If you’re an oncology patient having chemotherapy, you get an emergency card. You flash it at the triage nurse to be admitted without waiting, as fevers and chemo are a bad combination.
My father and I were ushered into the emergency room. An experienced nurse walked up to us, held my father’s hand and exchanged some English–Australian banter about England winning the Ashes, then pointed to a seated area near the green cubicles. She simultaneously showed authority and calmed my father and me down. If Mum hadn’t briefly married an Australian man, Green Card style, we might never have stayed here. The reality of this sliding-doors moment came back to me; my father might have looked after me in situ instead of having to travel half a world to reach me.
I was ushered into a curtained cubicle and my history was recorded by an experienced though young nurse with streaky dyed-blonde hair. An elderly woman was outside in the white corridor on a trolley, with a male nurse asking her questions: Do you know where you are? Who do you live with? She was disoriented and couldn’t answer him.
I lay back on the trolley and stared up at the fluorescent-lit ceiling. My father was allowed to enter and pushed the drapes aside like he was swatting a fly. He sat in the one corner without heart monitors or the mobile observations trolley with its blood pressure cuff, oxygen saturation probes and long proboscis thermometer.
Are your eyes normally this puffy? the nurse asked me.
No. I’m also not normally this flushed.
The nurse nodded. We’ll get something for your fever once we know what’s going on.
She wore one of the old-fashioned nurse’s watches with only the face pinned to the left breast pocket so you could glance down to read the time.
I might have picked up my mother-in-law’s cold. She arrived a few days ago, I said.
You’re not supposed to see people with any infection once you’ve commenced chemotherapy, she said in a telling-off manner.
I didn’t know at the time. Fuck’s sake, Josie. You were too blasé about contact with people. I wanted to reverse time and pay more attention to that chemo introductory room.
Where did she arrive from? asked the nurse as she scribbled comments in my medical chart.
Hong Kong.
The nurse’s head jerked up. Does she normally live in Hong Kong?
Yes.
My father’s back straightened on the chair.
The nurse asked a lot of questions about my mother-in-law’s presentation and whether she’d been tested for swine flu. No, she hadn’t been tested, but, despite it being considered an epidemic at the time, I figured the chances of her having swine flu were remote as she was in charge of a school where health standards were high. The nurse went off to inform the doctor and get a quarantine card to attach to the now-closed curtain over my cubicle. Anyone who entered had to wear a mask and gloves. It wasn’t quite code red, but definitely code pink, and after a throat swab that made me gag, and getting my nose poked, I was regarded as having swine flu until proven otherwise.
My doctor arrived, a newly minted registrar of oncology, and shepherded me through the situation and medical requirements. He was one of those rare men who matched a keen intelligence with kindness – eyes that reflected inwards as well as looking out – and he also had the endearing quality of speaking aloud his thoughts. He questioned me about my breast cancer in relation to my mother. I guessed where this was going, so said:
I’m not BRCA1 or 2 positive. There’s likely an inherited unspecified cluster that’s made me susceptible to breast cancer.
Oh, highly intelligent.
Alas no – just regurgitating what a highly intelligent geneticist with a name like Dr Gattaca said.
I did well in biology at school because I had a good memory for rote-learning details and finding sequences that linked information together in pictures. After studying I’d close my eyes and read off the image in my mind to answer test questions. This ability would evaporate after chemotherapy and induced menopause.
My fever remained constant at 38.5, and with no known source of infection the registrar had to get my blood tested. My white cell reading came back as 0.00. When a bacterial infection has no white cell soldiers to attack it, it attacks the organs directly. The registrar placed me on continuous antibiotics straight away, even though the full blood cultures were still not back from pathology.
I’m treating this as serious; you’ll need to be admitted onto the oncology ward and likely stay up to five days, he said.
I searched for my father’s eyes. They were fixed on mine. We couldn’t believe it. The day before I’d attended my son’s birthday party relatively well, and now I was febrile, with no white cells and possibly an unknown bacterial infection attacking my organs.
After a few hours in the accident and emergency cubicle I was wheeled up to the oncology ward and into a large isolation room because of the swine flu possibility. The oncology ward had rooms that ran off a central, carpeted corridor. There were only four single rooms as the rest had multiple beds of four or two in a room. I later found out the single rooms were for people leaving us.
I climbed onto my trolley-bed and looked through the open blinds out to a courtyard where a couple of medicos were smoking. A nurse wheeled a machine in to take my blood pressure and pulse. Its rubber wheels squeaked on the linoleum flooring. I looked up from my bed to the TV on its high mount. You had to pay extra to operate it, which I thought fair. The public system is burdened already, without footing patients’ pay-TV habits.
After the nurse took my observations I grabbed the IV pole delivering my antibiotics and
