‘Bohemian and rackety’ Hitchens confronts cancer

WRITER Christopher Hitchens, who is suffering from cancer of the oesophagus, has described his illness as "a bit of a yawn" and accepted that it is a result of his hard drinking and smoking lifestyle. He has been told that he has only a one in 20 chance of living for longer than five years.
 
He said he was not surprised by the diagnosis, which came earlier this summer, and said: "If you've led a rather bohemian and rackety life, as I have, it's precisely the cancer that you'd expect to get."
 
The 61-year-old polemicist, whose cancer was first diagnosed in June,  made the comments in an interview with BBC's Newsnight, to be broadcast on Monday night, in which he reflects on his mortality now that it has spread to his lymph nodes and lungs.
 
Talking to Jeremy Paxman, Hitchens said: "I think my main fear is of being incapacitated or imbecilic at the end. That, of course, is not something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of."
 
Hitchens, who lives in Washington DC and has dual nationality, said he understood what had caused his illness and described that as "demystifying". He added: "There are also people who say it's God's curse on me that I should have it near my throat, because that was the organ of blasphemy that I used for so many years. I've used many other organs to blaspheme as well, if it comes to that."
 
He said his treatment, which involves being injected with what he described as "a huge dose of kill-or-cure venom" every few weeks, did not feel like a battle. "Doesn't feel like fighting at all," he revealed. "You feel as though you are drowning in passivity and being assaulted by something that has a horrible persistence."
 
But he said he wanted to show that being diagnosed was "not the end of everything".
 
Hitchens, whose recently published memoir /Hitch-22 / recounts his life as a radical, also confronted the prospect of dying. "Everyone has to go some time,” he said. “I've always thought that will be a bad day, at least for me. I now have a more pressing idea of what that might be like. Anyway, that's being stoic for my own sake.
 
"But for my family it's not very nice. I could wish perhaps to have led a more healthy and upright life for their sake, and that's a very melancholy reflection, of course.
 
"I feel a sense of waste about it because I'm not ready." ·