Several months before my mother died the palliative chemotherapy she received had shrunk the metastatic tumours in her liver. The reason my mother gave palliative chemotherapy a try was to sustain her life long enough to tie up loose ends like a failing marriage as well as to have as long as possible with me. Her then husband left the house with their two untrained wire-haired fox terriers and went on a road trip. An escape for him and us. He said he did it for my mother, knowing his presence and behaviour were unacceptable and disturbing. He also hitched his wagon to another unsuspecting woman, advertising himself on a dating website as a widower before my mother was dead. Love me, love my dogs was his by-line.
When I entered her home to become her full-time carer, she had, in her own words, been sent home to die. There was no further treatment offered, and no arrangements made for hospice services, or even any information about support services in her area. In the Northern Rivers you had to drive to the Gold Coast or Brisbane for appointments with medical specialists. I wasn’t informed about travel or accommodation assistance for overnight stays if my mother was too ill to sit in a car after a hard day on the drugs. Once, our car broke down and we had to wait for roadside assistance. There was no hope of a recovery and she’d been given roughly a year to live if she made the palliative chemotherapy trips. A year after my own diagnosis I became a cancer patient advocate with CanSpeak Queensland to correct some of these ways in which the health system failed people diagnosed with cancer, especially those dying of the disease.
One morning Mum sat up in bed and in a chirpy voice said, You never know, a miracle might happen. I could still be cured. She smoothed the creased bed linen across her lap.
Well … I started, then softened my tone to sound gentle. I just don’t want you to have false hope. Your cancer is classed as terminal.
Mum looked down, making a face like a child who’d been chastened. Tea then? She brought her chin up.
Coming up! and I exited stage right to the kitchen.
Why did I not have more fun with it? Make the conversation lighter? Instead I quashed her levity.
In Life in His Hands a New Zealand journalist, Michael Bartrom, was refused a referral to Dr Charlie Teo on the grounds that his doctors didn’t believe anything more could be done. Bartrom considered their attitude amoral; he could only imagine a future with himself still in it.
We all have this vision and wish to be the ones sitting in a future photograph surrounded by friends and family instead of the absent one in the picture. Hope offered in the hands of medicine and its latest findings lets us die knowing we’ve done our best, or that the choice was ours to refuse further treatment and a handshake made with death instead.
Unfortunately my nipples didn’t stay in place. Instead of nipple ruffles I got nipple pimples. The waterproof dressing was not so waterproof. I left the dressing on for several days as advised and when I changed it the wound area was infected. I guessed the water trailed in along my mastectomy scar, because the second waterproof dressing (which was said to absorb fluid up to ten times its weight) allowed water to sneak in also. My friend, an experienced wound-care nurse, said that the infection was likely there before the dressing became wet.
With the infection the wound’s stitching spread apart and in effect undid/unzipped itself and the neat job performed by my surgeon. The result of all this was that my previously pert nipple skin ruffles were flattened; they were goners.
Dr Theile told me to allow the wound to dry out. On seeing the infection he quickly announced, We’ll get them looking good, don’t worry. Then he proceeded to discuss skin grafts, preferably taken near an existing scar to mask the graft site.
I blanked out the entire conversation about skin grafting. I didn’t want more hassle for something that was between B and me only. If we could live with the current result then they were staying as they were.
After the wounds healed they were minuscule rises on each breast, which I decided to leave alone so that I could wear camisoles under tops and forget the bra. Moreover, if I wore a tight-fitting top the small bumps showed as flattened nipples would under a solid bra. In short, my nipples could fake well enough for me.
Post-it all emotions: does stress cause cancer?
… neural networks are sensitive and, once formed, are prone to repetition. In neuroscience, one of the first ideas I learned, no doubt made memorable by the convenient rhyme, was Hebb’s law: ‘Neurons that fire together wire together.’ The more I shake, the more likely it is that I’ll shake in the future.
Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman
I had elevator emotions. They sat inside my chest in some sort of shaft. It was easy for the emotions to descend to the stomach’s ground level, a solemn interior with little light.
I clocked the elevator emotions as they descended: the nausea after a general anaesthetic bruised my outlook (it tingled in my chest); my son wasn’t babbling or saying words at 18 months (it weighed heavily at the top of my gut); I could actually die from breast cancer (bang on the bottom).
With the physical sensations of my emotions heading south, my face dropped its hold on fine muscles around my mouth, which was normally quick to smile. All of me wanted to pile up on the floor and Wizard of Oz out of there into another place in the world where I could be someone else.
In the blue of depression I smelt red. My blood was close to the surface. I feared an unthinking moment with a knife or tall
