I usually publish this newsletter on a Wednesday, and this one should — I think — be reaching you on a Sunday. It was supposed to be all about nu-classism in Britain, from a longer essay I’ve been working on for a while, but I had to abandon it because nothing in my brain works for one week every year and it just so happened that this year it was this week. Every time I sat down to write my brain would turn to TV static. I couldn’t create anything and I couldn’t really take in anything new (this is the week of the year where the only comfort show I can stand to watch is Bones, which is a really great crime procedural because all the crimes are committed in the distant past so the stakes are quite low, actually, I would recommend it).
Hell week, as I’ve taken to calling it, is also MRI week. I have to get an annual MRI because a few years ago I had cancer, and it was a weird cancer for someone to get as young as I was when I got it, and it’s weird to get it if it doesn’t run in your family. So they check in on me every year to make sure I’m okay and there hasn’t been a recurrence. It’s nice that this happens for free, and it’s nice that it happens altogether; that you’re not just discharged after chemo and radiotherapy and sent out into the world to hope nothing bad ever happens again. It’s also not bad being in hospital one day a year, especially when you used to spend many more days than that in hospital. But still, it’s stressful.
It’s stressful because of the waiting mainly. The anxiety that comes from stuck inside the big whirring machine for 30 minutes, with claustrophobia and veins that always — always! — collapse around a cannula, and a choice between only morose classical music and, for some reason, the Michael Jackson Best Of album to listen to, is nothing to the anxiety that comes after. Online cancer forums sometimes call it “scanxiety”. You can go on there and read about other people’s scanxiety as a form of moral support, but it always bums me out too much to do so.
MRI results have to be “double read” by two doctors in radiology, which means waiting around a week to find out whether you’re okay and ready to get on with your life and stop thinking about cancer for another year, or whether you’re going to be pulled back into the past all over again. If you live in the UK you’ll know that the NHS is more stretched and understaffed and underfunded than ever before, so this year I waited longer than usual.
I finally got my results on Friday night whilst in the back of a cab going to a party, which was a nice place to get them, and it was good news. I don’t have any recurrences. It’s the fifth year of no recurrences and clear scans, and so some people refer to that as a marker of being “cancer free”, which is something I’ve chosen to adopt too. I really can’t explain the euphoria of getting good medical news if you’ve had a past experience of getting bad medical news at some point. It sounds cliche to say it’s life-affirming, but as someone who frequently spirals about whether I’m doing enough and trying hard enough and about if I could make more money and if I could be thinner and if I could be kinder and if I should be reading more and whether I could be better and smarter and maybe I should volunteer somewhere, would that be good, but what if I’m only doing it for self-serving reasons, that’s not good, and gets caught up on silly things that annoy me as though they’re the worst thing to have ever happened, it is good to have this reminder that things are good and it’s good to just exist.
It’s also good to be able to sleep again. Anyone I’ve interacted with in the past week has had to talk to a very low-energy, slightly grey sleep deprived version of myself, because anxiety has made me weird and introspective and boring, thinking only about my life five years ago and my life today, and it’s kept me checking my phone every 30 seconds to see if I’ve had an email or call from the doctor, and it’s stopped me replying to invites for drinks and making any plans for my own social life, and worst of all it’s prevented me from being able to rest until I’ve scrolled through TikTok until about 3am every night. Last night I slept. It was great.
I haven’t celebrated properly yet — results week this year also coincided with London Fashion Week, so I’ve spent the weekend surreptitiously trying to take pictures of Juergen Teller in short shorts — but it’s my birthday next week — the woman writing about anxiety is a Virgo? surely not! — so I intend to do it then, before catching up on all my missed work deadlines, replying to all my unread emails and coming back here to publish about 5,000 words on class. Cheerful!
This week I read:
The Angry Island: Hunting The English, by AA Gill
This week I wrote:
A review of Theresa May’s terrible new book, and a cunty little op-ed about Elf Bars being unchic (again, yes again).
I am also really excited to be publishing a new short story in the upcoming autumn issue of The Dublin Review. It is about an Irish girl who lives in New York and is not having a good time. It is of course totally fictional.