I still remember where I was when I got the call. Walking down Bourke Street Melbourne, going about life in the careless way you do when there seems to be endless amounts of it left.
It was Tim Baker: always a call to enjoy. Not only had I long admired his writing, but he’d mentored me through becoming a writer myself. His very Zen but pin-sharp instincts have put him in the front row for some of surfing’s peak events across three decades now. He’d made himself the biographer of choice for my favourite surfers; he’d charmed a car, a camper and a publishing contract out of various hard-headed people to take his family on a surfing road trip around the continent. Tim could sing the birds down from the trees.
But Tim’s tone was different, and he went straight to the point. “I’ve got stage-four metastatic prostate cancer, and it’s got into my femur.” I remember the shock, like a physical blow, and the mental scrambling for what to say next. Tim, being Tim, made all of that easy. I suggested he do the thing he does best and write about the experience of being diagnosed. He was already well down that road.
Patting the Shark is the collection of that writing – a book that is unusually bright and funny, given the subject matter: equal parts PhD thesis, memoir, self-help manual and savage critique of the shortcomings of our medical responses to cancer. To be perfectly clear about that last bit – because I’ve seen it misunderstood – Tim is all for conventional Western medicine and is not, as far as I know, drinking his own piss or communing with yaks instead of doing his chemo. His whole point is that the patient is a multi-faceted human being, and that while the depth of medical intervention might be impressive, its width is sometimes wanting.
Tim was diagnosed young, at 50. This is younger than men are recommended to even begin thinking about their prostate health. He talks of the oncologist’s waiting room, where there are pamphlets on the tables entitled How to talk to your grandkids about prostate cancer. Tim’s kids were 13 and 9.
Patting the Shark is ferociously brave writing. Nothing is off limits – not the terror of asking about life expectancy, not the emasculation of hormone therapy, not the cold horror of talking to your children about what’s happening. Not the gloomy corridors or frightening machines, the nauseating drugs not the losses of life’s pleasures. Tim takes his conversational tone to all these dark places in order to make another, even bigger point: that the living keeps going on, long after the diagnosis. Cancer is not a ‘fight’, or a ‘battle’, despite the over-use of those comparisons. People don’t win or lose that fight. By chronological measure we are all dying, every day, and we’re challenged to extract all the meaning and worth that we can from our secretly numbered days.
For those wondering, Tim is now seven years into a five-year prognosis. Already a healthy guy, he has zeroed in on meditation, a plant-based diet, music, exercise (yep, he’s still in the water), medicinal cannabis and psychedelic therapy. His PSA number (the index that measures the distress signals that the prostate is sending into the bloodstream) is reassuringly low and his scans are good. The numbers indicate that Tim’s approach is a remarkable, unqualified success, although being a pragmatic atheist he would baulk at the notion of miracles. I ring him from time to time and as we all do, I default to the socially reflexive “How are ya?” His response is always “Great mate, how about you?” and I find myself marvelling at the hidden meanings in the exchange. Are you really great, or are you sparing me the hard conversation? Am I great?
This short book, thin on celebrities and almost bereft of waves, is probably the most important thing Tim Baker will ever write. It’s not just a book for the owners of prostate glands: just about everybody cares about somebody who owns a prostate gland. And the lessons in Patting the Shark go much further: lessons about acceptance and courage and how medicine works, and the value of family and health. This is indispensable reading, from one of our greats.
