After admission to Southampton General Hospital, aged 64, on 17 Sept 2022 for sepsis, explorations of the underlying issue indicated cancer of the bowel and liver, with a likelihood that it had also spread to the lungs.  That seemed to point in just one direction: I found myself thinking about death, and jotting down jestingly macabre thoughts. Meantime, I was feeling fit enough to roam the hospital corridors, taking the accompanying photographs of ‘hospital still life’. Some of the poems mention my immediate family: mother Shirley, unmatchable wife Steph, children Ursula, Kim and Greg, and my six grandchildren - all wonderfully supportive, along with my brothers and scores of artist friends. It proved, incidentally, very easy to outlive the prime ministership of Liz Truss (‘I wonder’). I was moved around the hospital a fair amount, but spent a dozen days in Bay D of Ward D8 - Gastro Hepatology - and that’s where I wrote most of these poems (the staff in D8 were great, incidentally). I lost two stone between the opening and closing photographs: the last followed on from bowel surgery (‘Notice’), after which I was moved, initially to my own room for four days due to the ward I came from having had a covid alert (as per ‘For four days now’) then onto a post-surgical ward, where the last few poems were written in less luxury. I returned home on 11 October.

POSTSCRIPT OCTOBER 2026

Somewhat surprisingly, I am still alive after three operations and three rounds of chemotherapy, though the diagnosis remains terminal. I have continued to track my ‘cancer journey’ through photo-poems, making this ‘The Death Suite 1 - The Efficient Life’ in a sequence of twelve potential volumes to date.

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Edited and Published by FAD Magazine 
Design by Pritpal Ajimal
Text © Paul Carey-Kent 
Publication © 2026 WXY LTD
Edition 1

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Printed in the UK
ISBN is 978-1-0369-7568-5