[Chris O'Carroll]

"Technically, you don't have liver cancer," the doctor told me. "What you have is colon cancer in your liver." Well, I knew I wasn't hearing good news. But I also knew I was hearing a great laugh line. Colon cancer in my liver? C'mon, that's pretty funny.

After a two-month course of chemotherapy, I had my liver surgery earlier this week. And the new issues of Lighten up Online and Snakeskin each carry one of my cancer poems.

https://www.snakeskinpoetry.co.uk/

https://www.lightenup-online.co.uk/i...-65-march-2024

I'm grateful to all of you who have rallied around with messages of encouragement and concern, and I hope everybody enjoys laughing at mortality.

[Susan McLean]

Great poems, Chris! I laughed out loud at "Prague Proverb." How true!

Susan

[Chris O'Carroll]

Thank you, Susan. Apparently, that joke is familiar to the point of cliché among experienced mushroom enthusiasts. But it was new to me, and I also laughed out loud when I heard it from our Czech guide. Glad to have passed the merriment along.

[Terese Coe]

Chris,

You're a brave man, and macabre humor is the best of humor, the worst of humor. Hang in there, and may the writing bring you laughs, as it does your readers!

[Brian Allgar]

I told Francoise the mushroom joke this morning, and it made her laugh - which, since she hadn't yet had her breakfast, takes some doing!

[Chris O'Carroll]

Thank you, Brian. It's good to hear that the 'shroom joke is provoking more laughs.

Thank you, Terese. I'll own that best of humor/worst of humor business, but I really haven't had to be all that brave compared to many other poets who've chronicled their cancer experiences. At the moment, I'm reading Katie Farris's Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, a "memoir in poems" about the author's breast cancer. She's just one of many whose run-in with the disease has been far more grievous that mine.

[Julie Steiner]

I thought of J. B. S. Haldane's 1964 "Cancer's a Funny Thing" (whose title is a quotation from an Auden poem). Glad to have your humorous take on things as well.

[Chris O'Carroll]

Thank you for those poems, Julie -- two more salutary reminders of how many people have suffered more from their adventures in cancer than I have.

[Gail White]

Chris, you are the best author of cancer humor since the unknown genius who wrote that
One would need the pen of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma.

Please keep it up, as far as is consistent with being completely cured.

[Chris O'Carroll]

Thank you, Gail. I think you're referencing the J.B.S. Haldane poem that Julie mentions above. I'm much flattered to be compared with the poet who rhymes Homer with carcinoma and a serious loss to me with very neat colostomy.