The man with lung cancer
Note to the actor
Firstly, thank you very much for agreeing to take part in the session about health, life and death decisions on 4 July. I am hoping it will be a fun and stimulating session; I am looking forward to it. I hope that you will enjoy it too. I have prepared a separate sheet with an outline of the planned session, and I am hoping to meet you and the other actors a little bit before the session starts at 13.20. That will give us time to have a chat about what we are doing.
Your part is to play a man who has lung cancer, and who needs expensive drugs to give a better chance of surviving. I have drafted a script for the part below: your soliloquy. However, the more you get in character the better, so if you want to alter the script a bit to bring it to life for you, feel free to do so, as long as the nature of the character of the person, and the basic facts of the case remain the same. If you want to dress up, put on an accent or whatever, then that is all fine with me. A bit of humour is good if that works for you. Given his story, the person has to be between 25 and 45. You decide.
After the opening soliloquy, I would like you to stay in character for the rest of the session, answering any questions that the students may have about you and your situation. But you don’t have to be an expert in the medical intervention that I sketch out below – real people are rarely experts on all of the medical details of the treatments. If they ask you questions about your character’s personality or life history, just ad lib as you think best.
Script
My name is John. Where I grew up, almost everyone smoked. My Mum smoked, my Dad smoked, my big sister smoked, and all my friends smoked. It’s what people did. We all knew it could be dangerous, but nobody thought about that. On our estate, there was this one patch of grass, and that’s where we would hang around, smoke, drink, laugh, shout, fight and generally mess about. It was great. But then some of us got into drugs, and things got serious. You know, robbing, sex, beating people up, whatever it took to get the drugs. I spent a few months inside a couple of times.
This went on for years, until I met Julie. She got me to look at what I was doing to myself. We had a little boy. That’s when it really hit me. He needed me. So I went to rehab, and now I’m clean. I have been for a couple years now. I got a job. And last year, I even gave up smoking. I felt like a proper good dad. I would pick up my little boy, look at myself in the mirror, and for the first time in my life, I felt good about myself. Too good to be true? Yeah, it was.
My cough started getting worse, and I had these pains in my chest. I lost loads of weight. So I went to see the doctor. He did loads of tests, and then one day he gets me in and sitting comfortably and he says “sorry, but you’ve got lung cancer”. Just like that. I ask him if I’m going to die. He goes on and on for ages, but the short answer turns out I probably am going to die. They’re going to give me chemo and everything, but he says I’ve got about a 20% chance of living 5 years. That’s a 20% chance of seeing my little boy reach the age of 7.
There is one thing though. They could give me this new, really expensive drug. I said to the doctors – I’m up for that, I’ve had lots of new expensive drugs in my time! They didn’t think that was funny. Anyhow, if I get this new drug my chances improve a lot: to 50/50. I want to flip that coin. I want that drug. The doctors say that you can’t get it everywhere because it’s too expensive. How can you put a price on life like that? Who has the right to decide whether I live or die, and whether my little boy has a Dad?