I was not like this. Not one little bit.
Brisbane summer was twirling her full skirt and flashing everyone with her naked brilliance. Here, when you step outside the home, your pupils constrict so sharply that you walk around with tunnel vision for a minute.
My hormones or lack of them made me grumpy under the oppressive warmth of Brisbane’s wet armpit hug. Or, as the literature for women taking Zoladex says, Mood changes are common.
I was bathing Celso, leaning my arms on the porcelain edge of the bath, and ruminating. B was watching ABC iView in the other room. Yeah, just suck up that TV, arsehole, crisps in hand with nothing to do.
I fumbled something and it dropped to the ground. For fuck’s sake! sprang out of my mouth.
B rushed in. Are you all right?
I get tired too, you know, I blared into his face.
Okay. He was wounded.
I smoothed down Celso’s hair and stood up. B took over washing him.
I stormed into our room and crashed onto the four-poster bed, exhausted.
After B put Celso to bed he walked into our room. I looked up at him.
Sorry, I didn’t mean it, pea, I said, feeling like five kinds of poo.
It’s okay. He shrugged, then made a face. I understand.
I love B down to his mitochondria, but jab me with Zoladex and watch sparks fly. The heat from my menopausal hot flushes pressed tight upon my skin. I was claustrophobic, uncomfortable, red and sweating. I was murderous under The Menopause, and my burgeoning depression left no room for fun.
Menopause dries you up. Oestrogen is a great lubricator of the vagina, joints, skin and brain. Part of going into menopause to protect myself from cancer was negotiating a body with plummeting oestrogen levels. To help the Zoladex keep my oestrogen level down I took a pill – Arimidex – alongside high doses of Vitamin D and calcium. This was all to help my body pretend it was in its 50s or 60s. Once I’d lost the puffiness of the steroids I’d taken during treatment, my forehead resembled a ploughed field.
Breast tissue contains fat cells. Fat is considered the third ovary because it still produces oestrogen after oophorectomy. When science writer Florence Williams found substances similar to cannabis in her breast milk she delved into the history of the human breast. Endocannabinoids regulate a baby’s intake of their mother’s breast milk. One of the possible reasons for obesity in formula-fed babies could be the lack of hormones to regulate their appetite. Williams discovered that breasts also absorb chemicals such as fire retardants sprayed onto sofa foam.
Breasts absorb but they also create. Arimidex leaches my fat of oestrogen by being an aromatase inhibitor. Aromatase is an enzyme responsible for converting androgens (‘male’ hormones, like testosterone) into oestrogen. In breast tissue, aromatase is normally regulated, but when it’s not, you get hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer.
In menopause many women worldwide take synthetic oestrogens to overcome their natural relinquishing of it at menopause. Williams explored this phenomenon in Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History. She wrote: By 1992, Premarin (the name stands for pregnant mare urine) was one of the most widely prescribed drugs in America, given to 11 million menopausal women and earning its happy makers nearly $2 billion a year. To create the unprecedented demand, drug companies and physicians appealed to women’s vanity and reason, essentially inventing a new pathology called menopause in the same way the surgeons had invented one called micromastia, for small breasts.
When I went through menopause instantly and younger than I would have naturally, I realised what it must be like for older women – for those no longer seen as being sexual or attractive to men (in a society that tells us that’s one of the most important ways a woman can be valuable). I was distanced from my true age, which didn’t bother me as I wanted to do other things like survive and write. But there was one major aspect of menopause that made me pause in my breast cancer treatment regime.
After chemotherapy my brain behaved very strangely indeed. I wanted an apple but asked for an orange. I misplaced my son’s first two pairs of proper leather shoes. I left things on top of cars: one week, I drove around the suburb with my lost mobile phone stuck to the roof. I only noticed its presence when I headed out the door and spotted it on the car instead of in my handbag.
When Celso came into the world my memory for names and lists fell away through sheer exhaustion. With chemotherapy my ability to retain recent events, dates, times and appointments had not so much fallen away as been buried by a pile driver. I often walked into a room and stood still, waiting for my brain to catch up and remind me why I was there. I’d go through possible reasons: get Celso’s meds, ring and make an appointment with X, organise weekend get-together, call someone back, put on washing, recall own name. It could take anywhere between five minutes and a couple of hours for the reason to spring back into my mind.
I declared myself the human goldfish. It was as if the drugs created a barrier that held my short-term memories at bay: in effect damming them. As the chemicals leached slowly from my body the ability to retain information and short-term recall of events returned a little.
It was the same with old dreams and memories; the damming process let whatever flowed closest to the filter inlet in my memory pipe pour out. I was a ten-year-old, aglow with warmth as I walked the high path
