To look after her mental health, Camilla has bought a sewing machine and retreats to her room often to “thread her bobbins,” she says. However, I can’t help but think that she’s probably stitching together a hot-air balloon in which to sail away from us all. Can’t say I blame her. I did notice that some bedsheets were missing and all our Fortnum & Mason hampers have vanished. Hmmm.
As for Felicity and myself, we only have five people to cook for this time around.
Gosh, it’s almost too easy.
Almost.
20
I find being in Los Angeles for any longer than a few days rather painful. I have felt that way about the place since my first visit about thirty-four years ago. Although there are lovely areas, some wonderful restaurants, and close friends and family members whom I love dearly, it just ain’t for me. I don’t care for the consistent sunshine, the lack of rain, the absence of seasons, and the sprawl of it all.
Four years ago I found myself there after an absence of more than five years, filming a limited series called Feud. I flew back and forth a number of times from LA to London, so as not to be away for too long at any one time, but often had to stay longer than I had hoped due to the schedule. The pain of being away from my family was, of course, palpable, but more palpable was a shooting pain in my jaw. This pain had been coming and going for a while, but when I was in LA it worsened. I found a wonderful dentist who couldn’t quite discern what was wrong but told me to come back and check with her if it persisted. I flew back to London and had a wisdom tooth removed at the request of my dentist there, as we both thought that it was too close to the adjacent tooth and food was getting trapped in between and causing the issue. （I know that’s a gross image in any book, let alone a food memoir, and I apologize.） Yet after the removal the pain got worse. Back in LA, I returned to the first dentist, who examined me and suggested that it might be a form of oral cancer.
I was stunned to the point of almost fainting. Kate had died after a horrid four-year struggle with cancer and the thought of revisiting that world again was something I dreaded. The dentist suggested I get a scan right away. I was leaving that evening and decided I would have it done in the UK.
Partly out of fear and partly out of a profoundly arrogant disbelief that I could ever get cancer, I delayed the appointment. The pain continued for a while and in fact began to increase. This started me on a steady diet of ibuprofen.
Over the coming months, as the pain increased, along with my intake of ibuprofen, I continued to work, but it was getting harder and harder to function. I returned to London after working in Toronto before Christmas 2017 in more pain than ever. Felicity insisted I visit a doctor in London who specialized in cancer of the salivary gland. Within ten seconds of prying my mouth open with a gloved hand and looking down my throat, he said, “You have a huge tumor at the base of your tongue. It is most likely cancerous, and this is what you are going to do. You are going to have a scan. This scan will most likely show that you have cancer and whether it has metastasized. Then they will perform surgery to remove it if they can. Then you will have radiation and chemotherapy and most likely you will have to eat through a feeding tube in your stomach for some months.” He had no bedside manner to say the least.
I almost fainted again.
In the hope of finding a cure for Kate, we had traveled around the world and met a number of doctors and scientists, some traditional, some alternative, who had dedicated themselves to finding a cure for what Siddhartha Mukherjee calls the emperor of all maladies, so I had come to learn about cancer from many different perspectives, and that knowledge had made me at once hopeful and very fearful. Because Kate’s experience with the standard of care （chemotherapy, radiation, etc.） had been so horrible and ultimately futile, I was determined not to go through any of it.
The problem was that the tumor was so large, surgery was not possible because it would have required removing a large section of my tongue, insuring that I would never be able to eat or even speak normally again. Therefore, the only viable option was thirty-five days of high-dose targeted radiation and seven sessions of low-dose chemotherapy. Luckily, because the cancer had miraculously not metastasized, it had been proven that following this protocol meant the cure rate was close to 90 percent with an extremely low rate of recurrence. Those were very hard figures to argue with. So, in the end I did go through with it, because I had to. I was, of course, terrified, and although she was such a proactive and positive force, I knew that Felicity was as well. And rightly so. She was pregnant, we were soon to move into a new home, and we had a two-year-old and three children in high school. Yet her innate fortitude, determination, and intelligence to doggedly calculate the best way forward and find the most accomplished, avant-garde team of doctors whose treatments would assure a successful outcome eclipsed any fears she may have had. Her reassurance, love, and patience were my greatest pillars of strength and still are to this day in all things medical and otherwise. What a shame she doesn’t feel the same about me.