Nothing can prepare you for a
real incurable illness quite like an imaginary one. Contributed by Ian Marchant
In early 2020 I was diagnosed with the bad kind of prostate cancer, the kind you die of, rather than with. I was told that it had metastasised into my bones, and nothing could be done except courses of hormone blockers, which might hold the lesions in my bones in check for a while, but would strip away my sexuality. I found my inner stoic agreeing with Spike Milligan, like it says on his headstone; I told you I was ill. Prior to 2020 I am being unfair on myself if I say I did not have a real illness. It was real but some would call it hypochondria. Health anxiety disorder, they call it now. Nor, I’m certain, are doctors allowed any longer to refer to ‘problem patients’. But that’s what I was. In fact, my GP at the time was doing a PhD on the subject of problem patients, and I became ‘Patient M’. He told me this on my last visit, the one where I told him I thought I was through the worst. When this happened though, or how long it lasted, I’m no longer entirely sure. I lived in Lancaster, I know that at least. I lost somewhere in the order of four or five years of my life to terror, utter screaming shaking nightmarish terror. A ‘real’ illness, no matter how gloomy the prognosis, simply can’t match the horror of my life in those lost years. I remember its beginnings, 1992, maybe? I was in the car, with my second wife and two children (aged 11 and 2). We had spent a few days with some friends in West Wales, and now we were driving home to Lancaster.
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We had stopped at the old Little Chef beside the A483 outside Wrexham; it’s a Starbucks now, but I never feel inclined to stop. Without warning, my arms went numb, my chest tightened, my breathing came in gasps, and my head spun. I was hollowed out by fear. I said to my wife, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack. I am, I know I am.’ She’s a nurse, and I’m not sure she was as worried as I was, but the Little Chef staff may have been, because I insisted they call 999. In the ambulance on my way to Wrexham General, the paramedics worked to calm me down. I think I was seen quite quickly; I remember an ECG printout, and a consultant being kind enough to show me my results next to those of a normal readout and talking me through the results. ‘As you can see, Mr Marchant, they map exactly on one another. It’s almost a textbook example of a normal ECG’. ‘But what was it?’ I asked. ‘Have you been playing golf?’ I had played pitch and putt with my wife and pals the day before. ‘Sometimes you get shoulder pain from playing golf; that can feel like a heart issue.’ He was very kind; we all laughed. Then, it happened again, maybe six months later. By this time, I had split up with my second wife, and I was home alone with two kids. I had never been so terrified. I called my soon-to-be exwife; she reminded me of Wrexham, but
