Through my brother’s eyes.

The following post was written by Zac Vandersman. Zac is one of the most generous people I know, and certainly one of the funniest. His ability to turn every challenge into sheer humour, made, and continues to make my days so much brighter. Throughout my cancer journey, Zac was one of the few people who messaged me every day, mostly to make sure I was ok, but also to make me laugh. Having someone around me, who was comfortable enough to joke about cancer and death, was one of the best therapeutic interventions I had in the whole process. Because, when we can’t control life, what more have we got than a good sense of humour? On another note, Zac and I are not actually related, but I took his mother as my Australian mother early on, and he took me as his sister without even blinking. Recently, I introduced him to someone as my friend, and he gave me a hard time for at least a week. And so he should, because he is in fact, my brother. So I leave you with the words of the best brother I could have asked for.

Dear Readers,

Thank you for reading this much into my post, it already means so much to me. I bring you what I hope, is a unique perspective to Diana’s cancer journey. Being the obsessively compulsively disordered brother of a medical doctor has given me a huge range of perks. For example, the sound medical knowledge Diana provides to reassure me that my moles aren’t suspicious, that a skin tear from galvanised metal does not risk tetanus, and that my risk of rabies is at an all-time low, as Australia is actually one of the countries declared ‘rabies free’. Since I met her, she has been my emotional and spiritual rock when it comes to health and wellbeing. That was until the year 2020 arrived, and decided to rock the boat. 

For the first six months of 2020, Diana had been complaining of a constant itch that she felt was steadily getting worse over time. Her patience and overall calmness with the symptom, had us all feel assured that it was nothing concerning. In addition, clinician(s) she was consulting in relation to this itch seemed similarly unalarmed, which made us doubly reassured that the itch might be related to something minor and incidental. It wasn’t until she started applying her medical training to herself, and started exploring all possible causes, she suspected that something more sinister might be at play. I’ll never forget the day she messaged me to say that she had requested a chest X-Ray. To my medically untrained brain, this meant nothing, what could bone and joints have to do with an itch? But to her, it was a brilliant process of elimination. What seemed like mere hours after the X-Ray, Diana received a phone call telling her to go to the hospital immediately for further tests, as the results had revealed a ‘MASS.’

I remember, it was just before I had to attend a full department team meeting when I got the message containing the dreaded C word. The universally spine tingling, jaw dropping C word: “Cancer.” The team meeting I subsequently took, was one that will stay in my living memory, not for its gripping content and productive discussion, but for all the emotions that were going through me. The surreal reality that at any moment I could either disrupt this meeting by bursting into tears, or by having a full-on panic attack. Two things I had always feared the most about doing in public, yet this time, I was surprised with the lack of care I had about that type of embarrassment. I felt I was in this eerily sombre place where none of that stuff mattered anymore. All that mattered was this realisation that from this point on, it was my turn to be the emotional support for my older sister, my turn to provide her reassurance and comfort, my turn to be the ‘doctor and her as the patient’. However, unlike Diana who is a qualified medical doctor with specialty training experience in oncology, my (non-existent) medical qualifications wouldn’t permit me to be a quasi-doctor-brother. While I was cognisant that I couldn’t reciprocate her good will identically, I realised that I could give her the only thing remotely close to a good therapeutic intervention: laughter.

As we are both fans of the movie Patch Adams, we both have a great appreciation for how important laughter is when feeling unwell. And seeing how that was one of the few things that I could do well, at least in Diana’s perspective, I made it my mission that every time I would contact her, I would strive to get at least one laugh out of her. Naturally the first night of her being in hospital for additional tests was no laughing matter, yet I was able to conjure up a laugh, by describing to her an exaggerated hypothetical situation, involving (of course) her husband and his antics. I have often found that making jokes at her husband’s expense has resulted in her laughing and this was no exception. She said it was the first time she had actually ‘laughed out loud’ in a week. The next few days of Diana being in hospital provided a somewhat ‘sterile’ platform for comedy, but we still managed to crack jokes and laugh despite the intense sense of despair and confusion that surrounded us.

This became the predominant ‘therapeutic intervention’ Diana received from me throughout her months of treatment. Laughter through contextual jokes, silly jokes, dad jokes, and not so funny jokes. One example is how I told Diana that this cancer would not kill her because she always wanted to die peacefully in her sleep like our grandfather, not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car. Or when I made up the news of a crematorium that had burnt down overnight, but the owners said that while the damage was extensive, they are now two weeks ahead of schedule. And so forth…

In the end, regardless of the quality of the jokes, the key thing was the constant form of communication. The global pandemic had made domestic travel within Australia, reminiscent of travel through the dark ages. One day you have your flight tickets all ready to go, the next day a hard border lockdown kicks in, and suddenly your flights go into credit or you get stuck in hotel quarantine. This level of travel uncertainty, made it very difficult for me to physically visit Diana in Brisbane from Adelaide. Which is why keeping a constant flow of instant messages to her was so important. My wife and I have a three-way group WhatsApp chat setup with Diana to keep our sense of connection live, vibrant, and regular.

So, what is the key takeaway from all of this, for you, as the reader? I guess I would summarise it as: constant communication and laughter go a long way for a loved one’s journey of cancer. Naturally it is very common when someone announces the shocking news that they are ill, we all instinctively offer them support, well wishes, and favours in the initial phase. But as time passes, one tends to fall back into regular life routine, and what was once a flurry of offers of support, is now periodically keeping tabs on the person’s progress through their treatment regime. Put simply, the message is: a message on day 67 of a person’s illness is just as important as on the first day, as long as ALL the messages reach their destination. Also, it is ok to laugh about cancer, in fact, it is strongly advisable. Like the age old saying “don’t take life so seriously, it’s not that you’re going to make it out alive anyway”.

Thank you for reading this last line as it provides the assumption that you read everything else before you got here, but I also thank those that skipped straight from the first line to this one, because I admire your cheekiness.