The carpet was a close-cropped weave in a vibrant green with darker squares. Its colour would come to represent how I felt for months to come, its pattern nauseating.
My name was called and I went over to the middle-aged nurse to go through my particulars one more time before being admitted for surgery. She would check my weight (53 kilograms), my height (163 centimetres) and my blood pressure (86/60) before finally admitting me to the ice-cold pre-op side behind the European foyer.
Do you know what procedure you’re having today? she asked.
Oh yes, I knew.
My breast surgeon, Dr Wilkinson, a reserved man who drove an old Valiant to work, would look down on my unconscious body, take a scalpel from a nurse’s hand and cut into my right breast. He’d start near the cup of my waxed armpit to perform the lumpectomy, to preserve the skin on my breast.
He’d inject a kind of blue dye into my tumour and watch it spread down the lymph tentacles to perform the modern sentinel node biopsy. All the subterranean blue ones he would cut out of my body. Part of my tumour would be sent to America as I was a randomly assigned control subject in the BETH trial, which measured survival rates and the use of a drug, Avastin, on women with the HER2 gene.
For the next few years I’d get used to this. My cancer or, later, parts of my organs and tissues were outside me and in a dish. Packaged for transport and marked with information for an anonymous professional to slice into and analyse.
I often thought of all those pieces of me, the incisions and the excisions, bits passed to pathologists for testing or thrown into an industrial bin to burn to ashes that would puff out of the back end of a hospital. Although the only surgery where I would wake lighter due to the quantity of organ tissue removed was over the horizon – my double mastectomy. (Before meeting Dr Wilkinson I had already decided to have my breasts removed. It was the clearest decision to make – breasts develop cancer: get rid of them.)
My mother’s bodily ashes I split – one portion under a gingko tree, the other lot into a stupa. Most of her is buried under the ancient species of maidenhair tree on my in-laws’ former property. She grows on someone else’s land now. The epitaph engraved on a brass plate in front of her contains the last two stanzas of Mary Oliver’s ‘In Blackwater Woods’ poem:
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Before burying the ashes under the gingko tree, I had gone to Chenrezig, a Buddhist institute north of Brisbane. That day I was all raw nerves. I had Mum’s recently cremated ashes tucked under my arm like an infant; the mature bamboo creaking and clanking its trunks was another world death knell: death worked towards by the Buddhist practice of acceptance. I do not believe in renewal of a soul in the form of reincarnation, but the practice of calming your chattering mind and compassion and love – the hard-worked-for ‘look to yourself; on the mat’ type – has much value for me.
The smaller portion of her ashes was potted into a Tibetan shrine. She has settled there these past ten years among others in Chenrezig’s sub-tropical gardens.
Three days after my surgery Dr Wilkinson phoned me with the news. The operation was successful. The margins were clear.
I repeated what he said, to clarify I understood it and to let B hear the results. We sat, hunched over, on the end of a single bed in our spare room. It was already afternoon and we hadn’t bothered to open the curtain to let the light in. The door was closed and we could hear B’s auntie on the other side entertaining our son in the lounge room. I didn’t say much so I could absorb what the surgeon was saying. I swallowed hard. His words came to me down the line as if by parachute – what was landing in my world?
But the surgeon was still talking: I removed nine lymph nodes from your armpit. One of them had a four-millimetre cancerous tumour. He paused. That’s very small.
He told me when he held my lymph nodes in his hands they’d felt enlarged. This worried him, thinking all nine of them might be brimming with cancer cells flicked off from my breast tumour. I thought of the dried seaweed I’d picked up as a child from Sydney beaches. Dark green strings of discarded sargassum, which I imagined as mermaids’ pearls. When I squeezed them between thumb and forefinger the pearls would give a satisfying pop.
Bugger, bugger, bugger, I thought.
B held my hand.
I asked the surgeon about the chances of the cancer spreading to the rest of my body. My voice was weak.
He spoke plainly, and I was grateful. I can’t answer that, he said. Even your oncologist likely can’t if there’s no clear tumour. We’ll do a CT abdominal scan and a full bone scan this week. With cancer tumours they can be in your lymph nodes, caught early and never rear up anywhere else, or it travels directly into your bloodstream, metastasises and kills you.
My head
