There’s no escaping chemotherapy with these results, said my surgeon.
I didn’t want to burst into sobbing tears, knowing that would quake B’s insides, after all that we’d gone through as a couple already: our return from France for my mother’s care then death, my near-fatal post-partum haemorrhage, and now the care of an as yet undiagnosed, high-needs baby.
When a child’s spinning top turns, all the colours blend. At that moment I oscillated between I’m going to beat this and My life’s over so rapidly that my emotions swirled into a fusion of optimism and dread.
They’ve caught it early though, right? B was churning through the information.
I nodded. Yep. But my internal voice added to my list of fears and regrets: I’m fucked and I’m going to die without becoming an author.
I had to put my ambitions on the back burner, again. When I had Celso, I put my Master of Arts in children and youth writing on hold. I finished the core subjects, a very rough draft of my novel and a decent draft of my exegesis, which examined how the hero’s pathway, the journey towards knowledge and resolution, was best explored in young adult literature through dystopian narratives. My exegetical question was: How has Ursula Le Guin altered the hero’s pathway in her high fantasy The Earthsea Quartet (1968–1990), to fit changing contemporary social realities?
Writing was now, again, the last thing I could afford to think about. Suddenly I was in the life-threatened category of people, of stories that only happened to others, to friends of friends or in magazine articles – not to me. I had grade 2 invasive ductal carcinoma and my cancer was triple positive: it had increased levels of oestrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and the HER2 protein (or human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein). Thanks to having been my mother’s chaperone through her cancer days, I knew that after chemotherapy I’d go on hormonal therapy because of my cancer’s oestrogen dominance. But just as suddenly I felt a spear of determination. I could do this. The job of chemotherapy and hormone therapy would be to cut off my cancer’s food supply. It was not going to get me. I was going to starve it to death.
Body scans: what’s inside me?
Look, let’s look at you
crabbing disease that’s taking over
my body
one nip at a time
I shook like I was standing on ice. The CT (computed tomography) scanner would laser-reach into my body, touch my soft tissue, stroke my rushing one-way valved blood vessels and bounce against my bones. The captured images from this internal sweep would show a medical expert, sitting in a distant room, if I had metastatic disease: Ms Josepha Ruth Dietrich, CT scan for mets – invasive bc.
I was screened off zoo-style from the medical staff, who stared in at me through a large glass pane. The walls of this private hospital room were beige and tired compared to the one where I’d had my lumpectomy one week before.
The bed in front of me was curved and slender, like a sleeping pod in some distant spaceship. I climbed aboard. The hospital gown protected nothing. I wore old, overstretched Bonds knickers and I didn’t care.
Just stay still, said the CT scan technician standing by my side. Her manner was kind but businesslike. I could picture her playing volleyball.
A sting, then pressure, and a radioactive substance was injected into my vein via the inserted cannula. A metallic twang infused my mouth as though I were swallowing silver.
It’ll feel like you’re wetting your pants. You’re not, don’t worry, she said. She quickly turned and left the room, sealing the door shut.
It was the machine and me. It was spinning wildly 30 centimetres from my face. A disembodied male voice told me, Hold your breath. The machine whizzed around my torso then stopped: Breathe, said the same voice.
I hadn’t stopped shaking from the moment I’d entered this room. I worried the CT image would blur. Warmth spread into my groin. I contracted my pelvic floor muscles just in case I was about to pee myself.
I’d consumed a litre and a half of some dodgy liquorice liquid and felt nauseated. A recurring theme throughout my treatment. The nausea and shaking had nothing to do with the liquid drunk or blood taken. I’d come out of the lumpectomy and sentinel node surgery one week earlier and the shock of being a ‘cancer patient’ was hitting home.
The CT slowed down. I hope they don’t come out blurry, I said into the room, knowing the sonographer could hear me behind the glass viewer.
That’s what I’m checking now, but all looks fine, said the sonographer through the two-way speaker.
Does that mean my internal organs look clear of metastases, when she said all looks fine? That’s what I wanted to know.
All done! You can get changed now, she said.
I swung my legs off the bed and used a kindly pre-placed stool to get down.
Then I was sent back to sit in a yellow-walled waiting room. I recognised it immediately because I’d sat in a place like this as a 23-year-old while my mother had her CT scan. That day the MRI technician came out with a look I’d come to know well. Medical staff were invariably discombobulated when my mother collapsed with anxiety. She appeared to be calm and confident; she was articulate and looked directly into your eyes. People assumed she had it together.
And then the MRI technician and I were watching her emotional breakdown. My mother was sobbing, scared of what the doctors might find and the big medical machinery required to envelop her. Her physician needed a full bone and body scan. To get one my mother had to lie strapped down onto a thin bed as it moved into a hole in the wall. The technician looked
