Henning Mankell: how it feels to be diagnosed with cancer

In January the Wallander author was diagnosed with cancer in his neck and a lung. In the first of an occasional series he describes his initial shock, and the agonising wait for the treatment to start


SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

Henning Mankell

Wednesday 12 February 2014 15.00 GMT

 Henning Mankell … 'Now the counterattack against my tumours will begin.' Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian Felix Clay/Guardian

After being diagnosed with cancer at the beginning of January, I endured a 10-day-long descent into hell. I remember that time as a fog, a shattering mental shudder that occasionally transmuted into an imagined fever. Brief, clear moments of despair. And all the resistance my willpower could muster.

Looking back, I can now think of it all as a long drawn-out nightmare that paid no attention to whether I was asleep or awake.

Then I began to clamber up out of the hole. I think that I am now back on ground level.

I am a child of the 1940s. I think that everybody of my generation automatically associates cancer with death. Even if I know, as others do, that cancer research has undergone an incredible development over the past 50 years, and that cancer no longer indicates the inevitable outcome, the old conception no doubt lingers on somewhere inside me.

I counter my lack of knowledge by reading as much about it as I can. And not least by listening to the doctors and other nursing staff I meet at the Sahlgrenska university hospital in Gothenburg.

One day Eva, my wife, says: "You ought to write about waiting. Cancer diagnoses and cancer care involve waiting. And that is difficult for all concerned."

She is right, of course. But there is one aspect of waiting that is essential. It involves doctors, pathologists and other nursing staff analysing meticulously the precise kind of tumours I am suffering from, and what treatment can be most effective.

When I talk to V, a lung specialist who was active 20 years ago, she says that compared with the cytotoxins available today, which can be more or less "tailor-made" to treat specific tumours, what patients had to put up with in those days was pure "rat-poison".

This waiting can be hard, at times unbearable: but there is nothing one can do about it. This waiting is unavoidable, provided there are no bottlenecks to hold up the diagnostic process unnecessarily. Naturally, while waiting, one feels utterly helpless.

In my own case the 10 or 12 days that passed while I was waiting were filled by a very special kind of fear: I have a metastasis in a cervical vertebra. Had it had time to spread into my brain? If so, I could well imagine that the battle was over even before it had begun.

But my thoughts are with those who may not have anybody else with whom they can share the angst associated with the waiting. People whose affliction is not clear-cut, and who may be forced to wait for an unnecessarily long time before a diagnosis is made, and treatment begun.When Eva and I sat with Dr M and she said that they had not found anything in my brain, that was a moment of great liberation. My cancer was just as serious as before, but that waiting – which at times had been horrific – had been rewarded with a piece of positive news. And I knew that doctors and other staff had been working as fast as they possibly could.

There is also unnecessary waiting within cancer care, due to understaffing, bureaucracy, political shilly-shallying. We know that.

During the last few weeks I have attended an endless number of clinics at the Sahlgrenska hospital, and only come across dedicated, competent and hard-working people. Some of them never seem to have any free time. And all of them seem to be driven by a determination to reduce people's waiting times as much as they possibly can. But you don't need to have special insight in order to realise that there are big problems with understaffing. Let us not even speak about what these people are paid.

Within cancer care, the various dimensions of waiting should never be forgotten. I am convinced that so very many people suffer completely unnecessarily because they might not even know where to turn to in order to receive support.

Now, at the beginning of February, it is about a month since my cancer was discovered. In a few days' time my treatment will start, with no holds barred.

So the first waiting is now over. Now the counterattack against my tumours will begin. To expand the military image, it feels as if the cavalry will emerge from the edge of the woods and launch an all-out assault on the enemies that have invaded my body.

I am immensely grateful that this is now happening. And that it has gone so quickly.

When I look back at this month, I can see flickering images of a large number of people flashing past. Doctors, nurses and others. Without them I would not be where I am today.

Another period of waiting is now beginning. But unlike a month ago, I am now the one going on the offensive.

• Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson

Henning Mankell, Swedish author of Wallander, dies at 67

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

Alison Flood and agencies

Monday 5 October 2015 12.10 BST

Henning Mankell wrote about being diagnosed with cancer in his book Quicksand: What It Means to be a Human Being. Photograph: Reuters

Henning Mankell, the Swedish writer best known for the Wallander crime novels, has died at the age of 67.

Mankell was diagnosed with cancer in January 2014 and dealt with the experience in his book Quicksand: What It Means to be a Human Being.

“He passed away quietly last night in the wake of disease,” his publisher said on its website on Monday morning.

Mankell was the author of around 40 novels – 11 of which starred his best known character, the Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander – and had sold more than 40 million copies of his books around the world, in more than 40 languages. Leopard, the publisher he founded in 2001 with Dan Israel, and which published his books, described him as “one of the great Swedish authors of our time”.

“For Henning, writing was his lifeblood,” publisher and longtime friend Dan Israel told Dagens Nyheter. “He had plans to write a new Wallander in time for the 25th anniversary next year, he had several ideas. He saw enough in front of him that he would fight a long time. He was most afraid of not being able to write... He wrote two books during their disease and I think they are brilliant books.”

He was born in Stockholm, the son of a lawyer. After his mother abandoned the family when he was a year old, his father moved the family to the small down of Sveg, where they lived above the courthouse until Mankell was 13. He dropped out of secondary school to travel first to Paris, and then to sea, where he worked on a freighter. In 1966 he returned to Paris, becoming active in the student politics, but returned to work as a stagehand in Stockholm. There he wrote his first play, about Swedish colonialism. In 1973, he published a novel about the Swedish Labour movement.

Wallander, who featured in a series of novels published between 1991 and 2009, was portrayed on screen by Rolf Lassgård in a series of Swedish films, and in Swedish and UK TV adaptations starring Krister Henriksson and Kenneth Branagh, respectively.

Mankell was a leading figure in the“Nordic noir” genre, exploring the darker side of Sweden and providing a counterpoint to the country’s image as a relatively crime-free society.

The Orwell prize-wining writer and journalist Andrew Brown wrote in a Guardian obituary: “He established almost single-handedly the global picture of Sweden as a crime writer’s ideal dystopia. He took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition, capturing in his melancholy, drunken, bullish detective Kurt Wallander a sense of struggle in bewildered defeat that echoed round the world.”

Mankell also wrote plays, and was the artistic leader of Teatro Avenida in Maputo. He divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, setting his young adult novel Secrets in the Fire in the country, and basing it on the true story of the land mine survivor Sofia Alface. He worked extensively with Aids charities in Africa, and, in 2010, was on board the aid flotilla bound for Gaza which was boarded by Israeli troops.

“Solidarity with those in need run through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end,” said Leopard in a statement this morning.

In 2008, Mankell was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of St Andrews “in recognition of his major contribution to literature and to the practical exercise of conscience”.

After being diagnosed with cancer in 2014, he wrote a column about his experience of the disease for the Guardian, describing the period after he was diagnosed as a “10-day-long descent into hell”.

In his final column, written in September, he pointed to a comment made by the writer Per-Olof Enquist: “’One day we shall die. But all the other days we shall be alive.’ If I add to that a quotation I read in a repair workshop when my car was in for an oil change, the picture becomes even more clear. It said: ‘Don’t take life too seriously. You won’t come out of it alive no matter what.’”

In an interview in the Göteborgs Posten late last month, Mankell told Ingrid Norrman that “I might work for two hours a day. … I use the hours I have the energy to write, but it is clear that I do not do as much now as I did before”, adding that he was working on a new book. The idea, he said, came last summer when he was admitted to Sahlgrenska hospital to be treated for a lung inflammation.

“I got the idea in midsummer when I was at the doctor to take a blood test and instead ended up in an ambulance. It turned out that I had double pneumonia, the immune system was completely beaten. I was inside for ten days at the hospital, slept pretty bad, and heard in my confused state of people talking in the corridor. … I realized that it was the night nurse they were talking about, but there was something magical about those vague voices talking about the night. So I got in touch with a night nurse, interviewed her and now I am writing a novel about a night nurse from early evening to the time she goes home in the morning. It will be a book about all these nurses walk alone around the hospital wards at night and taking care of patients,” he said.

The novelist said in the interview that when he was young, “the only thing I was afraid of was getting old and turning around and seeing that I botched my life. But I’m happy with the life that has been.”

“I have always made my choices and lived despite them, whether they were right or wrong. I have never been like a dry leaf that someone threw into the stream and which randomly ends up anywhere downstream. I dare to turn around now and looking back, because I see that I have not botched my life. The unique thing about life is that you must account for the choices you make. You can never take a step back and redo it. It does not mean that I’m finished. Death, when it comes, interferes always in the living things that are going on,” he said.

How did I get home last night? My bizarre, panicked life as a blackout drinker

I fell down staircases. I woke up in strange homes. When you love booze like I did, it's amazing what you'll ignore

SARAH HEPOLA

READ ORIGINAL POST HERE

A photo of the author in college

The following is adapted and excerpted from "Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget," coming out June 23 (Grand Central).

I met my friend Allison at a Mexican restaurant. We hadn’t seen each other in years. It had been so long that, as I scanned the menu and failed to listen to the waiter recite the evening’s specials, I couldn’t stop my mind from tunneling back through time in an effort to pinpoint when we last hung out. This is a form of bragging for me. I pride myself on remembering more than anyone else.

“I know,” I said. “Your 36th birthday party,” and I smacked the table like it was a buzzer.

“You’re right!” she said.

That party was such a blast. Three years later, I can still remember so much about it: How her cozy Park Slope apartment was strung up with Christmas lights. How I planned to stop by for a quick drink, maybe three, before heading to another party across town. How I charmed her chic 20-something colleagues from the online fashion magazine with my big ideas about female comedians and sex.

But of all the details I can summon, one I cannot is how I got home that night. Trying to remember the end of that evening now is like watching a movie with a reel of film missing. I’m talking to this girl on the back porch, I’m laughing with this girl on the back porch, and then … the screen goes blank. CUT TO: Me, in my Williamsburg loft at 6 a.m., the white curtains billowing in the breeze.

I’d had blackouts since the first time I got drunk. If you’ve never had a blackout, then you might not understand the singular horror of waking up to discover that time is missing. People often confuse blackout with passing out, but the experiences are quite different. A person who is passed out is unconscious. A person in a blackout is very much awake: Walking, talking, singing bad karaoke. You keep going, even as your long-term memory shuts down. Sometimes my blackouts were only a few minutes, a temporary outage, but a few lasted hours, and the first 10 seconds of a hungover Sunday morning were a checklist of panic: Did I remember how I got home? Was anyone lying beside me? Did I have any cuts or bruises? I woke to strange data sets. Orange juice on the counter, refrigerator door flapping open. My vibrator tossed on the living room couch. Once I woke up with a half-eaten corn dog in my hand and a smear of mustard across my face. But I was starving, so I ate it.

Allison leaned in at the table. “Oh my God, do you remember that night?” she asked, and I braced myself. Anyone with a drinking history learns to hate those words. The wrecking ball is about to arrive.

“Actually, I don’t,” I said.

“You fell down my staircase.”

I covered my face with my hands and peeked at Allison through the slats of my fingers. “Yeah, I used to do that.“

“My stairs were marble,” she said. “It was terrifying. Honestly, I’d never seen anything like it. You don’t remember this at all?”

No, but I was familiar with the habit. By my mid-30s, I had drunkenly tumbled down rickety outdoor wooden steps and glamorous winding staircases. I don’t know what’s crazier: That I drank as long as I did, or that I kept wearing heels. Once, I tripped down the narrow metal staircase of a Turkish restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and wound up in St. Vincent’s hospital with a concussion and the world’s most excruciating hangover. But what was most remarkable about these extravagant nosedives was how painless and without consequence they often were. I’d get up, dust myself off, and grab another drink. OK. What’s next?

“I can’t even remember how I got home that night,” I told Allison.

“Oh I remember,” she said. “We put you in a cab.”

Thank God for cabbies. Other people can give teary testimonials to the cops and the fire department, but as far as I’m concerned, cabbies are the superheroes of New York City. They have ferried me safely home when I couldn’t see straight — I mean, when I literally held one hand over an eye to keep from spinning. They have driven me up and down the same few blocks while I tried to figure out which of the blurry row houses was my blurry row house.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Allison, hands still shielding my face, as though I could somehow hold in the embarrassment.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I felt bad putting you in that cab. I wanted you to stay the night at my place.”

“But I refused, I’m sure.”

“You wouldn’t hear of it.”

In addition to being a sot, I was stubborn to boot. I sometimes bristled when people tried to take care of me, as though they were telling me I threw like a girl. I’d stagger off into the night: I’ll show you. Whenever I woke up on a friend’s couch, it was a sign that something had gone wrong. Not only had I been too drunk to remember; I’d been too drunk to escape.

When the blackouts first started happening, they could derail me for days. In college, I woke up from one blackout feeling like a kidnapping victim emerging from the trunk of a car: How did I get here? Who did this to me? In my 20s, I’d spend hours writhing in bed trying to reconstruct the night, imagining with a full-body cringe what boozy gimmick I’d pulled from my bag of tricks: Did I flash a stranger? Throw beer in people’s faces? Force everyone to watch me perform songs from “Jesus Christ Superstar”? But by the age of 33, when I went to Allison’s party, I had grown weary of these convulsions of anxiety. I was the kind of person who could spend an hour flinching over a misplaced comma in a story; I didn’t need to take a deep dive into what might or might not have occurred in the course of two lost hours.

So what I can remember about waking up after Allison’s party is that I simply did not remember. If I had any bruises or scrapes from my fall, they did not throb or otherwise snag my attention, a detail that is sad in its own quiet, neglectful way. I woke up, alone, in my own bed. My earrings had been removed and placed in the bathroom drawer. As far as I could see, nothing was amiss.

I wondered that morning if I should text Allison. “Had a great time last night! The part I can remember was amazing!” Or maybe I should call and apologize. But apologize for what, exactly? I needed my own fill-in-the-blank letter of apology:

“Dear so-and-so. I’m terribly sorry that I _________ last night. You must have felt very _________ when I _________. I drank too much _________ that night, and I was not in my right mind.”

In the end, I sacked out on my futon, watched a marathon of reality TV and ordered pad thai. It was years till Allison and I saw each other again.

I avoided a great deal in those days. I avoided credit card bills that piled up on the counter. I avoided full-length mirrors. I avoided doctors, since I did not have insurance. I avoided going to the same bodegas and wine stores too often, keeping several in my regular rotation lest the cashiers get any ideas about me. And when I behaved badly in the company of a drinking companion, I simply avoided her, too. This was incredibly easy to do in a city where “the G train” served as a suitable excuse for failing to visit close friends.

I should have just emailed Allison. It wouldn’t have been hard. But there was something so debasing about having to ask another person: What did I do? Can you help me remember?

Instead, I mentioned my evening to a friend who lived down the street. “I’m sure you were fine,” she said, and gave me a comforting rub on the back. The white lies women tell each other: You look great in that dress. No one will notice that thing on your head. I’m sure you were fine.

Surely, I was fine. I was fine, sure. She and I cracked a bottle of red wine in her apartment, and it was like my insides shifted back into place. OK. What’s next?

“I was worried about you that night,” Allison told me at the restaurant.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was the fifth time I’d said it. I wish the vocabulary here were more varied. I’m sorry. I apologize. I wish I hadn’t done that. Part of the reason I stopped calling friends the morning after was that I grew tired of hearing the same dumb words crawl out of my mouth. I got tired of hearing the same words from them, too: I’m worried about you. You need to keep it together. And then part of the reason I stopped calling was that I didn’t want to know what happened. I couldn’t hear it anymore. Every problem drinker struggles with denial, but blackout drinkers have a particular burden. If you don’t remember a thing — did it really happen? The blackouts were a terror, but the blackouts were a kind of protection too, like someone pulling the shade down in front of my drunken behavior and telling me I didn’t really need to know.

If I reflect on my drinking years now, what I remember first is how amazing they were. The promise of a cold beer in my tired hands, the perfect pop of a cork coaxed from the bottle at 6 p.m. Drinking rescued me from the dull ache of ordinary life — a life spent waiting for life to begin — and I can’t imagine my college years, the wandering of my 20s, the striving of my early 30s without it. Alcohol was the glue that bound everything together: my friendships with women, my romances with men. Even my career in media seemed to improve with a glass of wine in my hand. Sometimes I think I won’t ever feel lighter, or more powerful, than when I was drinking.

“You sure drink fast,” a guy would say, watching me down a beer, and I would lick the foam from my lips. Damn straight.

But if I dig deeper, it’s not long before I remember the blackouts. How disorienting and spooky they were. I could not shake the fear of what could have happened but didn’t. What did happen — and couldn’t be fixed.

I tried so many tricks to avoid them. I stopped drinking bourbon. I drank a glass of water between cocktails. I cut out red wine before dinner, and then red wine after dinner. I moved to a new city. I got a new job. I went on antidepressants. I pledged myself to the gods of yoga and Vitamin Water. But here is the truth that I could not outrun: When I drank, I kept drinking. And if I drank enough — and God knows, I usually did — I would black out. It wasn’t an accident; it was an inevitability.

It’s been five years since I quit, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it sometimes. But for all the crashing good times that drinking gave me, it brought me so much shame. So much horror. So much regret. So many conversations like that evening with Allison, four years ago, when my dark past landed in my lap like a tossed grenade. The blackouts are what leveled me, and they haunt me still. The nights I can’t remember are the nights I can never forget.


GET THE BOOK HERE

Ann Rule

Ann Rule, crime writer - obituary

Crime writer who discovered she had befriended the serial killer Ted Bundy



Ann Rule, born October 22 1931, died July 26 2015

Ann Rule, who has died aged 83, was struggling to make a living as a freelance crime writer when she discovered that the charming young man beside whom she had answered phones as a volunteer at a Seattle crisis centre was a serial killer; she wrote about him in The Stranger Beside Me (1980) and went on to dominate the American true-crime market with more than 30 bestsellers.

Her colleague on the hotline was Ted Bundy, former boy scout and law student who, in the mid-1970s, went on a murderous rampage, raping and killing 30 or 40 women – Ann Rule believed the true number could have been more than 100 – before he was put to death in Florida’s electric chair in 1989.

Bundy came across as a decent all-American boy. Ann Rule recalled that she had felt safe in his company: “He would walk me to my car when my shift was over and he would say, 'Ann, be sure your doors are locked. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you on the way home.’ ” Even after they stopped working together they remained friends.
Then, in 1974 women in the Seattle area started disappearing and, in an odd twist, Ann Rule landed a $10,000 book deal to write about the disappearances, not knowing that Bundy was responsible, but with the caveat that there would be no book unless a suspect was arrested.

In July 1974 the abductions in broad daylight of two women from a crowded beach near Seattle produced five female witnesses who described an attractive young man calling himself “Ted” who had requested their help in unloading a sailing boat from his Volkswagen Beetle. Four of the women had refused; one had accompanied him to his car, but fled after seeing there was no boat. Armed with a detailed description, the police put up wanted posters and a sketch of the suspect was printed in local newspapers and broadcast on television.

Though Ann Rule did not think Bundy owned a car, the description of the suspect matched that of her friend, so she decided to tip off the police. But detectives, who were being inundated with leads, took no action. Bundy continued to kill – and Ann Rule and he remained friends. In early 1976, when he was out on bail after being arrested for suspected kidnapping, she had lunch with him. But it was to be the last time she would see him as a free man. Convicted of kidnapping later that year, he was found guilty of capital murder in Florida in 1979 and sentenced to death.

When The Stranger Beside Me was published in 1980, it became an instant bestseller, eventually running into 32 editions. “He made my career,” Ann Rule recalled, “... yet on a personal level, it was a terrible blow to think I had trusted somebody – would have trusted my daughters to him. Until then, I thought I could really judge aberrant behaviour.”

Ann Rae Stackhouse was born on October 22 1931, at Lowell, Michigan and became fascinated by the criminal mind as young girl, when she spent her summers helping her grandmother serve meals in the Montcalm County Jail in Stanton, Michigan, where her grandfather and uncle were sheriffs. She went on to study Psychology at the University of Washington, but could not cope with the statistical part of the course, so switched to Creative Writing.

After graduation she joined the Seattle police department, but was denied a permanent post due to shortsightedness. Instead, she began to work as a freelance writer for True Detective magazine producing two 10,000-word articles each week under the pen name Andy Stack. In 1971 she started working at the Seattle crisis centre.

Ann Rule published 33 books, with earnings routinely climbing into the millions, of which several were turned into films and television series, including Small Sacrifices (1988), about an Oregon mother (played by Farrah Fawcett) who shot her three children in the hope of pleasing a lover.

But she could never escape Ted Bundy: “I was naive enough when I wrote it in '79 to think 'I’ll write this, and it will be cathartic, and I’ll never have to talk about Ted again’,” she recalled. “And yet, he just fascinated people, and he still does.”

Ann Rule’s marriage to Bill Rule was dissolved in 1972. She is survived by her four children, two of whom were charged earlier this year with stealing money from her.