I’m going downhill fast

I was discharged from hospital into local taxi driver Gilles’s brand-new metallic blue Skoda, of which he is intensely proud. I’d been in for more than a week. My pain level had been assessed and the daily morphine dose adjusted, and a new and different species of analgesic prescribed; also lignocaine patches, to be stuck on my breasts each morning. Humming, as he does when in a cheerful mood, Gilles collected me from the ward in a wheelchair and transferred me on to the back seat of his pride and joy. “So how are you?” he said.

I told him I thought I was more or less finished. Gilles wasn’t having any of that kind of defeatist talk. At rest, his slanting French eyebrows oppose one another like one acute and one grave accent. As he maneuvered our way out of the enormous hospital they became tautly horizontal as he made an impassioned speech about never giving up, about fighting on to the beaches, about not thinking of myself in this fight, but of those who love me. The heartfelt outpouring lasted several minutes. I didn’t know where to look. When we approached the village where we both live, I commented on the variety of tree blossom and the advancing season. The eyebrows stood smartly to attention. He too was a man who noticed such things.

Two of Catriona’s three lovely, expensively educated girls were staying with us, which is always jolly. We played a party game called “Who am I?” Given the amount of morphine I’m taking, it’s a good question. When they left, the girls cheerfully hoped that I would still be around in May when they returned for another visit. I said it was quite possible.

In spite of what Gilles says, and the recent drug adjustments, I’m going downhill fast. The numb fingers of my left hand are barely strong enough to unscrew the cap from a tube of toothpaste. And the morphine dose occasionally still fails to mask the pain, which achieves an unsurmized, unimaginable, unsupportable level. It makes one wonder what role in nature that level of pain is supposed to be playing. “Treena,” I say. “I don’t think I want to live any more.” Then I swallow a big short-acting morphine dose and after half an hour the pain subsides slightly, and I have a sip of tea, and I can hear a choir of village children singing over at the school, and a soppy dove almost flies in through the open window, and life has interest once more.

The day Catriona’s girls left, I knocked a pint of lemon squash over my iPad, finishing it. And while making my way across the room to pee into the plastic pot my left leg gave way and I fell over backwards heavily and couldn’t get up. I’ve fractured my pelvis before and it felt like I’d done it again. Treena and her girls hauled the silly old git back on his feet and put him back to bed.

The next day I couldn’t pee. I tried to go but nothing. The day after that still nothing. Stomach like a balloon. Couldn’t stand up. One of Ford Madox Ford’s novels is called A Man Could Stand Up. Well, this one couldn’t. In the course of a week my range has shortened from the downstairs lavatory to the bedroom window sill to the bedroom to the bed. The implications of these new, narrower perimeters are I can have no more chemotherapy, no more radiotherapy, no more chats with the oncologist. No more pep talks with perorations from taxi man Gilles. No more treatment. Finished.

Treena put out an SOS for a commode and three hours later she came staggering up the stairs with this deluxe, padded affair. It seemed a crying shame to go to the toilet in it. Each morning, Catriona washes me thoroughly all over, rolling me this way and that on the bed to get at the obscurer regions, and puts me in a new diaper. I play African pop, in particular kwassa kwassa music, for the morning bed bath and she twerks along as she washes me. She also puts out my tablets, of which there is a colorful variety. Sometimes I’m so helpless I merely open my mouth and she lobs them in.

This morning I woke early paralyzed with worse pain than ever and I said to Catriona that we couldn’t go on like this. So she trotted down early to discuss my future with Dr. Biscarat. My future is this. I will be cared for at home until I die. France will supply nurses capable of hospital-level care. If the pain continues to overcome the oral morphine, I will be fitted with this fabled morphine “syringe driver,” which can be turned up to eleven and put an end to it whenever I like. Splendid.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.