From: Yvonne Harrison Subject: New story: Cancer Date: 1997/06/05 Message-ID: <3395FF71.30D0@ihug.co.nz> X-Deja-AN: 246170153 Organization: The Internet Group Ltd Reply-To: yvo...@ihug.co.nz Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Content-Disposition: inline; filename="CANCER.txt" Usual disclaimer. Mulder, Scully and everyone else on The X-Files belongs to Chris Carter, 10-13 Productions and 20th Century Fox. No infringement on copyright intended because for some reason I am writing for no monetary gain (carumba!), so please don't sue me. For the archives. A V for vignette. Unhappy vignette. Unhappy story. The realities of having a friend die of cancer. CANCER by Yvonne Harrison yvo...@ihug.co.nz He had learnt quite a few things about cancer since he started reading about the subject. Reading as a way to try and become more knowledgeable about what she was going through and reading as a way to try and figure out how he could help make it better. He found out that he couldn't make it better. He found out that it was rarely the cancer that killed once a person was diagnosed. It was usually the result of the chemotherapy or the radiation. The body was subjected to treatments that left the person so sick they couldn't stand the sight of food, an immune system so suppressed that even a cold easily turned into pneumonia. To cure cancer, modern science had come up with the only approach is could - it used a chemical sledgehammer to smash, indelicately and without impunity, cancer cells and healthy cells alike. It was an ugly disease with an ugly cure. Cancer stripped its victims of all dignity. All of it. Every shred of decency, every vestige of their lives and their selves were subsumed to a disease that reduced the person to little more than a reflection of the cancer. He had watched her struggle with that. The loss of dignity. They didn't tell you *that* in a Movie of the Week. They didn't talk about what it was like to lose patches of hair, to vomit so much that in the end your oesophagus started bleeding. They didn't tell you how the steroids they used to keep the cancer under control left you bloated and moon-faced. They didn't tell you about the long term effects of morphine and how you cycled between severe constipation and uncontrollable diarrhea. They did not tell you that it left you a helpless, dependent creature that had to sit on a chair in the shower while someone else washed you. That you would have rubber sheets on your bed. That the cancer despite all the treatment would suddenly strike out and you would have a seizure in the middle of a busy mall, while every one gaped, or stared and no one tried to help... At night, after he had visited her at her mother's house, he would come home and cry with the horror of it all. The tumor had begun to press on her brain, causing seizures. It was like having a stroke every other week. She could hardly walk now. Had to be supported or try and use a cane but her gait was so uncoordinated, she would have to sit down after a few feet, frustrated with merely trying to move from her bed to a chair. When he visited, which was every day, he would try and be cheerful for her. No small task for Mulder, who hadn't had a lot to smile about since starting the X-Files. But he did it. For her. Scully tended to tease him about it, given half a chance. "If I'd known this was all I to do to get you to smile so much I'd have gotten cancer sooner". Ah - the bravado of those who are dying. Sometimes expressed in saint like gestures, sometimes expressed in unspeakable rage but either way it was okay and it was theirs to own. You got to do that with cancer - society gave you a ticket that made it clear that since you were checking out of the game soon, you were exempt from the normal rules. Pass Go, collect $200 and kick the guard on your way past the jail. But Life went on. As it always did. Some nights she was too tired to do anything but lie in her bed, but they'd watch TV anyway. She'd developed an odd obsession for watching reruns of her favorite childhood TV shows. `I Dream of Jeannie'. `The Brady Bunch'. `Gentle Ben'. `Flipper'. `The Monkees'. She didn't analyze it but Mulder thought she wanted to be reminded of times when her whole life stretched out before her, supple and keen to move, to run here and there, run to exotic places full of adventure. If she wanted to talk about dying he gladly did so but with a false calmness that made him clench his teeth from the stress. One day he had come in and the homecare nurse was injecting her with yet more morphine, she was crying from the pain and he hadn't been able to stand it any more. He had gone home with a headache that had turned into a migraine. The migraine was permanent these days. The furrows in his brow did not go away. He noticed his first gray hair two days before she died. They didn't tell you that cancer left lots of walking dead in its wake. Lots of people, family and friends, stumbling around in the dark after the speeches at the funeral and the flowers had wilted and the grass grew over the plot of dirt and the body six feet under had grimaced, shuddered, turned and become one with nature. You just have to get on with your life. Grieving is natural. But gee, it's been a whole year, maybe you should be getting over it. You know, Life has to go on. There was no getting over it. The pain just became a little less with each passing day - except the pain of loss was a mountain and someone was down there at the base with a teaspoon, slowly chipping it away. Every teaspoon meant the pain was a little less but you still had so much pain. A whole mountain of pain. One day it occurred to you that you woke up in the morning and your first waking thought wasn't about the person you lost. Then maybe later, you didn't think about them for a whole day. That was all. At some point in time, you ordered your take-out Chinese and realized that you hadn't thought about them for a while, that you could look at their photo and not cry. The night she died, they were all there. They all tried to be happy so she would go out seeing them smile. If he'd has a choice he would have taken all the morphine that was left over and he didn't doubt that Margaret Scully would have happily helped him and helped herself too. Instead, Peter Scully, the only person in the house who was still thinking rationally, bundled the stuff up in plastic garbage bags and a friend of the family drove it down to the hospital and told the hospital pharmacy to get rid of it. Mulder went home, drove home to his dingy apartment somehow and switched on the TV. Life went on. Somewhere in Bolivia 14 hostages had been killed. In India a train had crashed and 200 were injured. In Wyoming a dog had adopted four baby kittens. His partner, his friend, the only person he had ever trusted, the woman he had shared much of his waking life with, the one person that had always been there for him, the one he was rude to, been angry with, ditched and never once said he was sorry to, the one that sometimes, just sometimes he let his guard down for - *she* had died. And for one simple reason; her death, he had somehow expected the world to stop spinning on its axis, for people to sadly wend their way home and remark on the passing of a brilliant and wonderful woman. But no one did. The apartment was still the same. Cars still drove up and down outside his place. People still came home from work, went out to dinner and argued and drank and fucked and yelled at their kids. Life went on. He would go to her funeral in a couple of days, be in the front row of the church with her family, listen to platitudes, listen to Margaret Scully cry, stare at the coffin with its shiny varnished surface and the brass handles and feel the blankness of loss descend on him. Feel that selfish thought that had started the moment she'd died go through his head in an endless loop. It said: what am I going to do now? That was all. Just endless. What Am I Going To Do Now. The TV droned on. It started to rain. In Wyoming a dog had adopted four baby kittens. The End.