by Raz Shaw
Cancer was thousands of years old. With an army of billions of cells behind it.
It had mounds of experience as to how to break down my brittle defences.
I had me, a couple of pamphlets and a few doctors armed with drugs.
In 1995, I didn’t even have Google to help me.
I had a sense of humour.
That was my biggest weapon. My cancer would get increasingly frustrated by that sense of humour. Every time it pushed out a side effect, it would sit back and just expect that to be the one that would make my resistance disappear. But it hadn’t reckoned on my retaliation missile. My comedy arrow had staggeringly pinpoint accuracy.
Cancer hated that I had a weapon. It began to up the ante. The mouth ulcer weapon was its attempt to sink my Belgrano (that’s not a euphemism) and to try to shut me up for good. It very nearly succeeded, but it didn’t bank on my perversity in adversity.
After that, cancer either lost heart or tried a completely different tactic. It was a petulant child who loathed being ignored. Now and again, it would send out suicide bombers with minor explosives to cause a modicum of havoc. But I could deal with that. I had survived the big stuff, so the rest was manageable. Cancer hated that I was coping. It would try to blindside me at any given opportunity. It almost succeeded. Almost.
2) ME VERSUS GAMBLING
This was a fight that had been going on for an awfully long time. Almost ten years since I’d recognised it as a problem. I never really tried to stop it because I never really wanted to. I made proclamations all the time. But nobody believed them – because I never believed them. The truth is that I was head over heels in love. With gambling. It gave me everything I needed: adrenaline, excitement, escape. It wasn’t better than sex. It WAS sex. It was sex and love all wrapped into one big gambling maniacal thing. I’m not good with love, but I’m good with sex!
Gambling was one of the few things that I knew how to love.
I totally loved gambling. And gambling totally loved me.
We would fight all the time but our make-up sex was off the scale.
Our love was unconditional.
Win or lose, I would always love gambling.
I would hate it too.
Hate it more than I have hated anything or anyone before or since.
But, love or hate, it made me really feel things. That’s what I really loved.
And then one day it made me feel numb.
When the numbness takes over, that’s when you really have to worry. That’s when your intake capacity is so high that only a binge of epic proportions will impinge on the deadness. And you have to go further and further to find that high again.
The vicious circle out of control vortex is set to max.
3) ME VERSUS THE NOTION OF STOPPING GAMBLING DESPITE IT SEEMING TO HELP ME GET THROUGH THIS CANCER MADNESS
That was a hard concept to get my head round. Thankfully it wasn’t something I was even conscious of at the time. But it was undeniable that the distraction of my gambling addiction was making the day-to-day of cancer living much easier to deal with. That’s not to say that being in the midst of a gambling addiction was a breeze. Far from it. But, for good or for bad, the addiction filled every particle of my waking being. The self-hatred altitude was so high that it almost totally consumed everything else. There wasn’t a lot of room for cancer. That said, cancer doesn’t like being second best so it wasn’t going to give up first place without the mother of all fights!
Gambling addiction was so much simpler before the cancer.
BC, I would wake up and know that there was just one thing devouring my mind. Last night’s win/loss and the next bet. That haunted abyss inside me was weeping. It was begging to be filled. This was pre-internet gambling days so 11.02 on the first race at Romford was my first opportunity to fill it.
I am in bed. I am in a white cold sweat of disgust wondering what the fuck I am doing with my life. I tell myself I am going to stop. I tell myself this at the same time as I find myself marching towards the bookies. I am in the bookies. I am in the bookies and I am telling myself that I am not actually going to have a bet today. I am telling myself that even if I do have a bet today, it will be my last. I am telling myself that even if it isn’t my last, I am in control of it. I am telling myself that I will just have one. Just one bet and then leave. One bet and get on with my day. One bet and get on with my life. And so I have that one bet. And that dog almost wins. It almost wins. And that rush of almost-winning-adrenaline feels good. It fills the chasm. For now. I tell myself that I will win on the next one. I will win and then I will stop. And I do win. I win. That’s fucking great. I win. I have a full wallet and I won. And I can’t leave now because maybe, just maybe, I am on a winning streak and today could be the day. It could be the day that wipes out all my debts and takes me back to the top and once I am back at the top I am going to stop and it will feel great because I will stop and I will be debt-free and have nothing to chase because I will be debt-free and I will stop gambling and I will get on with my life. And I will no longer wake up wishing I hadn’t. Woken up. I will no longer wake up and wish my life would end. And. And. And today will be that day. Today will be. Will be. Will. Be. That. Day. And. And Today. And the next bet. And after lunch. And I need to fill that hunger. And the next. Bet. And. I walk out of the bookies at 5.17. I have been in there for six hours. I stink of other people’s cigarettes and ache of self-hatred.
I may have won, I may have lost. It didn’t matter. I was sleepwalking through my life. Single-handedly trying to destroy any chance I might have of a future, a career, a life.
And then I was diagnosed with cancer.
I’ve already said that cancer saved my life. It really did. It focused my life. It, eventually, gave me perspective. And it gave me something to live for. None of that happened immediately and most of it happened unwittingly and indirectly, but it did happen. It was the most complicated year of my life and I still can’t quite make proper sense of it some twenty years later.
Days and nights were spent at the casino, at the hospital or watching the OJ Simpson trial.
Cancer and gambling ran in parallel the whole time. They echoed each other and raced each other and goaded each other and fought each other. I was the cancer piggy in the middle of it all.
It was a race.
A race to the finish line.
ADDICTION TAKES NO PRISONERS
Addiction identifies your weaknesses and your vulnerabilities and goes straight at them. It has sniffer-dog capabilities. Once it has found its prey it will latch on like a leach and be impossible to discard.
Addiction is the perfect chameleon. Once it’s on you and in you it will manifest itself in so many forms. It will do anything to make you love it. To make you feel like it’s part of you. That you can’t live without it. That you don’t want to live without it. It is the perfect ying to your yang. It complements you. It makes you think you have become the person you always wanted to be. It fills up the emptiness inside you that nothing or nobody has ever been able to fill before.
And that’s its genius.
When you first meet, it feels so good. So right, so thrilling.
Life is so much better with it in your life. It absorbs itself into you. It becomes part of you. Part of your identity. It invades every single bit of you. Not only can you not live without it but you need more and more of it just to keep you on an everyday equilibrium. The more you have, the dirtier you feel. So you need even more. Even more will definitely take you back to the time when just doing it made you feel invincible.
CHASING NOSTALGIA
And that’s what you’re doing. You’re chasing nostalgia. And chasing nostalgia only ever leads to pain. Because you can never go back. But, addiction equals madness and the madness tells you that you CAN go back. You are the Time Lord. You are insuperable. You can go back to better times. You can. And that’s what addiction is.
It’s a cult. It’s a cult. It’s a cult. It’s a cult
. It’s a cult. It’s a cult.
Once addiction’s got you in its cult, it will do anything to make you stay. Or, more precisely, it will do anything for you NOT to leave. And this cult takes no prisoners, and its leaders are fucked and evil and will never let you go. Ever. The harder you fight, the more evil they get. The finish line is a place of such surrender that you don’t have any fight left to try to escape from it. So you surrender to it. You glorify in it. You accept the inevitable final tragic darkness of it. They have you by the medicated scruff of your cancer neck and they are forcing you towards life’s finishing line. And you need shitloads of energy to fight them. Energy that you just don’t have.
CULTISH CANCER
Cancer is also pure enemy. It is just as evil and cultish as a gambling addiction. More so:
1. It overtly makes the first move.
2. It is indiscriminate in its targets.
3. It won’t give you any early breathing space.
4. It can mutate at will.
5. It laughs at the lengths people have to go to try to destroy it.
6. It laughs in the face of side effects.
7. It forever ups the stakes and the ante.
8. It is deeply arrogant.
9. It needs to be number one.
10. It hates you having other lovers.
11. It will do anything to win.
Winning for cancer is your death. Simple as that.
That is the finishing line. Anything less is just unacceptable.
And so in 1995, as summer began to turn to autumn, Cancer and Gambling Addiction were chest-deep in battle. A battle for my life.
‘WE’RE IN THE HAT BUSINESS’
Some people said that, when I was young, I had a bit of a Jew-fro with strawberry-blond tendencies. I am not at all sure that that was true!
In actuality, I never really thought much about the pros and cons of my hair. Or hair in general, really. Until I was diagnosed with cancer. And then, that’s all people talked about.
I guess that is the iconic cancer image.
Bald.
Naked-bald if it’s a man or bandana-bald if it’s a woman.
It was the first picture that came into my head when I realised I had cancer. Not necessarily the first thought but definitely the first picture, and it became my way of telling people about my diagnosis.
‘We’re in the hat business. We’re in the hat business.’
I loved the fact that it took some people a while to cotton on. So much so that I had to explain it to them and then repeat the ‘soften the blow’ phrase. Which sort of defeated the point.
‘We’re in the hat business.’
‘You what?’
‘We’re in the hat business.’
‘The what?’
‘The h-a-t business.’
‘Oh. We are?’
‘What?’
‘In the hat business?’
‘YES!’
‘Raz.’
‘YES!’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘OH! Well. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine. Well, not fine. OK. Well, sort of OK. I mean, I will be fine so don’t worry about it. Nothing really to worry about.’
‘WHAT? WHAT IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT?’
‘Oh. I have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yes.’
‘Shit.’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘OK.’
‘OK.’
‘Erm. Raz?’ ‘What is it?’
‘What is what?’
‘The non-thingy lymph thingy.’
‘OH. It’s. Well, it’s a type of cancer. Of the lymph glands.’
‘Oh shit. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine. So you see, we’re in the hat business.’
‘What? OH OH OH. Yes. Hahaha. I see. Oh shit. Oh shit. OH SHIT! I’m sorry.’
So you see, it doesn’t always go to plan.
But ‘we’ were in the hat business. At least that was my perception of the future. Of my future. I didn’t really have much to go on. I hadn’t really properly known anyone with cancer up to that point. I mean, I had known people, but only from afar and certainly not well enough to know the ins and outs and details and things.
ICONIC-BALD
Up until this point, the iconic-bald was about as deep as my cancer knowledge had taken me. Or maybe it was about as deep as I had wanted to take it. Because up until 1995 BC, apart from the more tabloidy stories of a famous person with cancer or a child braving leukaemia, my personal and thus emotional connection with the illness was very limited.
Pathetically limited, in fact.
BEYOND THE BALD
But now, I was beginning to see things beyond the bald.
I don’t make light of the bald. The bald is an extraordinarily strong and sometimes frightening symbol that you or I have cancer. And to many it sums up the despair, the pain and the humiliation we feel. It is a vivid external symbol of what is eating away at us.
Bald to a man doesn’t have to say cancer. It can say cool. It can say hard. It can say gay. It can say all sorts of things that you can embrace and enjoy. The croupiers at my casino just thought my bald was my twenty-eight-year-old fashion statement. Bald doesn’t have to say cancer to a man.
To a woman it screams cancer. A deafening, hideous, silent scream.
It remains one of the most painful memories of the whole of my cancer experience. To lie in a day bed on a ward and hear a woman behind a screen wrestling in tears with her wig and her dignity is truly heartbreaking. It was clear that all she wanted was to look in the mirror and see herself. If she could see herself, then she could be herself. Even for just a few moments. And no matter how much she fluffed up the wig, she just couldn’t see the she she wanted to see. And the pain and panic in her voice was distressing to hear. She just needed a few moments’ respite. A few moments of escape breath.
LET THE BALDNESS BEGIN
I was ready for the bald. At least I thought I was. Ready to retire the Jew-fro with ginger tendencies and be cool. A bald, cool Jew with cancer. Cool.
We were in the hat business and, to be in the hat business, we must have hats. Why am I using the royal we meaning me? We were in the hat business so we needed to buy me hats. See. Not as stupid as I was about to look! And the hats, they started to come in. From all over the globe.
LA,
Sydney,
Mexico City,
New York City,
Hull City.
Some of the hats were cool, some really NOT so cool, but all heartfelt gestures of thought. In order to make the hat thing really play out, I needed one simple thing to happen. I thought it would happen immediately. Thought that I’d have one dose of chemo and va-voom, I’d be hairless. I genuinely had got it into my head that that’s what would happen. I even thought that the hair itself would just magically disappear. Vanish into nowhere. I am not entirely sure where I thought the hair would go. Maybe it would just be sucked back into my head. I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. I just thought it would go. In an instant.
But it doesn’t go.
And it doesn’t go.
Weeks have passed now and it still doesn’t go.
And more weeks have passed and still it doesn’t go.
And it does not go.
FRO STILL NO GO
And, very strangely, my hair NOT going started to really get to me. It was like a badge of honour that I really needed to wear to validate me in some way. I felt like a freak. A fraud. I had hats. But I still had hair. I had cancer. But I still had hair. I had had heavy-duty chemo. But I still had hair.
I don’t know why I needed the hair to go so much. I think that, if this thing was going to happen, then I needed it to happen to the max. That way I could feel its full force and see what the fuck I was made of. This wasn’t conscious thinking, you understand. The conscious me was in an uncontrollable torrent and I was searching
for anything I could grab hold of to stop me from going under. Besides, it felt wrong wearing baseball caps with bits of Jew-fro seeping out over the sides. I looked like Krusty the Clown! Even when my chemo moved from being once every three weeks to weekly did the fro no go. The doctors put it down to me having really strong hair. Whatever the fuck that means. I didn’t want strong hair. I wanted no hair.
AND THEN IT HAPPENS
I was lying on my hospital bed listening to my mum chatter on about I don’t know what – golf or bridge or Andy Murray, who was only eight at this time – and I lifted my head and a huge mound of my hair was left on the pillow. I don’t know why it chose that moment to come out. It just did. I felt a wave of something. I don’t really know if it was a happy wave or a sad wave. It was just a wave. I think the wave was a recognition that the iconic symbol of cancer was upon me and that there was no escape. If there is an emotion that combines relief and fear, this was it.
Felief. Or Rear.
LET THE MOULTING BEGIN
And, boy, did it moult. Once it started, it didn’t stop. I shed hair from every pore. Every orifice. I did the classic thing of shaving all my hair off before it got the chance to disappear itself. Nobody likes a tufty Jew. But I was not prepared for it all going. It all going. And I ended up looking like a big old, puffy-eyed, huge-headed, no-arsed, smooth-skinned newborn.
It made me feel and look like an alien. It also made me feel totally conspicuous and totally invisible all at the same time. Invisible because I didn’t really feel like me at all. Me had been displaced by an alien boy. God knows if me was ever coming back.
THE BADGE
It was also curiously comforting and distinctive. Being bald was one thing, being utterly hair-free was quite another. Brought a whole new meaning to the term ‘smooth’. But smooth I really was. And born again. Not in a religious way, you understand, but in a soft and vulnerable way. Very vulnerable. And very soft. And other. As I’ve said, I like ‘other’. Other took me out of my cocoon into a place of oddness and otherness and wonder. Odd but strangely thrilling.