Josepha (Josie) Dietrich is an English immigrant to Australia. She lives in Brisbane in the home that she and her partner built on Passive House principles. After coming out of a long reign of being a carer, she’s worked as a research assistant for universities on projects to improve psychiatric discharge planning and women’s wellness after cancer. Her prior long-term work was in the After Hours Child Protection Unit, assessing children’s risk of harm alongside the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Unit of Victoria Police. To remain sane during this period, she flitted off overseas for months at a time to climb cliff faces while sleeping on beaches or in abandoned shepherds’ huts. After her cancer treatments finished and in light of her experience caring for her dying mother, Josie joined the advisory committee of CanSpeak Queensland as a cancer and consumer advocate.
For my mother
Heather Mary Dietrich
21.02.1949 – 25.12.2005
Contents
Prologue
Diagnosis: will I live?
Lumpectomy: is this right?
Body scans: what’s inside me?
Portacath: could I think my way out of cancer?
Chemotherapy: are genes us?
The end of chemotherapy: what is a life?
Memory: will my relationship cope?
Breast reconstruction: what are the meanings of breasts?
Cancer etiquette: does cancer change you?
Mothering and cancer: is motherhood ever enough?
Christmas Day
Worrying: am I on the right path?
Physical intimacy: what is sexuality?
Hope: can you learn to live well in conversation with death?
Post-it all emotions: does stress cause cancer?
Pink bits: can a doctor–patient relationship help heal you?
A new normal: is how I look important?
Heightened experience: is life’s meaning found in connection with others?
Every female organ apart from my brain: what makes a woman?
Now: what’s current in the breast cancer arena?
Celso’s diagnosis and hope
Acknowledgements
Resources
Bibliography
Prologue
My mother’s breast cancer was diagnosed when she was 45 and I was 21, an unwelcome third character in a story that, until then, had been ours. Just the two of us, friends and confidants, two moons circling each other. We shared everything.
From that day onwards my adult life was shadowed by the disease. It emerged every two to three years. Mum conceded to surgery but not to the chemicals. She sought solace in alternative therapies: Vitamin C infusions, a German non-chemical chemotherapy, psychic surgery and psychological work. They didn’t save her.
But my mother’s death saved me.
Four years after I buried her, my mother’s cancer reared up in my own body. The minutiae of her experience – doctors’ waiting rooms, hospital stays, waking up after a general anaesthetic with her breast off and a purple slash, the weighted realisation that her doctorate would never get submitted, the reckoning of a life – clawed deep into my own cells. Yes, I thought then, we did share everything.
Except for this: by then I had a child of my own, and I refused to share my mother’s choices. Instead they galvanised me. I would fight for life with every piece of medical ammunition available. Chemical, surgical, atomic. In the end I had every female organ removed that could generate cancer, apart from my brain. I’m standing, still.
Diagnosis: will I live?
Cancer was named for the crab, because a cancer tumour sends claws out into the surrounding tissue.
Kathleen Jamie, ‘Pathologies’
It was 6 p.m. on a Friday. I had Bolognese sauce boiling on the stove and the aroma of its red meatiness was in the air. The telephone burred.
When I answered, my GP didn’t waste words. Josie, your results are in: you have ductal, invasive breast cancer. I’ve gone ahead and booked you in to see a breast surgeon on Monday.
I sat down at the kitchen table, my world now the size of its rectangle of silky oak. A tremor ran from my hand to my feet. A few days before, I had shaken uncontrollably as a doctor dug into my right breast with a fine needle, its journey guided by an ultrasound machine. I remember her authoritative voice warning me, This will sting. She pushed and the needle slid deeply into my breast. The sonographer, a well-kept woman in her early 50s, assisted. Something in that sonographer’s manner and voice made me trust her immediately.
It turned out I needed both types of biopsies that day. The needle that poked in and out of the tumour to capture its adolescent cells, as well as a core biopsy, where a thicker needle shunted in and out to take tissue – like getting your ear pierced.
A support person, someone from the front desk or a training doctor, I never found out which, had stroked my hair back. She had a brown bob and a plump figure. You wouldn’t notice her in a crowd unless you knew her and then you’d gladly rush over to share a confidence.
You’re doing well, Josie, she’d said.
I wasn’t. Not really. I’d wanted to say, I’m scared, I can’t get a grip. My mind raced, looking for a way to escape what I knew then was coming.
Here you go, honey. She pressed a tissue into my hand.
I’d sobbed throughout the entire procedure, thinking of my mother, wave upon wave of memories lifting off my chest. Like me, she’d faced this painful procedure alone and later, like me, was alone when she heard the news. Did she think of her own death then, as I did now? The future and the present colliding, like the words of that faux Buddhist phrase on café walls: Live like this is your last day on earth.
That’s what I read now in the aged, honeyed grain of the wood in front of me. I’d be dead in ten years, like my mother. And younger than she was, the flame of fate turned up high to reduce my lot.
I phoned my partner, B, at work and told him the results.
There was a pause and then he said, I’m on my way. He told me later he’d left his computer on with all his sustainable building projects unfinished.
