Dismantled
A MEMOIR BY JOE BUTLER
What Survives, and What You Build Instead
He almost cancelled the appointment that saved his life.
At twenty-seven, Joe Butler was diagnosed with stage IVa mouth cancer. What followed was surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy — and the much longer work of finding out who was left afterwards.
What happens after survival?
ABOUT THE BOOK
At twenty-seven, Joe Butler was diagnosed with stage IVa mouth cancer.
What followed was sixteen hours of surgery, reconstruction using tissue from his forearm, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a recovery that did not end when treatment did.
This is not a tidy inspirational survival story.
It is about fear, scars, hospitals, family, grief, stubbornness, bad jokes and the ordinary life fought for on the other side.
At its heart is a promise: to leave his children an honest account of what happened, what helped, what hurt and what remained.
READ AN EXTRACT
Chapter 6 — The Other Driver
The first thing I remember is trying to speak.
Nothing came out.
No memory. None. I was just there. In a bed. In the dark. Surrounded by beeping things and kind strangers and a ceiling I didn't recognise.
The light in the ICU is strange. Dim, eerie. Someone decided at some point that this was the right atmosphere, and presumably they had good reasons, but it isn't calming. It's the kind of light that makes everything feel slightly unreal. Like being at the bottom of a very clean, very organised swimming pool.
The nurses were there. They clocked immediately that I couldn't speak, which suggested this wasn't their first rodeo. A clipboard appeared on my lap. Paper. Pen.
Off you go, love.
When you wake up somewhere unfamiliar with no memory and no voice, your brain does its very best. It looks at the available evidence and constructs the most reasonable story it can.
My brain surveyed the cast on my right arm, registered something strange in my throat, noted the hospital setting, and concluded — quite confidently — that I had been in a car accident.
Solid detective work.
Completely wrong.
I picked up the pen with my left hand. My right was in the cast, wrist to elbow, protected while the graft site healed. My left hand had never had much to say for itself before that point. It managed.
Five words.
How is the other driver?
I want you to picture the nurse reading that. The pause. The quiet breath she must have taken. And then, in the calmest voice you can imagine, she looked me in the eye and said:
"You weren't in a crash. You've been in for surgery. To remove your tumour. You have cancer."
Just like that.
Sixteen hours I had been under. The world had gone on without me. And the first thing it had to say when I came back was: cancer. The word I already knew, even at twenty-seven, carried enormous weight. I had watched it take two of the people I loved most. I had always associated it, without much thought, with one outcome.
A nurse sitting on a night shift had to deliver that news to a young man with no memory and no voice. Using a clipboard. In the dark.
She did it with complete composure, and moved straight into the next thing, which was making sure I was alright and understood what she'd said. The composure wasn't indifference. It was professionalism in the fullest sense: the feeling managed, the job still done. These people operate at a level the rest of us simply don't. Whatever the NHS pays them, it never has been enough.
I processed this information in silence.
Extract from Dismantled: What Survives, and What You Build Instead.
© Joe Butler.
Survival was not the end of the story.
WHY I WROTE IT
Treatment saved my life. It did not explain what to do with the life that came afterwards.
Dismantled began as a way of making sense of that gap — between being alive and feeling like the person who had gone into treatment.
It became something else too: a record for my children of what happened, what changed, what helped, what hurt and what I learned to build from it.
This book may be for you if…
FOR READERS
- you have lived through serious illness or treatment;
- you are supporting someone who has;
- you are interested in identity, grief, recovery and family after crisis;
- you want a memoir that does not pretend survival makes everything neat.
You do not need to have experienced cancer to recognise what it means to lose part of a life and have to decide what comes next.
STAY WITH THE STORY
Dismantled is still being prepared for publication.
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