Early last month, about a week after Toronto writer Paul Quarrington had three litres of fluid taken from his chest, he met again with a doctor.
Mr. Quarrington was feeling much better, but was still unsure why the fluid had built up, causing him severe shortness of breath over the past few months. He thought it was allergies, or that he was out of shape. The doctor had some sobering news.
“I said, ‘I feel fine, I feel great.' He said, ‘Wonderful, wonderful. We have some answers for you. It's cancer. It's lung cancer.' And I said: ‘Hold on, wait a second, I was just telling you how great I feel,'” Mr. Quarrington said last night. “Very surreal, you know.”
Mr. Quarrington, a 55-year-old father of two, didn't know what to say. He'd been researching what could be wrong, and had ruled out lung cancer because he hadn't had a sudden weight loss, which he understood was customary with the disease.
“I quite pitifully had my bottle of Tums,” he joked. “At first I went home and sat, stunned. I took a walk in the Bluffs, and blubbered a bit like anyone would. I sort of said, ‘Well, you know, let's make the most of it.' You know, stop drinking cheap wine immediately and enjoy what one can.”
Mr. Quarrington, a musician, non-fiction writer and filmmaker, is perhaps best known for his novel Whale Music, which won the 1989 Governor-General's award and was turned into a movie five years later. Two of his recent novels have been long-listed and short-listed for the Giller prize.
He has Stage 4 lung cancer, and is “sort of beyond odds.” He has been told he has months, possibly years, to live. Once a smoker of cigarettes and cigars, he said that, “somewhere in there, there was a bad smoke, I guess.”
“But I still feel pretty good and I'm still fairly hale.”
Mr. Quarrington is not resigned to the diagnosis. Although set to begin chemotherapy soon, he hopes to continue working. Among the projects on his plate are his band, the Porkbelly Futures, and his latest book, for which he's finished a first draft (he jokes that he now has “new thematic material” to add). His most recent novel, The Ravine, is being turned into a TV show, one of several film or television adaptations of his works.
“I hope to see some of these projects through,” he said.
He's been touched by the outpouring of support from friends and colleagues who have contacted him in recent weeks to offer their support.
“It was quite overwhelming,” he said. “If anything, I'm here to serve as a [warning]: One mustn't make foolish self-diagnoses, because the doctors are actually pretty good. ... Now when talking to [friends], they give a little cough and I say, ‘get that checked.'”
