Health Check: My aunts and their champagne stoicism

When I receive my final diagnosis, assuming I don't die first, I hope I take it like my aunt Marion has. I was with her in casualty last week just after the verdict was delivered. "Darling," she said, "they say its terminal – lung cancer spread to the bones."

Her tone was interrogative, her eyebrows raised, as though she was telling me about someone else. I was stunned and distressed, but she was too positive, too upbeat and accepting for tears.

A radiologist appeared with an X-ray form. She cast a sceptical glance at Marion, who is in her eighties and has turquoise hair. (She dyed it three years ago for a wedding party and it was so stunning she kept it.)

"Why do you need an X-ray? Have you had a fall?" the radiologist asked.

"No, dear," Marion said simply. "They think its cancer in the bones." The radiologist withdrew. "I don't think she was expecting that," Marion quipped to me.

Marion has spent her life creating waves in the art world – her husband (my uncle) Michael Kidner has paintings in Tate Britain – and creating waves is what she's best at. She had been admitted to casualty because of an intense pain in her chest that turned out to be a broken rib, although she had suffered no injury. She exchanged banter with the nurses, joked about the hospital food andcommanded the doctor tell me what he had told her. (I was impressed. Listening before he spoke, he was straight without being callous, sympathetic without being mawkish, and gave enough information without overloading us.)

Marion asked the doctor if she could have champagne. "If that is what you want," he said. The next day she ordered a case, and for the last week, friends, relatives and her husband Michael have gathered each evening to pop a cork and share a gossip.

Sitting round her bed, sipping champagne of an evening, it is difficult to believe she can be dying. She has more life and vivacity than anyone on the ward. My 14-year-old daughter and her friend went to see her, displaying their pierced belly buttons, to which Marion reacted in mock disapproval. Afterwards, the girls said they wanted to be like her. "She is so stylish," they remarked. Indeed. When she asked me to escort her to the opening of Tate Modern two years ago, she turned more heads with her turquoise hair and extravagant jewellery than a supermodel.

I have several aunts, all with large personalities, and this is the second one whose medical exploits I have written about. A couple of months ago my aunt Margaret gambled her life on a heart operation that carried a 15 per cent mortality rate. Margaret is now back at home, I am delighted to report, with improved health and gaining strength day by day.

While the end result is good, and a tribute to the skill of all those who cared for her, the journey to it was not. After the operation she spent nine days in intensive care, and suffered such pain and discomfort she cannot bear to remember it now.

One evening I was called at home by the consultant anaesthetist on duty, who told me she had had a set-back. Her lungs had been filling with fluid, but the nurses only learnt of her distress when she asked for a pen and paper and wrote "Let me die". They responded by sedating her and putting her back on the ventilator. "She is a stoic lady," the consultant said.

Shortly, Marion, who is still undergoing tests, will have to face the same choice – whether to accept treatment that will cause suffering in the hope of extending her life. There are no cures for 80-year-olds with heart disease and cancer – there is only the chance of buying time. But time, at the end of life, is never more precious. The impossible question is: what sort of time will it be?