In his book Lance talked about his own emotional upheaval after finishing treatment, how gruelling chemotherapy was for him and how crucial support of family and friends was. He also ‘remained positive’ and focussed on his cure from advanced cancer. Later on, when he appeared on Oprah, his positivity to life and drugs appeared more like the arrogance and damaged functioning of a narcissist. However, if positivity was a door you shut on negativity, then mine was warped and let in the grey light of pessimism. Lance said that sometimes you need to support and reassure the people who are alongside you as they’re scared too. Once I was home I tried this out.
How are you going? B asked, patting his stomach, knowing I suffered lingering nausea from all the drugs during the hospital stay. It was the 17th day after my first cytotoxic hit. I had constipation, as well as gut pain that felt like hands were inside me trying to untwist my bowels.
I’m okay, you know – right now I’m okay, I said. How are you, pea?
Good! B gave me a bear hug and walked away to do something.
Okay then, mister, I thought. B had his singular focus switched on, a quality I admired and envied – a laser concentration over long periods of time without awareness of anyone or anything outside that focus, usually directed towards acquiring a new skill or learning.
I thought of Armstrong’s words to return the favour. I reassured my loved ones that as B and I rode the embattled River Styx that was chemotherapy, their support made a big difference.
As a family we had the luxury of being able to place everyone in different camps. B resumed work while his mother cared for Celso at his auntie’s house: a beautiful 100-year-old Queenslander with a grand frontage and a welcoming, quirky interior. My father remained camped in the local hotel. My sister had flown to Darwin to see old family friends and take a series of photographs as part of her entrance portfolio to study photojournalism. After the bustle of a busy oncology ward with its beeps, regular monitoring by nurses, scheduled meal times and doctor visits, I was home alone: in quarantine. This was done in a bid to avoid a repeat of what had just happened. The luxury was not unalloyed by grief. Knowing Celso was cared for was wonderful, as was the quiet time for recovery, but being separated felt strange and straining.
Twelve days after the first cycle I’d stood in front of the vanity mirror regarding my lank hair. I was alone, because B needed to look after Celso and his feeding regimen in the quarantined house. I would never shave my head unless I had to. I wasn’t one of those women who threw off their hair as part of trialling a different identity: Sinead O’Connor tough-beautiful without the feminine adornment of styled hair. I had been a forceps delivery. I have identical indentations on both sides of my skull. I figured my dented noggin would make a Frankenstein out of me. But the time had come.
I placed sheets of newspaper in the bath and leant over them. I chose a number three haircut. I worked my way from my ears inwards to try a Mohawk on top of my head before going all the way. Between each shave I’d stare into the new version of me emerging. When I finished I could feel the cool air on my scalp.
Punk, I said to myself in the mirror. The prickly hairdo was nice to rub.
In the third week after chemotherapy, when I was able to step outside, I walked to the local post office, which was nestled in the RBWH. I got many I’m-looking-at-you, trying-not-to-look-at-you stares. I had become a bona fide cancer patient.
The end of chemotherapy: what is a life?
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill
My guts butterflied as I walked into the day oncology unit for my second round of chemotherapy. My oncologist was not on duty that day, so I got a young stand-in, who was fine-boned and very slight. It was shocking to look at this clearly bright woman and think of her as healthy. If she covered her hair with a beanie and sat next to me in the waiting room you would mistake her for a patient immersed in her own chemotherapy regimen. Her manner was brisk. In her office we talked about how nauseated I had been with the last chemotherapy session and my hospital admission from infection. I discovered I was meant to have taken steroids
