After Barbara’s first lot of unsuccessful treatments, her pregnant daughter was killed in a car accident. Then her aggressive cancer flared up again. However, after receiving Trastuzumab, she survived the tolling bells of ‘terminal’ cancer and extraordinary grief. She remains alive today.
Cancer genes come from within us; the unique chromosomal make-up in our cells was written with the potential to develop cancer. We’re loaded with cancer genes – oncogenes – but they need to be activated for cancer to develop, for instance by an infection or a mutation in another gene.
When I was diagnosed my family paid for the BRCA1/BRCA2 genetic test to see if I’d inherited either of the known breast cancer genes. I received the result within a fortnight and it was negative. The truth was that even though my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at 45 and I was diagnosed at 35, no one knew why. I stood in the room with two pieces of good news: I didn’t have a known faulty gene and the cancer was gone from my breast and armpit, which bolstered me against my fears.
But the procedures required to test for mutant genes or remove flesh that held the result of bad genes were nothing in the face of what I was about to experience. I was taken out of the introductory room to a windowless space where nurses accessed portacaths and took bloods. It was as if I’d walked around the butcher’s counter to the super bright, cold refrigerator out back. I expected the room to go black and icy when a nurse closed the door. I would come to learn that nurses never closed that door because of feelings of claustrophobia.
Take a deep breath, said the nurse. I later befriended her when she became my regular nurse. She told me a difficult story of her first baby, who had died soon after birth, and how she’d come to call Australia home. She’d moved countries to escape her mother tongue: it embodied the memory of her lost child. She held the puncture kit of round, white plastic with its metal proboscis and IV line attached over my recently inserted portacath.
One, two and three. She pushed it through the septum of the port beneath my skin. Plunk.
No pain. I didn’t feel it. Thank you.
Good. She smiled and winked.
I smiled back.
Over several hours I was plugged and unplugged into my chemo cocktail. My face went hot, and then I went cold. My heart beat faster for a while, but I was also nervous.
Brenda Walker’s Reading by Moonlight explored how books saved her while she went through treatments for breast cancer. She realised her third novel, Poe’s Cat, was an echo chamber of the ideas she’d worked on throughout her writing life, and that the writers so familiar to her, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Beckett, wrote similarly about their emotions not wholly stabilising after terrible experiences. I wondered if this was going to be my story too. I took a sip of tea and ignored my own enquiry. It wasn’t too bad.
At first.
Mieke and Ngaire had to return to Canberra in the afternoon, so I opted to walk home after chemotherapy, as B couldn’t bring our sick son into the oncology ward. I looked over at the parents smoking outside the childhood cancer houses with greater empathy this time.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Celso, happy birthday to you.
It was the fourth of July and our son was surrounded for his first birthday party by his family: his paternal grandmother, who had jumped out of retirement into heading an International Baccalaureate college; his maternal grandfather (my dad) and aunt (my youngest half-sister), both arrived from the south of England; his great-aunt and great-uncle from B’s side, who lived in Brisbane; and three of Celso’s first cousins once removed. I helped him blow out the candle.
I cut the Mediterranean orange cake I’d made that day. It was for the adults as my son didn’t eat, but it was still incredibly important to me that I bake his first birthday cake. I’d commenced chemotherapy the week before and didn’t want to fail as his mother on the day he turned one in the world.
My brain was strung out and my stomach was raked by hunger; the chemotherapy had begun its stripping-down effect, where your higher thoughts and feelings turn basic. At the time of Celso’s birthday I still had the mental capacity to think about what might come if I didn’t survive. However, over the horizon was a time where simple survival instincts were all I had left – I could hardly factor him into my daily cancer routine, let alone parent effectively again.
I bit into the cake. Oh, not good! Does it taste bland to you or is it my chemo mouth?
Everyone politely said that it was a little savoury but okay.
It was tasteless. I realised I’d put in too little sugar – or none at all.
The following morning I couldn’t get warm.
Are you all right? My father was in and out of the spare-room-slash-study getting me a breakfast of porridge with prunes, and a cup of tea.
No, I don’t feel great actually. Could you get another duvet? I’m cold. I huddled under the pile of bedding, trying to sleep.
B had gone to work and my father was minding Celso. In between I supervised his nasogastric feeds.
My father and my sister Alex were staying in a nearby hotel because our house was too small for multiple guests. It was a two-bedroom post–World War II Queenslander with ornate ceilings and solid glass-panelled doors, the size of an apartment but on a proper-sized house block.
When Alex arrived at our home near midday and took to reading a Spot book to Celso, I
