Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

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As well as the medical texts he read, he became fascinated by novels and plays in which serious illness plays a major part. As he says to his students at the end of his introductory lecture at the beginning of each academic year, literature is not a mirror, rather it is ‘a lens we could use to refocus our understanding of the world. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College.

A few seconds later I found myself peeing into a bush, just outside my front door, while an elderly neighbour walked past tutting and her dog looked back at me with a new found respect. I don’t want to be too Pollyanna about this, but it’s better to be grateful for what you can do than to pine for what you can’t.It wasn’t clear the disease definitely would get worse, or how quickly it would if it did,” he says, handing me a slice of homemade fruit cake. Within a couple of minutes, I had begun to run – or more accurately lurch like a panicked giraffe – down the street. In the days and weeks after his diagnosis, when things seemed frightening and bleak, Douglas-Fairhurst often thought of poor Gregor. Perhaps reading shouldn't be thought of as a way of avoiding [our] problems, but rather as an invitation to look at them through fresh eyes.

This is a homage to the healing power of reading as much as to the incredible medical advances of stem cell transplantation. My eyes, for instance, have settled down in the last couple of years, which for me is hugely significant. In essence, it is a way of rebooting the body’s faulty immune system, like a computer being turned on and off again.

Amongst many other devastating reassessments of his life and his place in the world, Douglas-Fairhurst was faced with the question of how to tell family, friends and colleagues what was happening to him.

It really is time that there is a concerted effort by the NHS to level up diagnosis, care and the longer-term options. Since then, one drug has been approved by Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence], albeit not a very effective one. M, too, was sanguine about what might lie ahead – Douglas-Fairhurst carefully outlined a series of increasingly grim scenarios, beginning with whether M would be willing to cut his toenails for him – and he was also funny about it, ready to take the piss.

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He has also acted as the historical consultant on BBC productions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Great Expectations and Dickensian, and both of the Enola Holmes films for Netflix. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.A darkly comic and moving reflection on what it means to be human in a world where nothing is certain, from the award-winning Oxford professor.