by Wade, Calvin
Richie
“It’s not good news, I’m afraid, Mr.Billingham. The test results show that the tumour on your testicle is cancerous. What we need to do now, is look at how we are going to treat it………..”
That’s as much as I remember hearing. The talk continued but it never reached my brain. There was no point kidding myself any longer that it would all turn out to be something and nothing. This was my reality now. My cancerous reality.
As I left Ormskirk hospital after my second meeting with the consultant urologist, Mr.Davenport, within a week, my mind was everywhere. As promised by Dr.Whiteside, my initial appointment had come through within a fortnight. The date of the appointment though, was another four weeks down the line. Initially, I had forgotten all about it, but as it crept ever nearer, I struggled to keep up the pretence that everything was OK. I suppose the easiest solution would have been to tell Kelly about it, but I just felt that I would be burdening her with too much after the death of her Mum. I opted to tell Jim instead, but all he responded with was,
“It’s about time. Hope it all works out OK for you, bruv.”
Jim was pleasant enough but he was not designed to provide emotional support. At least Jim knew though and if my behaviour was short tempered or erratic, he understood. With Kelly, it was more difficult, I had no justifiable reason to take any of my worries out on her, so just found myself starting to avoid her.
In the six weeks between the GP appointment and urologists appointment, I wanted to develop a better understanding of the beast that lay within. If it was cancer, I wanted to know exactly what cancer was. I knew it was a serious killer, up there in the causes of death league with heart disease, but that had been the extent of my knowledge. I went to Ormskirk library and took out six books on cancer and testicular cancer and spent several evenings over the next month trying to comprehend what could possibly be going on with my genitalia.
I found out cancer is just the name given to loads of different diseases all over the body. They are grouped together as they are all abnormal growths of cells acting in an uncontrolled way and sometimes spreading. What I discovered my lump could be was a malignant tumour of the testicle. Testicular cancer, to a great extent, is a young man’s illness, with the majority of those diagnosed being under forty. I was certainly not unique in suffering from this illness at my age. By the time I went to see Mr.Davenport, although I had read most testicular lumps are not cancerous, I had diagnosed myself as a testicular cancer sufferer. I suppose, to an extent, I was playing mind games and was opting for a worst case scenario, in the hope of being proved wrong, but that did not happen. All Mr. Davenport did was confirm my assumption.
On the basis that I had already assumed that I had testicular cancer, I don’t really know why I was in such a head spinning state of shock when I left Ormskirk hospital late that Thursday morning. I guess it was down to the fact that Mr. Davenport had now eradicated all doubt and it was perhaps that element of doubt that I was clinging to. I walked through to Ormskirk town centre in a daze. I don’t really know where I was heading, perhaps sub-consciously I was heading to Woolworths, to see Kelly, to reveal the background to my peculiar behaviour. In an attempt to shield Kelly from my troubles, I had already alienated her, as she had concluded that my separation from her illustrated a diminishing interest in our relationship. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but how was Kelly supposed to know that? All Kelly was aware of, was a boyfriend who was keeping his distance.
I never reached Kelly. It was market day and Ormskirk town centre was jam packed. You needed your wits about you to manoeuvre through the throng, but I had left my wits back at the hospital. Solely due to a lack of concentration on my part, I collided with a lady who had just bought a cheese filled baked potato from a van on Moor Street, that had parked up next to the market stalls. The potato and its cheesy contents were knocked from her grasp and landed upside down on the concrete flags below.
“YOU STUPID IDIOT! Why did you not look where you were going? I’ve just spent ten minutes queuing for that!”
I looked at the enraged woman. With typical misfortune, I had only managed to walk straight into Jemma Watkinson! That pretty much summed up a miserable day! I was in bits. I put my left hand up on to the top of my forehead and into my hair and just stood there for a moment, silently. By this time, I was on auto-pilot. I could not control my hands. My left hand brought itself down to cover my face and then my right hand joined it. The tears then came. Jemma, unaware of the background, probably thought this was more than a little dramatic following the death of a cheesy potato!
“Richie! Are you OK? What’s going on? Sorry, I over-reacted! It’s only a potato! The world’s full of them. The potato famine is no more! Richie! Richie! What’s the matter?”
I took my hands away from my face. I needed someone to talk to about this. Not Jim and not Kelly, but someone else. I wasn’t sure Jemma was the ideal candidate, we had never exactly hit it off, but sometimes fate intervenes in your life in mysterious ways.
“I’m OK!”
I said as I kneeled down in a vain attempt to salvage Jemma’s potato, before realising it was a lost cause and standing back up.
“Are you sure you are OK?” Jemma enquired again.
“Actually I’m not. Do you have a few minutes to spare, Jemma? I have a problem, I really need to talk to someone about it.”
I think people just ask if you are OK to seek their own personal re-assurances. They want you to say yes so they can get along with the rest of their day, guilt free. My negative response caught Jemma out.
“I’ve got the time, Richie, but is it something you really want to be sharing with me? We hardly know each other. Is it something Kelly knows about? Maybe she’d be a better option?”
I shook my head.
“No, no, I don’t want to drag Kelly into this.”
“But you don’t mind dragging me into it?”
Jemma smiled. I did not like her much but she had a beautiful smile.
I smiled back.
“No, Jemma, I don’t like you nearly as much so I’ll quite happily drag you into anything!”
I said this in my dry, sarcastic way but there was more than an element of truth in this statement and both Jemma and I knew that.
Jemma must have sensed I was desperate. She gave me a half-hug, one of those uncomfortable hugs that two thirteen year old boys would do.
“I thought that was the case!” she said. “I tell you what, you buy me another baked potato with cheese, buy yourself something too, then come down with me to Coronation Park and we can sit in the sunshine on the grass. We can talk through your troubles there. How does that sound?”
It sounded fine to me, so that is exactly what we did. I bought Jemma another baked potato with cheese, bought another with a tuna mayonnaise filling for myself and we headed off to Coronation Park. Once there, I related the whole story of the lump, from initially discovering it right through to the diagnosis. I was pleasantly surprised by Jemma’s capacity to listen and to empathise. For a bigmouth with a prat of a boyfriend, she listened attentively, just throwing in the odd pertinent question from time to time.
“Does the tumour hurt you then, when you touch it?”
“How big is the tumour?”
“Does Kelly know anything at all about this?”
“How will they treat it?”
Once I had finished the whole tale, Jemma beamed that huge smile at me again.
“Well, I must say, Richie, that was not what I was expecting!”
If she had smiled at all during my whole confessional piece, it would have seemed more than a little tactless and odd, but having listened with rapt attention through a detailed monologue from me, with just the occasional interruption, I think Jemma was now smiling to lift the sombre mood.
“I don’t suppose you were going to guess I had cancer, but what were you expecting?”
“Honest answer?”
Of course I wanted th
e honest answer, I was intrigued to know what she was expecting to hear.
“I thought you were going to say you were gay!”
“Gay?”
I smiled at Jemma. I looked at her intently. Jemma avoided eye contact.
“Jemma, given that you once accused me of sneaking into a bed with
you and having sex, you are the last person I would expect, to believe I was gay!”
“You did kiss Ray though, didn’t you? I thought maybe you were confused about your sexuality, had decided you could no longer cope with the guilt and were going to live an open gay life from now on!”
“Interesting theory, Jemma. Ludicrous, but interesting!”
“It’s not that ludicrous! You kissed my boyfriend!”
“Yes, but only to piss him off!! He made some sickening comment about Liverpool fans deserving to die at Hillsborough, so I kissed him to piss him off.”
Jemma shook her head as if she didn’t believe me.
“Ray said ‘Liverpool fans deserved to die at Hillsborough’?”
“Well not exactly. He said that it was karma that Liverpool fans were dying as they had killed a load of Juventus fans at Heysel.”
“But he didn’t say they deserved to die?”
I had no idea why Jemma was defending this arsehole! Blind loyalty was the only possibility.
“Excuse my language, Jemma, but it was still a fucking thick thing to say!”
“OK. But why did you not just say, ‘Shut up, dickhead!’? Why kiss him?”
“I told you, I did it to piss him off! It worked too! If I’d have told him to shut up, he would have just continued with his incessant wittering about how fantastic he is. A kiss had more impact. It was a big, sloppy kiss too! It was impossible to ignore. I just wanted to disgust him, like he had disgusted me.”
Despite herself, I could tell Jemma was trying to suppress a smile!
“Well, you achieved that, but Ray now thinks you fancy him!”
I chuckled.
“Good! I’ll blow him a kiss next time I see him!”
Our tone was now most certainly jovial, but Jemma still had questions she wanted to ask. Questions that could only return the mood to serious.
“So, explain to me again, why you haven’t told Kelly?”
“About the kiss?”
I wanted the jovial tone to continue.
“No, you know what I mean. About the cancer. You may not think much of Ray, but if I had cancer, I would tell him and he would be there for me. I know for a fact, Kelly would be there for you too, so why not tell her?”
“What would it have achieved?”
“It would have been less of burden for you. A problem shared is a problem halved and all that.”
“Yes, but Kelly was already burdened by her own problems. Jemma, you and Kelly have been through so much recently, I didn’t want to weigh Kelly down with even more problems.”
“Why did you not tell her before Vomit Breath died?”
Ray was honest about one thing. Jemma did refer to her mother as ‘Vomit Breath’!
“I didn’t see the point. It could have been something and nothing. Most lumps in the scrotum don’t turn out to be cancerous.”
“And you were embarrassed.”
“Yes, that too!”
“Well, just say that then! You don’t have to lie to me, Richie. I’m your friend.”
That sounded strange. Jemma Watkinson was now officially my friend.
Jemma may now have classed herself as my friend, but one thing I was still not comfortable telling her about, was the fact that I knew how ‘Vomit Breath’ had met her maker. I did not want to tell Jemma that I knew Kelly had pushed their mother down the stairs. I suspected Jemma thought that would remain a secret between her and Kelly until their dying day. Presumably, she would have been horrified to know that Kelly had confessed all to me.
“Are you scared?”
I was ill prepared for this question, as my mind was still picturing the scene at Jemma and Kelly’s house that night, when their mother returned home.
“Of what?”
“Dying.”
Jemma was nothing, if she was not blunt.
“I’m not expecting to die, Jemma. I’m expecting to have treatment, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, whatever it takes, but I’m expecting to come through this.”
“Will you lose your hair?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve got appointments with a urologist and an oncologist. I expect I’ll find out after I’ve seen them.”
“What’s an oncologist?”
“Someone who deals with people with cancer. People like me.”
It was that final sentence that started me up again. ‘People like me’. The conversation continued, but my insides suddenly felt very vulnerable. I was shaking inside.
“So, how are you going to keep it from Kelly when you turn up at our house looking like you’ve stuck half your arse on your head?”
“If that’s going to happen, I’ll tell her before it does, Jemma.”
“You have to tell her now, Richie! It’s not fair keeping something like this from her. Kelly loves you.”
Here we go again! Tears welled up. I was on an emotional tightrope anyway and the ‘Kelly loves you’ statement felt like an electric prod.
“I will tell her. At some point, I will tell her. I just need to find the right time. Kelly means everything to me, Jemma. Everything. I’m not keeping this from her for any other reason than because I love her. I want to protect her from this for as long as I can. She’s just a young girl, Jemma. She’s just lost her mother, she doesn’t need to be worrying about whether she’s going to lose me as well.”
“Richie, you’re wrong! She does need to worry about this too, because it’s happening. Like it or not, Richie, it’s happening. You must tell her.”
By this time, I was ready to just curl myself into a ball and sob uncontrollably! I know Jemma was just looking after Kelly’s interests, but I was too. Kelly’s and my own, anyway. I did not feel emotionally strong and if Kelly needed to lean on me, I didn’t think I had the strength to prop her up.
“I can’t, this thing is destroying me, Jemma. I won’t let it destroy Kelly, too.”
The tears started. I reverted to sobbing like a new born baby with a needle in his nappy! Crying my heart out. I think Jemma felt guilty for steering us towards an emotional blub-bath and tried to comfort me as best she could. She spoke soothingly as she gave me a sympathetic cuddle.
“Come on Richie! Don’t cry! It sounds like you’ve been so strong through this so far! You’ve just got to keep it going. Keep battling. You were right when you said this lump is not going to beat you. You’ll conquer this. I know you will. Come on now, don’t cry!”
When you are in emotional turmoil, someone being kindhearted does not stem the flow of tears, it just makes them flow more. I felt like a radiator that was being bled, I filled up, full of water inside and then whoosh, it all became too much and it sprayed out everywhere. As the tears trickled down my face, Jemma gave me a few re-assuring pecks on the cheeks. Everything unkind I had ever said about Jemma Watkinson was now wiped clean from the slate. She had been brilliant to me this afternoon and I would always be grateful for that. I was thinking about my gratitude to her when Jemma cried out.
“Kelly!”
I didn’t even think how this must have looked to Kelly. Here I was, caught in a clinch with Jemma. That did not cross my mind at all. All I could think about was that my tears were a give away. Try as I might to protect her, Kelly was now going to find out that I had testicular cancer. Jemma, probably understanding better than I did how this must have looked to Kelly, tried to cajole me into a confession.
“Richie. Tell Kelly what’s happened. She needs to know.”
I felt that I was naked with a finger pointing at my lumpy ball, but still could not bring myself to get the right words out. I pathetically refused. I had once told Kelly that my middle name was Cheddar. It wasn’t.
Stubborn was my middle name.
“I can’t, Jemma! Not after everything that’s happened. I can’t!”
Jemma, at this point, probably realised the irony of the situation, I may have had a dodgy, cancerous ball, but I did not have ‘the balls’ to tell Kelly. Jemma offered to do my dirty work for me.
“Just tell her, Richie, or I will”.
The penny dropped. There was no way back now. I had testicular cancer and it was time I faced it like a man. I was not going to let Kelly find out from Jemma about this. I needed to tell her myself about this, right here, right now.
I was about to say,
“No, let me tell her!”
But as soon as I said, “No….,” I paused, taking a huge intake of breath, ready to spill it all out, but Kelly did not give me that opportunity. She ran off like a scalded cat. Jemma shouted after her,
“Kelly! Wait! Please wait! Let me explain!”
It was too late, Kelly was disappearing into the distance. I think Jemma was going to make one last ditch attempt to bring her back, she had one final thing to shout, but just as she was about to yell it, she recognised the significance of what she was going to say. Jemma could not broadcast my illness to the surrounding masses, so instead she just spoke the words, she had been about to scream.
