Thank God, thank God, thank God–for now, anyhow

As an update to this:

abnormalities

I thought I was in the all-clear for the moment as far as tests go, but April 30th’s pap smear–I’d assumed hearing nothing for so long was a good thing–apparently turned up abnormalities. This is not the first time this has happened, but it is the first time I have reason to be worried. They ask for a retest in six months. The waiting will never be over, or the worry.

Pelvic pains too, and waiting for my period, perhaps? Having had more or less regular periods since their return six months ago, last month was marked by a light period as predicted, then a hard sudden hemmorhage two weeks later. I don’t know what to expect now. Handy that the possible side effects of Tamoxifen include both irregular periods and uterine cancer, the hallmarks of both being vaginal bleeding.

Holding the gynecologist’s letter in my hand–Your pap results showed signs of cellular abnormalities–I could not escape the sickness and anger and the why me, why now. “I hate my life right now,” I texted–though predictive text first suggested the phrase, “I have my life right now,” which seemed somehow significant. 

I have my life right now.  

I’d like to ride that out awhile.

Jade Goody & the mythology of redemption: the spectre of cancer in the media

Jade Goody–the Big Brother reality television “star”-cum-cancer martyr–died the day before I started my own chemotherapy. I remember standing on the platform at the Royal Oak train station, waiting to go to the hospital for my first chemo treatment, looking at everybody’s greedily-grabbed copies of the Metro and the London Lite; even in the “real” papers, Jade Goody was the front-page news (alongside findings of a recently-published study, coincidence or no, about the non-improvement of cancer survival rates in the UK).

 I don’t know how large the storm surrounding this woman was in the American media, but in England she was as ubiquitous as Big Brother himself: first for the car-crash entertainment value of her all-around ignorance and repugnance, with the cherry-on-top of racist allegations–and then for the car-crash entertainment value of her stage 4 cervical cancer, and society’s ensuing Schadenfreude at observing her decline, glued to the television with eyes wide.

She made a mint out of that damn cancer, and, maybe even more sickeningly, seemingly won everybody’s sympathy from the media exploitation of her sickness –from her showstoppin’ Cancer Special, to her eight-weeks-to-live “fairy-tale” white(trash) wedding, to which she sold the rights to Ok! magazine for £700,000. (A  few months after Goody’s death, her previously-incarcerated Prince Charming was arrested yet again for an alleged sexual assault on a teenager. This may want to be excluded from the Disney version of the Jade Goody Story).

The debate raged as to whether Jade, being dumb as pig shit, was the victim of the media’s agressive manipulation of her, or whether Jade, being an unscrupulous media whore, was in fact the one doing the manipulating of her audiences. But whoever was pulling the strings, the result was the same–as her Guardian obituary put it:

The pig who deserved burning had become our sacrificial lamb, garnished with sentiment. Britain had turned 180 degrees to embrace a woman it had earlier scorned. Symbolically, at least, it was the right time for Goody to die.

–what someone on the BBC referred to, as I listened to Radio 4 while waiting for my chemo, as “the mythology of redemption.”