What a harrowing ordeal …

… Instead of shaking all over, I read the newspapers. I listened to the radio. I had my lunch. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A week later the phone rang and I was told that I had a cancer of the testicles that had spread to a lymph node and to one lung. Instead of seeing the urologist, I would now need to see an oncologist. For a few days I comforted myself by pretending that, because of my abiding interest in the mysteries and niceties of Being, I had to see an ontologist. Nobody except one of my fellow Irish novelists thought this was funny. The oncologist showed me the scan of my insides on his computer. At first I could not work out from what angle these images had been taken. Then I understood that the scan was a sort of carpaccio of the middle and lower parts of my torso, a slice of the inside of the self. While I saw some well-known organs clearly, the cancer as it appeared on the screen seemed nothing more than a smudge, a few faint grains. If the doctor had not pointed them out to me, I would have given myself a clean bill of health and gone to play tennis.