you may be at least a little bit wary of other people seeing your body. When I can't see it, it's easy to pretend that it looks absolutely fine, even if catching a glance in the mirror after a shower makes me think that some gargantuan pink monster has just invaded the bedroom. If someone else is going to see me naked then I usually make sure it's done in dim lighting after I've hidden their glasses. But illness changes all that. Suddenly, I'm expected to lose any notion of reserve and be willing to strip off and stop whining. There's a distinct briskness to the tone of the nurse in charge indicating that this is all perfectly normal and I haven't got anything they haven't seen before. How they know this is a moot point. But clearly I haven't because the revelation tends to received with a casualness that borders on disdain. 

For certain procedures, the medics try and maintain a semblance of dignity by giving you a hospital gown to wear. Unfortunately, unless you are a very standard size - and I am not, having shoulders the width of a small bus - then they don't usually fit and if they do, they leave a vast gaping hole at the back which gives the world the exciting prospect of a lengthy view of my hairy backside. Last time, during my CT scan, the nurse came up with a brilliant idea of giving me two, one worn normally and the other like a straitjacket and this did at least give me a certain self-confidence that waiting relatives wouldn't be wondering whether or not they could show a Cinemascope epic on my capacious behind. I would be quite happy to wear a t-shirt and underwear but this seems to be frowned upon, even if your pants aren't the colour of thousand-wash grey. 

But once you're in the room, there's no room for reticence as you're manipulated this way and that. If you've had a colonoscopy then you'll know that they waste no time in getting you to point your bottom in an exaggerated fashion so they can penetrate it with a long tube, usually within ten seconds of saying hello. The important thing is to try and distance yourself from the moment. I know some of you like to live in the moment but when you've got a tube sticking up down you then the moment doesn't seem worth relishing.  I've been lucky enough to have wonderful people performing my investigations - I swear that I was held and comforted at every moment during my gastroscopy - although when I'm told encouragingly how well I'm doing, I reflect that I could reply that I'm not really doing anything. Except alternately belching and whelping. So retreating inside my mind is probably the most attractive option. During the last one, I thought of my mum - who died in June - and how we would have laughed about the minutiae of the procedure. I thought of my childhood, my university days, and my teaching career. I thought of the people I love, have loved, and who didn't always love me back. I tried, above all, to think of what makes me me, and the all of the tiny slivers of memory which make up a life. 

This is a way to create dignity out of indignity - a sense of one's individual self which would otherwise be lost in a morass of pain and helplessness. Then you can laugh at the small humiliations which are a necessary part of discovering you are ill, and then becoming well.