It started out normally. I was eating a Greek salad that had raw onion in it. Is the onion making me light-headed? I thought, staring into the reds and greens of my salad. I was involuntarily drawing in bigger breaths of air. I’m just anxious: calm down. I straightened my spine against the blue padded-leather kickback chair and closed my eyes.
A nurse fitted my first hit of chemo, Taxotere, to the intravenous line replacing the steroids and saline. Okay?
I briefly opened my eyes and nodded.
Taxotere started and my breathing hammered in my chest.
Are you okay?
My eyes bugged and I shook my head. No.
The head nurse was called and a flurry of activity commenced. Put this under your tongue.
The Valium-type drug dissolved in my mouth while they fitted oxygen tubes into my nostrils and stopped all the medications going into me.
Just focus on breathing – you’ll be okay, instructed the head nurse.
I focussed on her eyes. I was shaking uncontrollably again. Nurses bundled me in heated blankets and took my temperature.
They thought I’d developed what’s called a ‘septic shower’, meaning when the nurse accessed my portacath to check my bloods in the morning some of the residual bacterial infection after my first chemotherapy hit might have got flushed back into my system. Once the reaction was under control the nurse started chemo up again. My oncologist’s stand-in was reluctant to alter the dosage, which seemed the right decision, so drugs were provided to mask my stressed-out body. I later asked my oncologist what had caused the stress response and she reasoned I was likely sensitive to the steroid dose, rather than suffering from a septic shower.
Chemotherapy was more gruelling than I could have imagined – even reading and hearing the horror stories didn’t prepare me for how it felt. It was the same with childbirth; no matter what women said to me there was no way of knowing until my body writhed with full-blown ripping contractions.
Once my body had calmed down from its shaking and my breathing returned, I distanced myself from it by closing my eyes and letting my ears lead me around the room. I overheard a conversation between an educated woman in her 50s, who was accompanied by a professional carer, and a country woman in her 60s, who had an attentive son. In my head I named the two women ‘Margaret’ and ‘Dawn’.
Margaret: I was supposed to go last November.
Dawn: Yes … they told me this year.
She turned her head to look at Margaret. The permed hair on the back of her head was thin; her scalp was purple-pink.
Margaret: It’s just statistics! Don’t believe the dates.
She readjusted her Japanese print blouse.
Dawn nodded. I don’t. I feel I’ll be here for some time longer.
Her son bowed his head.
Margaret: Me too.
I was reminded that there were tougher cases than mine. It was a dark place, chemotherapy. A death tendril touched me. I knew I wasn’t dying immediately of the disease, but the effects of the drugs in the first weeks after my two hits of chemotherapy let me know that the breast cancer business was deadly serious.
There was another side to being ill too. There were heightened thoughts and feelings, like the sadness of finally understanding some of what my mother had faced when she was ill. I hadn’t had the foresight to record her voice.
In my chemotherapy haze I stood back from the normal running of life. I observed others without experiencing the fast rush of get-to-work adrenaline. The comings and goings of daily routine were slowed down so that I noticed where my feet fell.
My mind kept returning to the idea of myself as a phoenix rising out of the ashes of my mother’s death, out of a cancer death. As I turned on my side to get relief from a constipated belly, the bony hips leaping out of my flesh were my mother’s. I was inside the last days of my mother’s life; I witnessed her frame inside mine and mine inside hers.
When my mother went into a coma the nurse put her into an adult nappy. Her best friend, Tess, and I rubbed oil into the sagging skin on Mum’s stick legs. We spoke to her as if she was conscious in the room and to reassure her she wasn’t alone, though she was alone in her mind. If hearing was the last sense to go then she knew of our presence.
My mother’s breast cancer was different from mine. She had lobular early-stage invasive breast cancer that was positive to oestrogen and progesterone. I remembered her getting the news that she was HER2 negative. The details were hazy, but I was driving her somewhere – either back to the Northern Rivers after seeing her overloaded and unavailable oncologist in Brisbane or on our way to the beach for a walk. When I visited, Mum always preferred it if I drove, and went up to the till to pay in cafés with her money. My mother had an innate shyness and a reclusive nature even though her academic life required her to speak in front of people and educate others. She often said, I’d love to live in a lighthouse. She had a framed picture of a man standing outside the bottom of his lighthouse with the one red door closed behind him. A heaving ocean with a wave that only sailors see has spilt around the structure and is caught at the moment it is about to return, merge and possibly swamp him. You can’t see how he’ll get out of the way of this wave.
It stung to recall our chats and driving times. We used to talk so openly on drives, our eyes to the front and our emotions easy. The loss felt even greater after the heightened intimacy of the car in the last few months of Mum’s life, as I drove her
