Poker with Izod

Every month a group of my (now ex) colleagues meet up at one or others' house for a home cooked meal and a game of poker. They take the money they would normally spend on a night out and put it in the pot for a poker game. By all accounts they have a great evening and balanced out over a year or so most of them find they have won as much as they have lost.

I've never attended. I'm not a dedicated gambler and have never regarded it as a form of entertainment worth paying for but recognise I could be wrong in this. Several friends and relatives view a holiday in Las Vegas as much more fun than spending several hours underwater, watching fish, every day. On the odd occasion when I have played a machine or laid a winning bet I've been only too sure that my luck won't repeat again so I've taken my money and run.

On my last evening in hospital the Worcester butcher came to see me together with the specialist nurse. They'd received the pathology report. Elaine was down in the cafe as I'd been eating my evening meal in my room and she'd left me to it but the butcher started straight in. He'd excised the entire tumour and a margin of healthy tissues all around and below it. He was entirely confident that my cheek was now healthy with no tumour tissue left in my mouth. He'd also removed sixty lymph nodes from under my jaw and in my neck. This was a personal best! The most he'd ever removed before was fifty-six, or maybe fifty-seven. Of these sixty only four showed evidence of cancerous cells. All four were just under my jaw bone showing the earliest stages of spread as the cancer spreads slowly down the neck through the lymph system. As the nodes collect cancer cells they 'fill up' and some glands can show signs of 'escape'. Of my four affected lymph glands one shows this tendency.

Over the years the medics have drawn a line between those patients who need follow up treatment and those who do not. Follow-up treatment is normally radio-therapy (or being zapped by a Dalek). There is nothing pleasant about this. For the first two or three weeks you are hardly aware of anything happening although you may get increasingly tired as the rays zap the energy out of you. But you have to go every day (although you do get the weekends off). Fortunately NHS transport is available for this as our nearest Dalek lives in Cheltenham. A door-to door service apparently. About 3 weeks in you start to suffer from zap-burn which is a bit like sun-burn. A skin cream is provided to sooth this and I am told that olive skin like mine which does not burn easily in the sun, may offer some protection. After that the inside of the mouth may begin to blister and ulcerate, the tongue may become swollen and generally the mouth becomes uncomfortable and painful. The rays can also damage the bone of the jaw and the tissue structure. They kill off the hair follicles - so I won't need to shave my left cheek again but also the salivary gland in the same cheek. Fortunately the right cheek will be protected and so saliva output should still be sufficient to avoid the dreaded 'dry-mouth'. I really don't fancy meeting the Dalek.

The line the medics draw between needing zap treatment or not is more than three affected lymph nodes or having just one where there are signs of 'escape'. I qualify, just, on both grounds. It took the Worcester butcher a good five minutes or more to get round to this. Again I was considering a murder defence on the grounds of incoherent incompetence and scientific obfuscation when I was told that Dalek treatment was "strongly recommended".
"Oh shit!" I thought. "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!!" I couldn't believe that I was so unlucky as to have put just a toe over the line. Just one gland less - if it had been the right one - and I would have escaped the Dalek and his zap-ray. Just my bad luck. Is it any wonder that I don't play poker?

Elaine returned and we recapped all the information we had just gone over. The precise details of the zap treatment will be left to the Dalek but as everything has probably been removed there is no immediate rush, they will give my mouth some time to recover first and the treatment will start in three or four weeks or so. I may need my mouth zapped or my neck or both. It may last four weeks or as many as seven. Some people breeze through with very few side effects, others find it unbearable and cannot complete the course of treatment. Then the butcher left us together, with the good news that I could go home tomorrow.

Of course, there were people to contact and give the news to. Father, friends, sister and so on. During the course of conversations I came to realise that there was another point of view. It may be three or four weeks of suffering when eating may prove almost impossible (I will still have the feeding tube in my stomach to inject food drinks through) BUT it will make it a 'Belt and Braces' treatment. On my last day in hospital I met a man who had had surgery a year ago for oesophageal cancer. They had reconstructed his oesophagus by using part of his small intestine but it hadn't worked properly and something had blocked up causing him to become anaemic, loose weight and generally spend most of the last year in or visiting hospital. He was back today to be admitted for more surgery. I certainly hope to avoid that level of familiarity with the nursing staff!

So perhaps I'm not unlucky after all. Perhaps my 'bad luck' is actually good luck in disguise. Maybe what I'd hoped for was actually the worst possible option and what I'd feared was actually the best. I can't tell whether I'm lucky or unlucky as I can't tell the difference any more. Is it any wonder that I don't play poker?