23rd to 27th June 'But whoso... Seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels...' PART DEUX (1 John 3.17)

The following is not for the faint-hearted, or the recently fed!

Around this time of the year rumours in the parish begin to circulate. The tension rises. The speculation intensifies. This is because the producer and director of the Parish Panto meet and discuss, and, significantly, choose, this year’s Christmas Panto.  

To say this is an important moment in the life of the community would be an understatement. Someone once joked (I thought, not knowing the reality!) that my parish is a, “panto with a church attached to it”! 

The one year it did not happen—very shortly after my arrival—I was actually accosted on several occasions in the street, and pilloried as a modern-day Oliver Cromwell. Rumour had it that I would be cancelling Christmas itself next. 

Determined to rid myself of any Roundhead associations I was determined it would happen the following year. Such was my conviction that even I ended up donning the dame’s dress on that occasion. Since then, however, our organist—so I am told from within the vicarage—makes a far more convincing dame. (Not sure how I’m supposed to take that statement, truth be told…) 

Anyway, my role now is writing scripts and amending them. I add the jokes, particularly for the dame’s opening soliloquy. These invariably involve jokes about the dame’s fat sister.

“My sister’s so fat she can be seen from space.”

“My sister’s so fat her tummy has its own postcode.”

“My sister’s so fat people jog round her for exercise.” 

And for those of an ecclesiastical bent, “My sister’s so fat, she had to go to Sea-world to be baptised.”

I am now the dame’s sister. For although I am the lightest I have been in 23 years, my tummy is so fat that I have moons orbiting around me… (enough Panto gags, ed.) 

This is the not uncommon phenomenon known as ‘chemo belly’. 

The main culprit for this mutation, the hospital informs me, is my previously favourite part of the chemo: vincristine. Vincristine sounds like Jesus’ table vin de maison. But, no. Oh, no, no.

Vincristine (the ‘O’ in R-CHOP, obviously!?) as well as doing wonderful things to kill the lymphoma, also shuts down the bowels. This rather key piece of information had not been communicated to me as clearly as I might have hoped. Haematologists, like Georgian physicians, seem obsessed with “the excellence of the stool”, to quote the Madness of King George. Being slightly reactionary, I took this as charmingly nostalgic, and looked forward to my bleeding and leeching. But, no. Oh, no, no. Their obsession comes from their care and knowledge of the horrors of chemotherapy and the excruciating pain of severe constipation.

The reader (non-medics) may wish to avert their eyes now!

A few days earlier I had decided to stop taking the three(!!) laxatives I had been prescribed as I was, well, functioning very nicely, thank you very much. I was, in fact, an accident waiting to happen… 

The first thing I noticed was the cramping, and the sound of my abdomen impersonating a coffee percolator. Then there was the absence of farting. The thrill of the fart had largely been lost on me in my early teens. As a choir boy, one of my favourite hymns was Disposer Supreme. This hymn, whose fifth verse brought me such immeasurable joy as a choirboy, had the wonderful line, “O loud be their trump…”. By 1986 this had been amended by some joyless editor who had never sniggered uncontrollably with fellow trebles, to the rather less lavatorial, “O loud be the call”.  

Now, however, the sudden absence of a once choral pleasure was very, very weird. Oh how I missed the joy of letting rip, breaking wind, YES, editor of The New English Hymnal, trumping! All the time the pain increased, and I needed release.

In desperation, I rang the out-of-hours line and the kindly, cheery ward sister picked up the telephone. She took my details and exclaimed excitedly, “Oh, it’s Father Robert. We’ve all being praying for you, how are you?”

My vocation demanded a polite counter-enquiry, but my bowels cried out in pain. I was assured it was simply constipation and not the dreaded neutropenic sepsis of which I have been repeatedly warned. How can poo do this!? I have been brought low before, but the painful misery of this for three days was something else.

I practically drank pints of laxative at the hospital’s instruction, and this all culminated with me vomiting some brown green slurry into the sink at 5.45am, “when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”. I don’t think I have ever felt more in need of a hug in my life. Yet there I was, sat on the floor of the cloakroom in a puddle of Keble’s over-flowing water-bowl, waiting for movement at the other end. It came and I sang, Fling wide the gates and the Hallelujah chorus.  

The joy, the release, and sleep at last.         

Welcome back the non-medic!

Constipation is a pain in the… “Oh yes it is!”—no trust me, “Oh yes it is!!!”