Russell Jones's Week Moment: My Cancerversary

15 years after the removal from his kidney of the biggest tumour in Stockport, Russell Jones commemorates the agony and reflects on the heroism of the NHS doctors and nurses who saw him through

Russell Jones. Photo: Jason Kenny

Russell Jones is donating his writing fee this week to Cancer Research UK

I hope you’ll excuse this week’s column being about something rather more personal than the usual fusterclucks playing out in Washington and Westminster. Today is the 15th anniversary of me being sliced in two, and it feels like something I should commemorate.

The events leading up to me being cut in half began quite normally. But you can say the same about the first couple of minutes of Jaws. Fifteen years ago, I awoke one Monday looking forward to an uneventful day working from home. I’d gorged myself the previous day, re-filling the tank after an active weekend of hill-climbing and Sunday morning rugby. But that Monday, the food seemed to sit heavily on me, and as the day wore on, I found myself feeling increasingly bloated.

Around 10am, I popped for a wee and was surprised to see blood in the toilet bowl. I suppose for a man, any amount of blood pouring out your genitals is odd, but this really was quite a lavish helping.

So I called 111 and told them my symptoms. Not a minute passed before they called me back to tell me they’d got me a GP appointment, literally now. I hadn’t been worried before, but it was clear the NHS didn’t like the sound of this, and I began to feel rising anxiety.

It wasn’t alleviated by the GP, all scatty hair and cardigans, who distractedly handed me a tiny phial and asked me to pop to her bathroom and provide a urine sample. This would have been a logistical nightmare at the best of times, since my aim is no better than any other man’s, but I struggled to make anything happen. Not a dribble. After a good deal of abdominal squeezing, I managed to perform the task assigned to me and returned to her office to present the results with a ta-daa of delight.

She didn’t share my joy.

“Is that yours?”, she screeched in a high, panicky voice, and clutched her hair in both hands. The phial was entirely full of thick, black-red blood. Recovering, she promised to refer me to a hospital for more tests and sent me on my way. The drive back home took no more than 5 minutes, but by the time I arrived I was in agony. Something had gone badly wrong in my lower abdomen, and I was sweating enough to make my tattoo slide off. I half crawled into my hallway, where I collapsed. I saw blood on my hands, and then, as I looked around, I saw it on the carpet too, and all over the front of my trousers.

This was turning out to be the worst Monday of the week.

Lucky Old Me

In a sense, I was lucky. If I’d been born 100 years earlier, I’d have simply died right there on the carpet in extraordinary pain. If I’d been born in much of the global south, the chances are I’d face the same outcome today, but without the carpet. Had I been born in the USA, using the system Nigel Farage has long advocated, I’d have been left bankrupt, as over half a million people are each year in America.

More good fortune: these events happened just before David Cameron’s first Health Minister, Andrew Lansley, began what Tories describe as their biggest mistake – vandalising the NHS with a plan even Conservative insiders described as “unintelligible gobbledygook”. Their regret is tempered by the fact that they followed this up with something that was no mistake at all: record low investment for a decade. Cameron’s Government had inherited from Labour a guaranteed 48-hour waiting time to see a GP. Liz Truss left office promising a grateful nation they would have to wait no longer than 18 weeks.

So yes, I was lucky: I saw a GP on the same day. And I didn’t have to wait 11 hours for an ambulance, as one in every 10 emergency cases do now, after 14 years of Conservatism. My paramedics were there inside 10 minutes and seemed keen to beat the record for getting me to A&E too. Blue lights up the usually gridlocked A6 outside Stockport, as I perched on a stool in the back.

“I’m going to administer morphine”, said the paramedic.

“No”, I grunted, “I’m fine”. I clearly wasn’t. I have no idea why I was trying to brave this out. I’ve broken my leg, fingers, toes, nose, skull, and several ribs during my not-noticeably careful youth, but they were nothing compared to this. At Stepping Hill Hospital my feet barely touched the floor. I was whisked straight through triage and into a curtained cubicle, where a doctor didn’t even bother asking – he just emptied a pipette of morphine into my mouth, whipped off my trousers, and nonchalantly inserted a catheter.

A catheter is not a pleasant thing, but I’d take it in a heartbeat over everything else that had happened that day. In an instantaneous jet, I filled a clear plastic bag with the contents of my bladder, and then watched as it was switched for a slightly more complicated arrangement. A single pipe fed saline into my urethra, and, by some miracle of medical engineering, the same tube drained the blood that had been gathering inside me into a second bag. The pressure and pain eased, and I settled in for a calm night in hospital.

Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport, Greater Manchester. Photo: Jonny Abbas/Alamy

Nothing Serious?

The following morning was much better. Staff reassured me that this was probably nothing serious. I had no other symptoms suggesting anything catastrophic, so it was most likely I’d developed a kidney stone, and while passing it, it had nicked a vein and caused a small amount of bleeding. The blood had congealed in my bladder, preventing me from weeing. Painful, inconvenient, but very much temporary. The kidney stone would be broken up with ultrasound, and I should be home that evening.

But first they had to do a scan to find the stone. So off I trundled, wheeling a bag of urine around as I padded down corridors in a backless hospital gown custom-designed to expose my backside to all and sundry.

“Hmm”, said the radiologist, passing a device around the gloop on my abdomen and gazing at an enigmatic picture on her screen.

“Hmm?”, I enquired.

“Yes”, she agreed slowly. “Hmm”. I was sent for a CT scan, which to my uninformed mind felt excessive for a kidney stone, and then, chin held high, retraced my dignified. backside-and-urine-enhanced procession back to my bed, there to await the results. An hour later, I was asked to go to a nearby office, because the doctor wanted to speak to me.

The previous year my dad had died. In his final decade he’d had diabetes, gone blind, had a series of strokes, suffered total renal failure, and then worked his way through a slack handful of heart attacks during an explosive sprint finish, before karking it.

What. A. Lightweight.

I’d wondered during his final weeks what would eventually get me, and now I knew. Before I’d even got out of bed, I figured out it was cancer. So I exhibited not a flicker of surprise when the doctor confirmed it. He tried to show me a picture of the tumour on his laptop, but it wasn’t working, and – like most software professionals – I was quietly dying inside as I watched him ineptly try to update his drivers. In the end, I stepped in and did it for him, which is why I spent my cancer diagnosis doing IT support instead of properly listening to what he was telling me.

What He Was Telling Me

What he was telling me was that I had a large tumour on my right kidney, and I wasn’t going home until it had been removed. How soon that happened depended on how quickly the internal bleeding stopped.

I was moved to a specialist urology ward, where I was the youngest patient by approximately half a century, and was met by a nurse who briskly broke news that was worse than the cancer: until surgery day, I'd be woken every two hours to have my catheter bag changed.

“Every two hours?”, I wailed. “Are you taking the piss?”

“Yes”, she replied, "but if I'm not on duty, somebody else will do it.”

Over the coming weeks I was moved further and further away from the location of my first bed, close to the entrance to the ward. This, apparently, was a good thing. I found out later that they keep you close to the nurse’s station if they think your life is at risk. But right now, the biggest threat was death from boredom. I had to pay to access the TV, which was nevertheless turned on all the time, forcing me to watch a short clip of Andrew Lansley on a loop, telling me how things were going to get better. If I wanted that to go away, I had to cough up £5 per day.

Lacking the funds, there were only two forms of entertainment left available to me. The first was morphine. Lord alone knows why I declined a dose in the back of the ambulance. I’d have another dose right now, if you had one. Cos that’s the thing about opiates: they're very moreish, like weaponised chocolate Hobnobs.

The second form of entertainment was Clive, a fellow patient whose bed I couldn’t see from my new position half a mile away from the nurses, but who I guessed had once been a pub singer, now sadly in the grip of dementia. Every evening, the moment the lights were dimmed, Clive’s brain told him it was showtime, and he’d launch into the Rat Pack’s greatest hits in a formerly fine tenor. He clearly had an established set of about 25 songs. Little Old Wine Drinker, Me was followed by Fly Me to The Moon without exception. If anybody interrupted him, there would be a brief pause before he’d start again at the beginning, meaning the show could easily go on until 5am. It sounds entertaining, but by week two I was cheering for the cancer.

I tried my best to remain hopeful, but since the IT failure left me unable to see the scale of the problem, all I had was the worst things my vivid, morphine-enhanced imagination could throw at me. I was glued to my phone, Asking Jeeves to reveal everything he could about kidney cancer. Jeeves was frankly useless. The best he could tell me was that if the tumour is smaller than 7cm, you have a fair chance of living. Above that, and you have a fair chance of dying.

So I was all prepped when, a couple of days after I arrived at the urology ward, a surgeon came to visit me wearing a suit so aggressively pin-striped it would make your eyes bleed. He gave off such a whiff of grandiose self-confidence that it could bring down light aircraft, and informed me that he wasn’t going to perform the operation in person: it would be performed by a colleague, but “he’s brilliant too”. But I had more important things to do than laugh.

“Is it bigger than 7cm?”, I demanded.

He drummed his fingers and sniffed. “You've been looking up things on the internet”.

Of course I have. I’ve got nothing else to do, except watch a silent, 2-minute film of Andrew Lansley on a permanent loop.

“Well: is it?”

“Yes”, he said, and my heart fell. “It's 17cm”.

Having already fallen, my heart was out of options, so instead the bottom fell out of my world. If 7cm equated to a 50/50 chance, 17cm was surely unsurvivable. I would never leave this godawful ward. I'd shuffle off my mortal coil to the singular stylings of Clive warbling That's Life, which was a fate worse than death.

TWOC and the Godlike Polish Doctor

But I still had to go through the motions, and the next motion was about to be attempted. Over the course of seven weeks, the liquid being drained out me has gradually faded from thick, deep red to a pale pink, like a rosé you’d be served in a restaurant in Hell. This was good news, of course, but the catheter itself had been driving me mad. It was uncomfortable and itchy, like a sunburn inside my penis. I’d complained to nursing staff, but – with deep sympathy – they told me that’s just how catheters are. However, with the bleeding now more or less stopped, it was time for Trial Without Catheter, or TWOC as the staff insisted on calling it.

The Trial consisted of me drinking a couple of litres of water, after which the catheter would be removed. My job was to pass that couple of litres into a pulp cardboard urinal bottle the shape of an aardvark’s head, thus proving my bladder was fully functional, and the surgery could proceed. So in went the water, and out came the tube, and it’s at this point that the more squeamish amongst you may wish to stop reading.

Just like the first experience of providing a urine sample in the GP’s toilet, nothing happened. I waited and squeezed and pushed and sweated, but not a drop would come out of me. It turned out that catheters aren’t supposed to feel quite as itchy and uncomfortable as mine did. I was allergic to the latex, and for seven weeks, the inside of my urethra had blistered and swollen. Once the tube was removed, my urethra closed up as tight as a gnat’s chuff, and my 750ml bladder now contained 2 litres of water, with nowhere to go.

The swollen, bloated agony I’d experienced on the first day was back, and then some. Medics rushed to me as I flopped around, howling on the floor, and was carried back to my bed. Curtains were whisked around me, and nursing staff battled to re-insert a non-latex catheter. Not a hope. The swelling had clamped my urethra so tightly closed that nothing could penetrate, and each time they tried my gentleman’s area became increasingly bruised, grazed and tender. Dose after dose of morphine were administered. It’s an odd thing, morphine, in my experience. It’s not that it makes the pain stop; it’s just that you no longer care.

There seemed to be about 12 nurses inside the curtains around my bed, and they stripped me naked and took turns applying lubricant and trying different tactics to shove a glass tube up my battered and bloodied penis. And then the curtains parted once more, and in swept a remarkably handsome Polish doctor with a tray full of brutal-looking instruments. Of course, he swept. He had the effortless magnificence of a man who swept everywhere, and I'm pretty sure he was accompanied by his own dedicated lighting team, because in that dingy and overcrowded cubicle, he seemed to glow. Even his tray of brutal instruments looked laughably glamorous, like a movie prop; but presumably they were real, because I later found out he was considering opening me up right there, on the basis that a clean incision is easier to sew up again than an explosively torn bladder.

An entire room full of wilting nurses stood back to let him get at my tallywacker, which had by now shrunk to the size and shape of a chantenay carrot in response to the combination of pain, fear, embarrassment, medical grade opiates, and sheer awestruck envy at the unfeasible handsomeness of this man. He looked like he’d have been rejected from the cast of Ocean’s 11 for being a bit too good-looking. I winced as he poked at my bruised and bloodied member.

“We may have to get him to theatre”, he said.

“Don't be ridiculous”, I replied. “I can't go to the theatre looking like this”. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever said, and nobody noticed, because they were all discussing whether to have one more attempt. More dollops of lubricant were added to my giggle-stick, and I was gripped on all sides by nurses and held firmly in place while Doctor Magnificent forced the tube up my urethra and the sun glinted off his perfect brow. He was grunting with the effort, but it was drowned out by the continuous keening sound I emitted as he battled away. I don’t know if there’s more pain in the world.

And then something inside me went pop, the excruciating pressure eased in an instant, and a geyser of blood and urine exploded out of me, instantly filling the bag, and then leaking across the bed, floor, and assembled company. I lay gasping. The doctor nodded handsomely and swept the curtain aside to leave. I glanced after him, and saw my brother with my mum in her wheelchair. It was visiting hours. They'd heard the whole lot, and now saw me, lying naked in what would happen if you opened a festival toilet in an abattoir. Not, I have to say, my finest hour. Such was the look of frozen shock on my mum’s face that it hasn’t changed since. Although a lot of that might be her Parkinson’s disease.

Anyway, it's traditional to say these things are worse for the family.

Hard no.

It was definitely worse for me.

Not a Combatant, the Battlefield

It's become a term I hate: battling cancer. It's the go-to cliche to describe those who host a malign little guest, but I can tell you for damn sure that I didn't fight anything. Nobody with cancer does. I lay in a bed and watched through a morphine haze as the NHS fought tirelessly on my behalf, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, day and night, for months.

Me? Battle? Not for a second. I wasn't a combatant. I was the battlefield.

I’d been nonchalant about my death until TWOC, but a few nights later, it all washed over me. I found myself doing odd things. I told my business partner I wasn’t coming back no matter what, and he could have the whole thing – I didn’t want a penny in return. Idiot move. I tracked down an email address for Mitchell Hurwitz and sent him an email to thank him for writing the hilarious Arrested Development. Series Four suggests he no longer wishes to receive such notes.

And then, a few days later, in the wee small hours, I had a little weep, which is most unlike me. A Malaysian nurse sat with me for hours, holding my hand in silence, the pair of us softly serenaded by Clive. Of all those who struggled to help me during those months, it is she who I remember the most, and I don’t even know her name.

She was one of an army of wonderful, thoughtful, skilled, patient and criminally underpaid foreign staff upon whom the NHS relies, and to whom I – and millions more – literally owe our lives. My oncologist was Greek. My anaesthesiologist, Indian. I was cared for by nursing staff from Asia, Africa, Europe, the Far East, and all points on the compass. Of course, this was before Brexit drove more than 4,000 such heroes out of the country.

After the far more localised disaster of TWOC, I was shoved straight into surgery. I said goodbye to my family because I fully expected not to survive this. Yet here we are: today marking exactly 15 years since I was taken down to the operating theatre – yes, on a Sunday. Things were now considered an emergency. The original schedule was for 4 hours under anaesthesia. In the end, it took 11 hours, by which point my family had concluded that I’d been right to expect death.

Surprisingly for all involved, I woke up, gradually over two days, sliding in and out of consciousness and self-administering morphine with a small switch attached to my hand with an elastic band. An attempt had been made to give me an epidural – I didn’t even know I was pregnant – but it had failed, so pain management was delivered by yet more doses of lovely, lovely opiates. When I was finally fully awake, I attempted to look down at the site of the operation but found I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. With my stomach muscles severed in two, leaving a scar more than half the circumference of my body, I had no power to move my head or legs. So instead, I asked a nurse to photograph the site on my phone. When I saw the image, I was appalled. Am I really that fat? But no, I’m only 37% that fat: the rest was swelling, and eventually reduced.

Everything about me was reduced, actually. My youthful certainty in my own invincibility was gone, which is no bad thing, considering my record with broken bones. My relationship with my girlfriend vanished too, which was probably also no bad thing from her point of view.

I Marie Kondo’d my life, carelessly throwing overboard anything that didn’t bring me immediate joy. Near-death experiences can make you astonishingly selfish, and I no longer had time for other people. I’d also been reduced by four stone – that’s 25kg – in seven weeks, although to be fair 5kg of that was the tumour, which broke the record for the largest kidney cancer ever removed at Stepping Hill.

Men, eh? We’re obsessed with size.

But on the other hand, something inside me was reborn. Until the age of 40, I’d been drifting through life with a shrug. Post-cancer, that changed. It made me care again. I’d looked over the brink, deep into the abyss, and lived to tell the tale in 4000 words in Byline Supplement. A continuous exultation awaited me as I exited Stepping Hill. Life was suddenly wonderful. It’s fair to say my cancer was both the worst, and the best thing that had yet happened to me.

Over the next days and weeks, I had to learn to walk again, and then spent a year undergoing physiotherapy and convalescence. By this point the Tories had deemed that near-fatal cancer wasn’t a proper illness, so I received no benefits whatsoever, and would have ended up homeless but for the kindness and generosity of friends and family. Instead, I got to gently recuperate in my rented house and, desperate to avoid any more boredom, I taught myself to paint.

Painting of David Bowie by Russell Jones. Bowie died from liver cancer in 2016.

Why Me? Why Anybody?

Bravely, foolishly, or in a spasm of egalitarianism, I volunteered to take part in a drug trial for a potential cure for kidney cancers. It left me undergoing experimental chemotherapy for three long, nauseating years, and triggered a lifetime of migraines that still haunt me to this day. But I don’t regret it, because the drug works and will help save many lives.

But this stuff isn’t free. The professor who was leading the drug trial told me my hospital treatment would have cost over £750,000 in the USA, and the ten years of post-surgery care would add another million.

Why me? That’s what I found myself asking. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I didn't smoke. I drank only in moderation. I played rugby, I climbed hills, I worked hard. I'd led a life that was not exactly blameless, but at least so lacking in blame that it hadn't yet attracted attention of the authorities. So why me?

Why anybody, of course. But it’s always somebody. Somebody's mum, somebody's child. This was my turn. I hope it won't be yours in future, but statistics suggest there's a 50-50 chance it will be, which is in part why I'm writing this today. Sure, the act of writing qualifies as some kind of therapy, for me at least: I doubt hearing about my lacerated penis has been especially therapeutic for you. Sorry about that.

But I hope I'll inspire you to de-risk your life wherever you can. My tale seems grim, but I was a lucky one. I lived. Many don’t.

I also hope you’ll forgive me for writing something so self-indulgent, and for ending it by climbing on a soapbox. If you smoke, quit. If you vape, stop. If you eat the wrong things, change. I survived, but take my word for it, surviving is still second best to not getting cancer in the first place. So change whatever you can.

And help wherever you can, too. Byline, the fools, pay me to write this nonsense every week, but this time I'm donating my fee to Cancer Research UK. And if, in these difficult times, you're lucky enough to have a spare fiver, I hope you'll consider making a donation too.

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Russell Jones is the author of two books, The Decade in Tory, and most recently, Four Chancellors and a Funeral. His forthcoming book Tories: The End of an Error, the final volume in the ‘Torygeddon Trilogy’, will be published in 2025