When I first woke up after surgery I kept saying, I feel weird, I feel weird, to a newly minted nurse from Queensland University of Technology. I didn’t need to ask what her role was; it was embroidered on her blue-collared QUT shirt. She was pumping up the blood pressure cuff. An IV line was delivering fluids on the same side as the blood pressure cuff and it hurt like hell.
B was beside me. He sat next to me reading for several hours until I woke up. In times like these B was my knight, standing guard to make sure I was treated well and everything was okay medically. He translated my discomfort for the nurse. I was protected.
Back into the sleep abyss. No dreaming.
Awoken again.
I need to go back. Sophie’s looking after Celso, he said. Sophie was B’s lovely cousin.
Okay pea, you go. I slipped back into the dark.
I finally came round at midnight saying the same thing: I feel weird. This time there had been a shift change and the night staff were older sisters, stern but capable. I longed for their hand or ear. They came and went.
The first time I stood my jaw quivered; my whole body quaked.
This is normal, just post-op shock and the anaesthetic wearing off, said the formidable nurse. The back of her head was flat, but her face was strong.
I didn’t sleep the first night without my breasts. I had come to dread being awake in a hospital, tied to the bed with tubes and catheters. This night alone with my thoughts was no different, like my time post–Celso’s birth, but I had no nausea so I was okay. I loved my anaesthetist. Without her preparatory phone call I wouldn’t have coped so well.
If my mother had undergone a double mastectomy in 1996 she likely would have lived. Fourteen years later, I sat upright in bed with two drains taking the excess blood away from my wounds. A TV was high up on the other side of the wall. On my left a large sliding glass door framed a city view with glimpses of the Brisbane River. The decision was mine, all mine. But if it wasn’t for my mother’s decisions and breast cancer experience I wouldn’t have been in that hospital bed. My mother’s death, I realised, saved my life.
Have you opened your bowels? asked the same nurse from the day before, who’d hurt my arm taking my blood pressure.
No, not yet.
Are you getting wind or rumbling in your stomach? she added.
Yes.
Okay, well, walk around again today and drink plenty of water.
Done deal.
Four hours under anaesthetic slows down the body. It’s like putting a frog in a fridge. My lymphatic system – which transports excess protein and waste product from blood and tissues – was sluggish. I had puffy hands. The physiotherapist came around on day one to put me through my paces.
When I was able to walk without aid I took myself off to get a magazine on the ground floor as the physio suggested. I wore B’s pyjama top (blue with red polo players), pink monkey pyjama bottoms, my leg-constricting leggings, ankle socks, Bonds sticky slippers, and no chest. I wondered if people thought I was a ‘he’. At the elevator a woman mistook me for a visitor, asking, Who are you here to see? She was one democratic thinker.
Despite everything I still felt the same sense of relief I’d first woken with, without my breasts. I was literally and figuratively lighter. This feeling never wavered. There is nothing like death staring into your eyes for mental toughness. But my nightlife took on other emotions. It was as if a large whiteboard recorded my nightmarish dreams and in the morning I’d reach for the duster and quickly wipe the words and images away. Some were drawn with black marker and were hard to remove; faint traces remained until the following night, when another hallucinatory dream wrote over and changed the previous day’s faded nightmares.
In one of them I was empathising with another young woman whose mother had died and I said, I remember the second time my mother died. We were in some hospital ward with old medical machinery around. Then I was inside a hospice – one without dignity – and watched my mother wake up from being dead. She’d come back to life. It was real and made sense in my dream and also when I woke. My experience of going through cancer treatment after caring for my mother as she went through hers made me relive her death and everything that had led up to it. My mother had died twice. The first time hadn’t counted. I understood her death more now, as I had come close to mine.
It was as if I had a door marked breast cancer. Once I opened it, it drew in others who had also experienced the disease. A big, kind woman who served the hospital meals had had breast cancer two years prior to my diagnosis, but she’d been clear ever since. She told me this after she’d enquired about my chest bandaging. She said she took her hormonal medication every other day because it played havoc with her. I would be too frightened to do this, equating this decision to taking the contraceptive pill every other day: you’d risk getting something you didn’t want.
On day three the nurse came
