Luck

About three years ago, my friend’s wife developed brain cancer, though we didn’t understand this. She stayed angry and resentful all that summer; when too weak for emotion, she was withdrawn, and chewed by headaches. She couldn’t find a job. About six months after she had first mentioned her troubles to her GP, she finally had a scan, and they found a tumour on the right side of her brain, pushing out tentacles like a hungry starfish. It was not malignant, but it would grow steadily until her brain was crushed. They put her on drugs at once, and did everything they could She had always been gaunt; now the steroids puffed her right up. She grew slow and confused. The emails she wrote were badly spelled all of a sudden. Her rages grew more violent. After four or five months, she went down to the west country, where he mother lives, to die. This was, I think, by that time a relief both to her, and her husband.

They had told her from the very first diagnosis that to operate was hopeless. The cancer had grown so deeply and variously into her brain that it could not be removed without taking essential functions with it. It wasn’t destroying the brain as it grew, just squashing it more and more; but the compression was of course enormously painful and destructive. The pain and the destruction of her personality, grew so great that the doctors decided that her last weeks, at least could be made more tolerable if they just hacked away what they could, and finally, a year ago this month, they opened up her skull and cut out everything they could reach. They reckoned, when it was done, that it would kill her, but that she had another week to live in agony if nothing were done at all.

She didn’t die. She even recovered a little. After a month she could speak in real sentences again; after two months, she left the hospital, and returned to the hospice. After a while she was even taken on holidays by her husband. The huge doses of steroids she has been fed are diminishing over time. Each reduction in the dose brought back a few of her earlier symptoms, but these would taper off after a month or so, and she would be better. She can read again now and is planning to return to London in the autumn.

In all these horrors, my friend was greatly supported by his sister, a woman of huge intelligence and appetite for life. She had been married for a while, to a nasty man. After that, she had a succession of nice boyfriends. She was doing well in her profession; the only cloud on her life were a tooth abcess and a nasty cold. So no one was hugely worried when she didn’t turn up for work last week.

My friend went round just to check on her, and found the curtains drawn in her flat. He checked with the local hospitals and so on, in case her cold had truned nasty, but it was still an overwhelming shock when the police came round on Thursday evening and told him that when they had broken into the flat, they?d found her dead, sitting in her dressing gown in front of the telephone at the table downstairs. It appears she had a blood clot travel to the lung. She was 49.
He left a message giving the barest facts on the answerphone while we were away. Neither he nor his mother can really believe it yet.

I had driven pretty fast to get back from Wales. At one stage, doing a little over a hundred in the fast lane of the almost deserted M50 , I noticed that we had flashed past a broken piece of a shoppig trolley lying by the central reservation: the sort of thing which would have thrown the car out of control had I hit it.

Someone else damn nearly piled into me in a country lane, driving with the homicidal insouciance of a native. We had been lucky, twice. And, when I went through the post on our return, there was a letter from the Norwich Union informing me that the car insurance had run out on April 1st because I hadn’t read through to paragraph three on page two of the last letter they sent in March, and noticed that I needed to make a phone call to renew what had been automatic. We’d been not just lucky, but lucky while uninsured.

If I believed in God, or providence, I would have to suppose that God preserved me from the consequences of my own idleness and folly while punishing all the other characters in this story for purposes all his own beyond my imagination. How could a belief like that possibly be described as moral?

My friend, to whom these things have happened, is, like his wife, a serious and philosophically literate christian. They know the cancer may very well return. They ask for prayers.