Buying time
An unrelenting battle with cancer has not stopped a leading literary scholar forging a brilliant career. Finally, the drug she relies on has Pharmac funding.
An unrelenting battle with cancer has not stopped a leading literary scholar forging a brilliant career. Finally, the drug she relies on has Pharmac funding.
Asked how her health is, Lydia Wevers typically answers in the bored tone of someone who is once again having to explain a bureaucratic process that she has become resigned to. She and cancer have, after all, been doing battle for more than 20 years. Wevers, a scholar’s scholar, doesn’t appear to have given the disease much head-space. There’s been too much else going on up there. Literary critic, historian and emeritus professor of English literature, she is as busy as ever, her retirement from Victoria University of Wellington signalling no let-up in her academic work. The director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies for 17 years, she’s still writing and researching and accepting such demanding projects as chairing the 2018 Performance-Based Research Fund’s humanities and law panel, which scores and ranks individual academics, and in aggregate, universities. This entailed speed-reading stacks of densely written, single-spaced, right-justified academic research – not everyone’s idea of a good time. But Wevers loved it. “It is so interesting to see what other academics are writing.”
She says she has preferred a “head in the sand” approach to the remorseless path her illness has cut through her life. While, a few years ago, her friend and confidant, scientist Paul Callaghan, was looking squarely in the eye the cancer that would, in 2012, kill him, she was facing her cancer’s latest manifestation by placing her thoughts elsewhere. When she read ARD Fairburn’s poetry at Callaghan’s funeral, she’d just learnt she had a large lesion on her liver.
In one respect, she now regrets the extent of her steadfastness, in that she tried to keep the severity of her condition from her children. “They knew something was seriously wrong, and hiding it from them just made it more frightening and depressing, especially for my youngest son, Tom, who was only 14,” she says, her voice catching.
Wevers may have prevailed over cancer for a remarkably long time, but it has been a cruel opponent. It first appeared when, prompted by a
friend’s breast-cancer diagnosis, she had a check-up for it in 1995. To her astonishment, this revealed a “ductile carcinoma in situ”. The good news, however, was that this was the lowest grade of severity and there was no hurry for treatment.
She was about to start teaching – after a stint in Australia, where her diplomat husband, Alastair Bisley, had been posted – when her surgeon called to say further tests had found aggressive cancer cells.
The doctors were surprised she’d had no symptoms, and recommended radical mastectomy followed by a year of treatment. So, in 1999, began a journey in which she refused to let the illness preoccupy her. Despite the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, she finished a Marsden grant research programme, a book ( Travelling to New Zealand: An Oxford
“[The children] knew something was seriously wrong, and hiding it from them just made it more frightening.”
Anthology, 2000), and looked after her two youngest children, who were still at school during her year’s treatment. She lost her hair, which, she says, initially grew back “as an Astrakhan cap!” She says fatigue, rather than pain or nausea, has always been the worst and most life-limiting symptom for her.
But there was much more to come. Wevers’ medical notes condense her 20 years of episodic treatment into two pages of medical terminology and multi-syllabic generic drug names. The periods of remission become shorter, the list of symptoms, lesions and new tumours longer. Although first Herceptin and now Kadcyla have been effective, they cannot win out in the end. The cancer is in her hips and all through her skull, where radiation is not an option because it would hit her brain. Her sense of smell has gone altogether.
She says a lot of foods and drinks taste metallic, so giving up wine has at least been painless.
Wevers says she has had to accept that there is no cure for cancer once it has spread (metastasised). There is just the option of trying to buy more time, and the hope that it will be quality time. She