Blog: The Big J vs The Big C

Poet, author and activist Janine Booth was part of the ranting poetry movement in the 1980s, performing as ‘The Big J’. In late 2016, she discovered a strange indentation in her right breast and was subsequently diagnosed with breast cancer.

She has to pull up
as she's overheating
Her engine sputters
the dashboard's beeping

She's burning up and burning out
worn and way past her best
Struggled to get through
her last annual test

She's found it more arduous
as she gets older
She's ground to a halt
on the hard shoulder

Ovaries
Out
Plus
Hysterectomy, hopeful
Outcome: odds
Radically reduced
Ensuring
Cancer can't
Touch, take
Obstruct or obliviate
My many more 
Years

What a lucky fucker am I
that when that firework hit my eye
I didn't die

And who even knew
that although you're better off with two
that just one eye will do
just fine, you see
Lucky, lucky me

And when I got a killer disease
I got the sort they can cure with ease
if you please

Surgery
Urgently
Blackcurrant jam on toast with tea
Lucky, lucky me

All hail to public hospitals
Which treat us at no cost at all
Come forth and heed the homage call
Give thanks and praise

Admire their shiny corridors
The wonder drugs in well-stocked stores
And colour-coded wings and floors
And curtained bays

Where patients' injuries are healed
By specialists in every field
Equipment-laden trolleys wheeled
In urgency

Two weeks ago, I posted that I had my second annual post-surgery mammogram and that the medics had found no signs of cancer. That was the truth, but a slightly economical version of it.

I wanted to clap at the funeral today
But I think that is seen as poor taste
I longed to applaud such a brilliant speech
But I feared it would seem out of place

I wanted to shout 'Hear! Hear!' when you said
Deceased was a wonderful chap
The whole of me knew this was so very true
I was craving to let out a clap

When they released me from A&E last week, they pressed into my hand a letter telling me to come back to the hospital this morning to visit the HAMU.

HAMU? Wtf? It turns out that this is the Homerton Ambulatory Medicine Unit. This means a clinic that you walk in to. Is it just me, or is this an excessively wordy name - with an accompanying weird acronym - for what could just as easily be called 'Outpatients' or 'Walk-in Clinic'?

Cancer Research UK has ruffled some feathers with its campaign to publicise the links between obesity and cancer, prompting accusations of 'fat-shaming'. I'm not easily offended - in fact, I dislike the whole notion of 'offence' - but the campaign does deserve some scrutiny.