The nurse assigned to me for that night came in and introduced herself, and handed me a mask. Anyone who enters will be gowned up, she said, pointing to her own yellow smock, mask and blue rubber gloves.
People’s eyes were all I would see for three days. I was a princess in my keep. Until day four when my cultures returned, proving I did not have swine flu.
A friend working as an investment banker in Paris sent me an email. Contracting swine flu would’ve been just greedy, he wrote. His and my friendship was cemented trekking in the Rockies together when we were 26. He had befriended my mother first on a self-analysis course he attended after a very painful divorce. Mum had said, He walked into the meeting room and had the same energy as you. I thought you’d make great friends. And we did.
I need to be travelling with someone like that, he’d apparently said after seeing a climbing photograph of me in the back of a Mountain Designs catalogue. Our friendship had started in email letters before we met in London for the first time.
Even though I had a casual boyfriend then, I secretly held out hope that this email friend might be the ‘one’. That didn’t turn out, but this dear, soulful banker taught me what decency in a man looked like. It was a quality I would later find in B.
After many blood tests the speak-aloud oncologist came in with the results. Your bacterial infection is treatable. These types of infections can be life-threatening for immune-compromised people like you. He was holding the results sheet with both hands.
Thank you, universe, I thought, and uncrossed my fingers. What did I have then?
The primary source of infection was bacterial, streptococcus from your stripped throat.
I put my hand up to my throat and swallowed: my oesophagus was a ribbed walnut.
The viral infection was a cold – a secondary concern for us really.
Okay.
Because I wasn’t infectious I moved into a two-bed medical suite with an elderly man who had some type of severe rash and made strange rubbing sounds at night. In the morning a nurse with a short, straight-cut fringe came into my new room. You’re young for breast cancer, she said after enquiring why I was there.
I know. I am. I was the youngest on the ward.
As my white cell count was too low I was classed as ‘neutropenic’. My oncologist, who was in the early stages of pregnancy at the time, arranged for me to receive a G-CSF injection for free. G-CSF or granulocyte-colony stimulating factor is a haematopoietic (to make blood) growth factor. For people who become neutropenic, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme provides a G-CSF injection. This medicine slow-releases over three weeks to stimulate the bone marrow to produce white cells to cope with the onslaught of chemotherapy. In three days my 0.00 neutrophil status was boosted to 23. Result. My white cell soldiers had returned: so too a functioning immune system. This was my first brush with the danger caused by the treatments to cure me and not by the cancer itself.
In my hospital isolation I managed to read one book: a complex novel by psychoanalyst Salley Vickers about human frailty, The Other Side of You, which matched the heaviness in my chest. I felt as if my heart had sunk. You’d think when faced with such ill health from a bad chemotherapy reaction you’d want only light comedy, but I didn’t. I read works that helped me to access a language to describe my life.
The psychiatrist in the story had been traumatised by witnessing his brother’s death as a boy. Vickers explores survivor guilt, something that was playing at the edges of my consciousness about my mother and not helping her make better choices.
Have you dusted off the TV yet? I asked B over the phone. It was time for the Tour de France, which we watched, religiously, every year. It was the only time we brought in the television from our house’s understorey.
The first time we saw the Tour together we were lined up alongside many French people in Besançon, near the border with Switzerland, to watch the time trials. We’d driven south like mad things from our then home, a shared apartment in Strasbourg, camping overnight on the wet undergrowth of a forest close to the highway. Preceding the cyclists was a procession of floats. Our favourite was a huge, pink pig that rumbled by with a man throwing lollies. Hot croissants and black coffee were on hand, served out of stainless steel trolleys.
I looked away from my own TV and held the hospital phone close to my ear. Can you come in and see me? I asked.
B paused. I can’t, pea. I’m in lock-down mode. I don’t want to bring any infection into your hospital room – can’t risk a repeat of what just happened. Your father’s visiting you, isn’t he?
I wanted to see B, but said, Yes, Dad was here today. We talked about my grandfather and his World War II service.
My grandfather oversaw the making of second-rate tanks, in Nottingham, for the British government, who were sending their troops over to fight the Germans in their superior tanks.
How’s Celso going? I asked.
He seems fine with my mum. He’s likely missing you but getting a lot of attention, so nothing to worry about.
Are you doing the feeds?
Yeah, it’s all sorted.
How is he going down to sleep?
Mum’s got him in bed with her, which he prefers.
Tell him I love him. Let’s put me on speaker next time so I can talk to him. How are you?
Pause. Good, B replied.
All right, I said. The Tour’s starting, are you watching it?
Yep, about to have dinner, love you.
Love you, good night.
The Tour is a physical and psychological minefield of pain and intense joy for the participants; it’s about perseverance, which was
