Odds on

What Ellen was thinking about as she lay in the doctor’s office was the presentation of odds, one in ten, ten to one, 90%, which chance would you take?

There’s a 90% chance I don’t have cancer she practiced saying to herself. But if there was a one in ten chance you would win a lottery wouldn’t those be pretty good odds? Who wouldn’t take that bet.

The thing she didn’t like about results was knowing that the dice had already been rolled somewhere. You were stuck on that teetering point where it wasn’t clear if the dice would land on a five or a one, but somewhere out there the decision was already made. You were just going to be the last to know.

‘Would you like a few minutes to calm down’ the doctor asked kindly.

Ellen shook her head slightly, she considered telling the doctor that 10 extra minutes to contemplate her potential non-existence was unlikely to help much. She felt sick and assumed she would continue on the borderlands of nausea until that point, potentially 6 weeks in the future where she got the all clear. And if that day never came then she this could well be the calmest she would be for the rest of her life. A new wave of nausea. The thought of spending her last few months in a state of perpetual unease was almost as horrible as the thought of having a final few months.

Ellen did not tell the doctor any of this, firstly because she felt that the doctor was unlikely to be the receptive listener she needed and secondly because she was worried that if she opened her mouth she might throw up. 

 'This will hurt a little', she was not reassured, it did, the local anaesthetic burned. ‘Can you feel that?’

Ellen shook her head again once again biting down the temptation to reply with her actual thoughts, the rather enigmatic ‘I feel everything’ but really, she did seem to be feeling about as much as a person could feel at any one time. The absence of actual physical pain seemed like something of an irrelevance. 

‘There we are all over now’ the doctor smiled brightly and Ellen struggled with the idea that doctors might actually be very stupid. No one seemed to comprehend that having a small cut in her arm was pretty much the least of her worries. Nothing was remotely over. 

Even in the best-case scenario she suspected this would mark her quite apart from the scar, which was to be four to five times the size of the removed mole. Whichever way you looked at it it was the beginning of the end. She promised not to get her arm wet or do any heavy lifting, which, from a certain angle seemed like entirely pointless precautions. Or desperately necessary? What if she didn't have cancer but did die of sepsis? 

The doctors had repeatedly assured her she had done the right thing in coming in but she remained unconvinced. Was anyone actually happier for knowing they were dying? Was the truth actually worth anything? 

She supposed ignorance was still an option, there would be a letter that she could simply never open. The harm seemed to be not so much in knowledge as in the fact that there was knowledge squatting out there like a toad waiting for her to reach into the future and grab at it. Innocence had been in not knowing there was a question.

She bought a bottle of wine and took the bus home, she shielded her arm against the waving bodies and bags of strangers. It felt oddly like she was trying to cradle a child and at least two people knocked into her anyway.

She drank her wine and prayed that she didn’t have cancer, then changed her mind, because it was too late to pray that decision had already been taken at some point. At this point luck was an irrelevance. 

She wanted to call someone and tell them she might be dying, but then if it turned out she wasn’t dying at all she’d feel stupid. If she was dying ought she to try and reconnect with all the people she's missed over the years? They’d fallen out of contact after all, and with the clear knowledge that death was an option. If she never talked to them again and died at 25 was that different to never talking to them again and dying at 80?

She couldn’t decide, which might have been the effects of the wine.

She took a drop of the wine on her finger and sketched a rough cross just below her wound. Dying young was good if you wanted to be martyr to something, but that would mean believing there was something more important than simply living. She tried to remember what she had believed before, she was pretty sure she’d had ideals although she didn’t have much clarity on exactly what they might have been.

Would it be strange to tell anyone at all? A bizarre confession - my body has turned against me. She supposed that, with the general prejudice for truth, whilst people might not enjoy knowing they would resent not knowing. It wasn’t the kind of secret you could keep forever - unless there wasn’t any secret to keep.

I mean the average person has a one in three, one in two? chance of dying of cancer at some point. If you looked at it that way her current odds were actually pretty good. Better than expected if you took a sufficiently long view. She had a feeling that probably wasn’t how it worked at all. If you had a one in ten chance of having cancer at 25 maybe you had a what a one in one chance of having cancer at some point? A nine in ten? Would her best escape from these unpromising odds be to jump in front of a bus and deny the fates their due. That would entirely remove the dilemma of whether to give any advance notice. 

She closed her eyes but she couldn’t get to sleep for the fear that if she did she’d never wake up again. She told herself that if she had skin cancer she probably wouldn’t die in her sleep of anything else - it would be a waste of malice to mark her twice. This logic combined with wine proved soothing enough to bring on an uneasy sleep.

5 weeks, 6 days to go.