How a colonoscopy taught me that being a half-decent dad and writer are both possible
JOHN Banville famously once said that writers make bad fathers. Clearly, I am no John Banville, but I can see where he was coming from.
I was a bad father long before I became a bad writer, but my creative process involves me disappearing inside my own head.
I become introverted, distracted and short-tempered – a fact brought home to me when my three-year-old sat up at my computer one day and shouted “For God’s sake, I’m trying to work!” at the point on the floor where he would normally be standing. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
My introversion when writing probably explains why this column has often seen me go far beyond navel-gazing and actually commit a kind of emotional harakiri, spilling my guts onto the page.
An old friend pointed out that I had mined myself so deeply that it was probably only a matter of time until I wrote a detailed account of my next colonoscopy. Oh, how we laughed.
I was quite late in life discovering that I had a significant family history of bowel cancer on my biological father’s side of the family. It was quite the revelation, given that I had ironically managed to place myself right in the line of fire thanks to my poor life choices – stress, smoking, alcohol abuse, and dietary choices that were almost exclusively based on their function as soakage.
As I near the age my biological father was when he died, I decided to get myself checked out.
It was just another sad irony that the date the hospital gave me was the day after Father’s
Day, meaning that on a day when I should have been eating a large fry, quaffing imperial stout and kicking back for a ‘Star Wars’ marathon, I was imbibing litres of MoviPrep and scuttling around the house like the bad guy in a romcom who had eyedrops put in his soup.
The preparations for getting a colonoscopy are fairly basic – a good old fashioned spring clean of your gut, and a dressing gown for the hospital. My wife pointed out that there was no way I would be wearing my tatty, ‘Big Lebowski’-style dressing gown. Surely I would be ashamed to be seen in such a garment? I pointed out that as I was basically going to have the crew from ‘Primetime Investigates’ crawling up my backside with full lights and camera, shame was a remote concept. So it was on Monday morning that I found myself curled into the foetal position, wondering why the sedatives hadn’t knocked me out, as I stared at a monitor showing a fairly in-depth tour of my lower intestine. After about 10 minutes I was done, wheeled back out to my bay to lapse into a mildly traumatised slumber.
I woke up later, had my first food in 36 hours (“the best tea and toast in Cork” is how the nurse accurately described it), before getting a belated Father’s Day gift – a nurse telling me to break wind as much as I possibly could.
Finally, I had found a judgment-free zone where men can just be men.
After my 21-gun salute to manliness, I got dressed and had a chat with the doctor. It was at this point I realised how scared I had been. In fact, I had spent more than a year convincing myself that there was something wrong, that Iwassick.
It was constantly there in my subconscious, anxious whispers that I was going to die young, that this was my inescapable fate. Apparently, I was wrong.
So why did it take me so many years to just get a health check? Why was I so scared to say that I was worried?
Why are men, in general, so bad at talking about our mental and physical well-being?
LAST week was Men’s Health Week – the fact that we need a week to encourage men to talk about basic health issues shows that masculinity needs a reformation.
It’s not just about being able to discuss having a camera shoved where the sun don’t shine, but about our fears, our stress, our worries.
But through all of my worrying, in the back of my mind was one thought – if I die young, how will my kids remember me? As the angry guy, sitting at the computer, shouting at them every time they need attention?
Perhaps I should follow David Simon’s stinging riposte to Banville’s comments on parenthood and writing – family is family, the job is the job – and accept that being a half-decent parent and a half-decent writer are not mutually exclusive.
After all, it would appear I have plenty time left on Earth to work on getting better at both.