“Oh, Nick,” she said, her voice quavering slightly. “There’s something I have to tell you.” She gulped. “And you’re not going to like it.”
I turned around to face her. Maybe I didn’t want to make it too easy for her after all.
She looked up at me.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
I could feel the tears welling up in my own eyes. All I wanted to do was to hug her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “I’ve got cancer.”
10
How could I have been so wrong? And so stupid?
“What?” I said.
“Cancer,” she repeated. “I’ve got ovarian cancer.”
“How?” I said foolishly. “I mean… when?”
“I’ve sort of known for about two weeks, but I found out for certain on Thursday.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“I was going to, but, to start with, you were so busy at work. Then I was going to tell you on the night of the Grand National, but there was all that Herb Kovak business. I thought you had enough of your own troubles. Then on Thursday…” She gulped again. “Thursday was an awful day. When I left the hospital after the doctor confirmed everything, I was sort of numb, couldn’t feel anything, didn’t even know where I was going.” She paused and wiped a tear from her cheek with the sleeve of her dressing gown. “It was while I was walking aimlessly down Tottenham Court Road that Rosemary called to tell me you’d been arrested. It was all dreadful. Then you were so angry at having your name in the papers that somehow I couldn’t tell you that night, and… well, yesterday seemed so fraught between us, and I thought it best to leave it because you had so much else on.”
“You silly, gorgeous girl,” I said. “Nothing is more important to me than you.”
I went around behind her and put my hands on her shoulders and rubbed them.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“I’ve got to have an operation on Tuesday.”
“Oh,” I said. Suddenly, this was very real and very urgent. “What are they going to do?”
“Remove my left ovary,” she said, choking back more tears. “And they might have to remove them both. Then I’ll never be able to have a baby.”
Oh, I thought. Too real and too urgent.
“And I know how much you want to have children,” Claudia said. “I’m so sorry.”
The tears flowed freely again.
“Now, now,” I said, stroking her back. “Your current health is far more important than any future children. You always said children were troublesome anyway.”
“I’ve been desperate,” she said. “I thought you’d be so cross.”
“Don’t be so silly. The only thing I’m cross about is that you didn’t tell me straightaway. It must have been dreadful for you, bottling it all up, with no one to talk to.”
“My doctor has been wonderful,” she said. “He gave me the name of a cancer counselor.” She produced a crumpled business card from the pocket of her gown. “And she’s been an absolute rock. I’ve called her so many times now, I know her number by heart.”
I looked at the business card. The number was the much-called one I had copied from her mobile phone bill.
How, I asked myself again, could I have got things so wrong?
“Tell me,” I said, “what did the doctor say?”
“I first went to my GP because I didn’t feel very well, and I could feel that my tummy was bloated.” She smiled. “I actually thought I might be pregnant, but I’m on the pill and I’d just had my period.”
“And?” I prompted.
“He asked me if I had any back pain, and I said yes, so he sent me to see a cancer specialist who did some scans and other tests and they came back positive.”
Back pain.
I inwardly chastised myself for my earlier thoughts.
“So what is actually wrong with your ovaries?” I asked.
“I have a tumor in the left one,” she said. “It’s what is apparently called a germ cell tumor.”
“Is it malignant?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is,” she said. “But it’s fairly small, about the size of a peanut.”
That didn’t sound that small to me. I thought whole ovaries themselves were not much bigger than that.
“And the oncologist is hopeful that it hasn’t spread. But he will find out for sure about that on Tuesday.”
“Where are you having the op?” I asked.
“University College Hospital,” she said. “It’s where I’ve been seeing the oncologist and having tests all this last week. I was there most of the day today having MRI scans so they know exactly to the millimeter where the cancer is and how big, ready for the operation.”
With her phone turned off.
“Overall, I’ve been lucky they found it so soon. Apparently, it’s quite usual for such tumors to go undetected until it’s too late because many GPs dismiss the symptoms or confuse them with other problems.”
“What can I do to help?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just be here.” She smiled. “I love you so much.”
I felt a fool and a charlatan. How could I have been so stupid?
“I love you so much more,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “Do you need to go to bed?”
“I’m not feeling ill,” she said, turning and looking up at me with a smile. “Or were you thinking of something else?”
I blushed. It must have been the gin.
“I wasn’t,” I said. “However, I could be persuaded. But, I mean, are you all right?”
“For sex?” she said. I nodded. “Absolutely. The oncologist told me on Thursday that it wouldn’t make any difference.”
It made a difference to me.
I lay awake in the dark of the small hours, trying to get my head around this new problem.
I had feared so much the thought of losing her to another man that the news of the cancer had almost been a relief, a reprieve. But this was now a much more serious battle with the unthinkable outcome of losing her altogether if the fight was lost.
Claudia had gone to sleep around ten o’clock, and I had then spent the next couple of hours at my computer, researching ovarian cancer on the Internet.
My initial results had been far from encouraging.
Overall, ovarian cancer five-year survival rates were only about fifty percent.
That was not good, I thought. It was like tossing a coin. To live, you had to correctly call heads.
However, Claudia had said that the oncologist thought that the cancer hadn’t spread. For Stage 1a ovarian cancers, those that were confined within the affected organ only and which hadn’t spread to its surface, the survival rate was nearly ninety-two percent.
That was better.
Throw two dice. Score eleven or twelve, and you die. Anything else, you live.
For germ cell cancer, the rates were even better. Women with only Stage 1a germ cell tumors had a near ninety-seven percent chance of survival at five years.
Throw those dice again. You are dead now only with a double six.
Slightly worse than the statistical survival rate for a space shuttle flight (ninety-eight percent), much better
