Zoladex is a monthly injection that sends you into a chemical menopause (it’s also used to chemically castrate men). It basically visits your ovaries and says, Hiya, girls, sorry about this but there’ll be no more eggs from you, and switches them off like a handy plumber. I had just experienced my last period, ever.
The following week I sat again in a puffy blue remote-controllable chair in the day oncology unit. This time instead of exposing my portacath to a chemo needle I exposed my belly to a needle the size of a pen. The nurse did something clever when she administered my first Zoladex injection. First, she injected a local anaesthetic just under my skin to form a small bump, which stung a bit. Then she got the Zoladex needle – Don’t look, she said, but I did – and she injected a pellet-sized deposit of chemical into the bump so it wouldn’t hurt. Which it didn’t. The pellet’s contents dispersed over four weeks, and then I’d get another hit. The plan was to do this every month until I was near the normal age to be post-menopausal – 15 years away.
Other women warned me that when you’re sent into a sudden menopause, bad moods can come on. No. Anger came on. I returned from shopping for dinner one afternoon – a healthy meal of salmon fillet, steamed vegetables and rice – with my temper boiling.
I got out the steamer and cleared away breakfast plates and crumbs off the bench top. I wrung out the damp cloth and placed it on a hook to dry. The groceries were poking through the clear plastic bag, as I’d forgotten my green bags. This was my ‘office’, in which I cleaned, cooked, and organised every day. I gripped the sink with both hands. My life was going to pot: I was living the life of the meek; I couldn’t stand being a house queen anymore; and I wanted someone else to look after my son while I returned to meaningful work. Full stop. But wait! I didn’t have work to return to; I was a 35-year-old loser. And on it went. My body was ramrod stiff but my eyes darted around, searching for an answer in my bag, out of the radio, out the window. Depression was again kicking my front teeth in.
Memory: will my relationship cope?
My dreams are going through their death flurries … I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together – with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.
Barbara Follett, Barbara
I had no energy. It was draining down the plughole, the bath water chasing it down. The noise of it outdid Celso’s vocal protests. At this point his large, washable change table stood in the nook just outside our bathroom. The nook had four doors off it, leading to our bedroom, the bathroom, Celso’s room and the lounge room. A phone line ran up the side of the wall beside four semi-circular wooden shelves. We used these shelves for baby stuff: wipes and nappy rash creams. To get Celso from the bath to the change table took two steps.
On the table, he kicked his legs into my stomach. His pudgy, working feet occasionally kicked my caesarean scar, which made me wince and draw my hips away. From the change table to his room took four steps.
Everyone was telling me that a regular sleeping pattern was ‘best for baby, best for parent’. I had commenced putting my son down two hours before. He was still crying. Inconsolable. We both were. My son writhed in my arms. His eyes were watering. He needed to sleep. I did too; I was sinking. The older he got the more likely it appeared that he had a developmental delay and God knew what else. This was before any diagnoses, before I found life-altering programs and the right physical therapy. He wouldn’t eat food. I had to get nutrients into him with a special formula made by a Dutch pharmaceutical company and shipped up from Sydney. He was still nasogastrically fed; a tube went up his nose, down his oesophagus and into his stomach. I needed to sleep. He needed to sleep. I wanted out of cancer. I wanted out of mothering. I wished my son wasn’t this child. I wanted him without special needs. If only we’d conceived another night. A different egg and sperm would’ve mixed another baby – a normal, healthy baby. But I still wanted that baby as this baby. Just a normal version.
A Texan yogi in Eat, Pray, Love gave Elizabeth Gilbert good advice when he said that if you couldn’t control your mind you were in trouble.
I was in deep trouble.
Depression had come home to roost, to ride my back. All the doubts rushed in. What was I doing trying to write a young adult novel as part of my master’s? This wouldn’t work. I wasn’t a writer. When I opened books and read the author’s bio it usually went:
Mary Stage wrote The Luck of Beauty at 25. It was an instant bestseller. She was a journalist with The Times before she wrote said novel. Her second novel won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her third book, a work of non-fiction, is ritually on the contemporary classics list in all good universities. She resides with her Italian husband, Pietro, a doctor for Médecins Sans Frontières and ex-model, in Milan with their fraternal twins Cute and Cuter. They divide their time between Western Europe, New York and Ireland.
Due to Ms Stage’s success she now wrote full time. Her husband could support her anyway because he was a former highly paid clothes hanger and current well-paid doctor. Her breasts
