Is There Anything I Can Do? (or 10001 things not to say to someone who is sick)

By Salima Saxton

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

“Is there anything I can do?”

Oh, thank you for asking, I say with a half smile.

Could you rewind me back to May? That’s where I’d like to be. Stop the clocks, freeze-frame the dirty laundry, the coffee cups and croissant crumbs patterning the kitchen sink, the lingering morning of fried bacon and fresh sheets waving on the washing line. I’ll hide behind the fluttering linen so you can’t see me, but I spy you. Boo. You could place me gently in the garden — God, it needs weeding, but look at that sprawling lavender and lovage. Sit me down in that broken rattan chair, my favourite place, and let me lean back, back, back. Hazy sunshine. Ketchup on my pyjama top. Tigger curled in my lap, growling the minute I move.

I want to be there. Not here.

Can you do that for me?

At first, I thought I had food poisoning. A woman had been vomiting outside the local bookshop — the kind of English woman who apologises even as her body betrays her, spewing greenish water onto the pavement. Her two little boys cry, dropping teddies and comics and sweets. I help. Reluctantly. Within days, I too was sick, cursing my Good Samaritan-itis. But tucked up in bed, eating salt-and-vinegar crisps on toast and dozing through Downton Abbey, I felt a touch of glory.

Until the world tipped. And I landed in an overheated NHS hospital. Don’t ever get ill in the summer. Tans, spaghetti-strap dresses, Cornettos, and the sound of children playing through locked ward windows don’t remind you life is still beautiful. They punch you hard in the gut. I thought illness was for other people. Not me. Ha! Look at my rosy cheeks and my, what big, white teeth I have. All the better to dutifully chow down roughage (even though I'd kill for a keema paratha fried in ghee). I’m healthy, you see. Smugly so. Flexibly so, my pilates teacher purrs. Let’s toast to good health, with my hold-your-nose maca, mushroom, spirulina, super-dupergreens smoothie. I didn’t get sick. I don’t get sick.

Until I did.

So, is there anything you can do? Yes.

You could stop the night. That would help most. Night is when the monsters arrive. When I rewrite my consultant’s words into a darker, more tragic tale — because if I’ve received news like this, surely, it’s worse than I imagine. That’s the logic I live by now: a cranky, wind-up machine that stutters and starts.

Please, stop the blackness. That inky, starlit nonsense. Then maybe make sure nobody else ever sleeps? Except me. Give me marathon twelve-hour blackouts so time speeds up and this will all be done sooner — sooner than the 24 hours of the day, the seven days of the week, the months that stretch beyond sight. I want to leapfrog, to Marty McFly my way past it all. And while you’re at it, spare me your promises that ‘the body is stronger than we know.’

You’re wrong. Mine broke.

And if you can’t stop the night, at least stop the silence. Fill it with the rowdy or surly. I’m not fussy. Kick the teens’ music up another notch. That’d help more than another lasagne (no offence, but fuck me, I just want champagne and blinis). At 3 a.m. it’s just me and that badger snuffling in the garden. We listen to the owl together. He forages elderberries and bracken. I re-order the airing cupboard, chucking yellowing pillowcases onto the driveway, and then as a coda, do a little deep dive catastrophise. But the snuffler’s always gone before I’m ready. And then I’m alone with my thoughts, and I don’t want them anywhere near me. Turn them off, or at least turn them down. Could you do that?

Because here they come again. I’m superglued to a Generation Game conveyor belt. Number one! The nasogastric tube up my nose, down into my stomach. “It’s just uncomfortable.” They lied. It was medieval. It was the worst medical experience of my life. Number two! I’m on the cool corridor floor, vomiting into a Sainsbury’s bag, praying for morning. They’re whispering I’m a health-and-safety risk, but I will not move my face from the cold tiles. I’m a bad patient. Three. I’m chanting little prayers in the early hours, promises to be better and kinder and GOOD and to stop stealing at self-checkouts if I can just get through this. And here’s the Brucie Bonus memory. The consultant I’m a little in love with, telling me the news. I try to leave the room. Post-major surgery. Drip still attached. I replay it over and over. Did I make it out of bed? Out of the room? In my head I’m running barefoot down the corridor, gown flapping, trying to escape this version of me. But my husband says I never moved.

So yes, maybe get rid of night altogether. And while you’re at it: no sunsets, no sunrises, nothing that makes me feel like I’m in Beaches. I don’t want beauty that surprises. No snow, no thunderstorms, no rainbows. Definitely no rainbows. But the moon? Maybe hang the moon in the sky all day. I’d like the company. I’d like the certainty.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ You can keep the fear out of your eyes. Because I see it, and I don’t want it near me. I want gossip and jokes and compliments I can believe. Tell me I look pretty. Tell me to hurry up and finish my debut book: that it’ll be a global bestseller, so I’d better get a move on with all of this rubbish. Tell me that soon we’ll be drinking spicy mojitos on that velvet hotel sofa, flirting with the Brazilian barman again.

And while you’re at it, could you superglue down the grief tourists? Like perhaps, just their fingers. The ones who crave the details, who feed off the bile and fluids and stitches just to relish in, ah, at least it isn’t me. I can smell them a mile off. And silence the wellness prophets too, please. The raw-garlic, gluten-is-death brigade. Once I found them amusing. Now I do not. Distract them with a cult or a new drug for a few months. Then maybe I’ll find my funny bone again. By Spring.

But mostly, remind me. Remind me that joy is found in the unlikeliest places. In the translucent, elderly woman across from me, whose hands curled into a permanent fuck-you as she slept. In the anaesthetist who told scurrilous jokes and twirled his moustache, seconds before I went under. Remind me I was doing Nazi salutes in recovery, making my husband laugh, even though he already knew the news I’d run from the next morning.

And then there’s you — the ones who don’t ask, but just do. The minute it began, you appeared: a ragtag army I never knew I had. The WhatsApp rota for treatment runs I ungraciously refuse, the care packages of oddly sexy pyjamas, oud, and sausage rolls. That song you play me. Your attempt at wheelies with that blasted wheelchair and then you crawl into my hospital bed, wrapping yourself around me like a talisman. Is there anything I can do? Keep laughing at my stories, would you? The Mean Girls ward outrage over my coveted window bed. The sulks behind curtains, even as I scream. Mad Lisa, who I befriend in an opiate haze — only to discover she forces other patients to steal from the downstairs Marks & Spencer. I jolt awake to her stroking my feet: “Morning, my darling.”

You just know what to do. No questions needed. And so, I exhale. Finally. I plant my feet on the earth. And I come home. I am still the same old curmudgeon. I am not strong, nor saintly, nor wise. I am contradictory and rude and funny and opinionated, and a total fucking nightmare control freak. (I was calm during my three c-sections because I was awake and thought I was part of the surgical team) I’m still a little too soft-hearted when it comes to my kids. I haven’t stopped making midnight shopping purchases for a life I had a decade ago. I still know all the lyrics to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. I’m me, still me, sitting here in the sunshine, writing this to you, tracing the long scar down my abdomen, the yellow bruises scattered across my chest and arms.

And yet, and yet, and yet, drums my heartbeat. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

But with you.

I can.

x

I am now to be found also at

Salima Saxton

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