I was 22 with my right cheek rested against the cool quartzite sandstone of an Arapiles climbing crag. Arapiles is a mass of rock in Victoria that sits among vast wheat fields and resembles Uluru. I was on the ‘Have a good flight’ wall: a slab of rock 15 minutes’ walk up from the bottom of a series of outcrops. I was about to pull through the crux of the climb. My heart was audibly thumping against my chest; two far better climbers were watching (one was my then boyfriend, the other was my future boyfriend).
Is that the sound of her heart? asked future boyfriend.
The current boyfriend (belaying me) kindly told him to shut it and turned to focus on encouraging me to go for it. I swapped my left foot to my right to stretch out towards the arête of the wall. A chicken-head-shaped clump of rock was the hold I needed to get past and then the climb was mine. It was a grade 24, with the scale going from five to 32. I pulled myself onto the arête and balanced on the chicken head. The hardest part was over. The relief coursed through my body, making my blood feel warm. This memory reminded me that it was rare to be the author of your own fate. I had once held my life in my hands. The situation got reversed with cancer.
And what about those who don’t survive? Are they losers? In The Year of Magical Thinking, American author Joan Didion explored the grief and shock to her psyche after her husband died from a massive heart attack, sitting upright at the dinner table. Her only daughter was dead within a year from septic shock after severe pneumonia. If death catches you, you only have yourself to blame, was Didion’s suspicion of how others sometimes responded to her circumstance.
I found there was a kind of blame assigned to a person for developing cancer in the first place, as if there’s a cancer type of person. Like you brought it on. Isn’t that what I did when I said I wished my mother had chosen differently in her treatment – that she could have lived, but she died instead?
My death felt imminent. I didn’t want to die young. I was 35. My mother developed breast cancer at 45 and died at 56, riddled with metastases from her womb to the lining of her skull. No thank you. It was scary and over-powering, as if a Greek god didn’t like you. I wanted in on the survivors, on that group of people. I wanted to be someone who died of old age with a story to tell. But what about those among us who fight the disease and lose?
Beat and fight. Words that never sat well with my mother or me. She used the term to dance with cancer and that’s what she did. Sometimes she stepped confidently without looking, as decisively as she would in an Argentinean tango: guided by the hand at her back. Other times she swayed on the spot with every beat causing goose pimples, summoning up the passion of a life lived in sound and fury: alive to the moment. She either leant into the movement of her dying swan or stamped angrily on her cancer partner’s feet, hollering at its jerky rhythm and too-rapid pacing. At times she prayed the dance would never end.
I wouldn’t dance with cancer. It was no friend of mine. I wasn’t going to fight it either, declaring war on my own body. I didn’t like cancer, but my body had grown it. My body had once been good to me. It had grand jeté’d across stages, hauled me up cliff faces, held onto billowing spinnakers and trekked into high mountains. I wanted to work with my body to rid myself of it. Beating cancer made sense – I understood the term – I just didn’t use it.
To fight cancer meant standing in a castle’s turret volleying arrows down onto an attacking army as it tried to break down your reinforced healthy door – this wasn’t the right image for the way it was treated. To attack cancer wasn’t really the right medical term. To suppress its chances of developing was. With chemotherapy and hormone therapy I had suppressed the bejesus out of mine.
Breast reconstruction: what are the meanings of breasts?
… I was still feeling a strange stunned alertness, as if everything were taking place in slow motion, under halogen lights.
Brenda Walker, Reading by Moonlight
I arrived on time at my plastic surgeon’s rooms. Pale velvety-cushioned chairs lined all three sides of the waiting room, with a low-lying table brimming with eye-catching magazines in the middle.
Celso wanted to practise his walking. He slapped his pudgy hands on the seats, one after the other, making his way along the perfect line of chairs. A kind woman opposite told me about her nine-month-old daughter who did the same. By this stage my boy was pulling all the neatly stacked magazines onto the floor, and then stomping on them. A fabulous poo stink reeked from his small person.
I’ll need to find a spare room, I said to the front receptionist. She was stiff and starched. She rolled her eyes.
Inside the room I prepared the spongy black consultation bed as if I were about to perform an operation myself. Celso tried opening the chrome cupboards and bin so I clasped him between my knees before picking him up and laying him back on the black bed. I got out a biodegradable bag ready for the soiled nappy. I opened it up, un-stuck the frilly bit around the leg hole that stops stuff getting out, and pulled the first of his wipes out of their
