But now after my own CT scan to check for metastases I rattled off to the change room and got dressed. Then I returned to the waiting room for my full-body bone scan. I had the results of the first procedure in my hands, in a sealed envelope.
I went alone to these and other tests because Celso’s level of care meant it was easier if he stayed at home with B, close to all the paraphernalia required to keep him going: compounded Losec in the fridge to control vomiting or at least reduce the scorching of his throat the vomit caused, spare nasogastric tubes in case he pulled one out, tape to secure the tube to his face, nappies, special formula bags …
You’re skinny, said the assistant. The belt doesn’t usually fit all the way over. She continued, I’m doing this so you can’t move when the scanning commences, otherwise the bone scan won’t work.
There was an easy-going rapport between the head technician and her student. Photographs of their families were Blu-Tacked to the walls. Both were from Malaysia.
I was one of many patients they’d scanned that day for various reasons: cancer, osteoporosis, et cetera. As I lay dead still and listened to their conversation, I wasn’t Celso’s mother, I was just another female patient with breast cancer.
I was slim. The only body change I’d noticed before my breast cancer diagnosis was significant weight loss. I put it down to returning to my pre-baby body, but enough people had commented to make me aware I was skinnier than normal. My smaller frame on the tiny bed made me feel almost childlike.
I lay there and felt relieved I wasn’t being posted like a parcel, as my mother had been. Instead a large metal plate hovered within licking distance of my face to scan my skull and brain. It shifted further down, in shuddering jolts, to trace the contours of my body.
If I panicked I knew I could get out of the contraption by wiggling my arm out of one restraint and ripping the other off. I closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind.
What did it? I wondered. To get breast cancer ten years earlier than my mother. Maybe it was the oestrogen I’d taken to override my polycystic ovaries and their tendency to shut down the release of ripe eggs. Or could the hormones that flooded my blood during pregnancy have led to my cancer? Was it that pill that made my breasts lactate more? Would it have been less serious if I’d turned up to my regular breast check?
In the first seven weeks of Celso’s life I’d fed him either a full bottle of breast milk or a combination of my milk and formula. My supply dropped easily so I kept up my continuous expressing with a white pill that made my breasts produce milk.
I’d hired the handbag-sized breast pump direct from the hospital chemist after Celso was born. Attached to it I’d felt like a milking cow with two udder teats instead of four. Its yellow, electronic arm swished back and forth to measure out suction strength and timing. The first few times I was amazed at the rush of warm, opaque milk into the plastic funnel and how the spray hit the bottom of the bottles with a thud. I’d known when the splat sound disappeared that I had expressed more than ten millilitres and was on my way.
In the morning my breasts had been like fists that needed coaxing to relax and open up, letting their contents fall out. When the tension eased the relief was satisfying, but not pleasurable. My mother had once confessed to me that breastfeeding was sometimes better than sex. The letdown of milk releases a hormone also released by physical affection and orgasm. Self-enjoyment aside, I’d missed the nuts-and-bolts action of being a mother and of breastfeeding skin to skin – to provide the best nourishment – for Celso.
When I had stared down with pride at my pregnant belly I’d conjured snapshot moments of my future when He or She and I were cocooned together on a couch or at an outdoor café enjoying the simple life. I couldn’t wait to breastfeed, and show my baby off. When Celso refused my breasts immediately after birth and took the bottle, and even that reluctantly, a protective casing shucked off and I was raw and vulnerable.
I can’t feed my baby! I’d said to the hospital nurses, thinking I was a failed first-time mother. They assured me it would come. It never did.
At home after Celso’s birth we hired a clear crib on tall casters and wheeled him around the house so that we could see and hear him at all times. His floppy newborn neck allowed his head to drop to one side, where he’d commune with his reflection on the plastic walls. My Welsh uncle said that Celso looked like an angel. We were relieved it wasn’t Angelman’s, which the paediatrician flagged during my son’s first post-hospital visits as a possibility. A Dr Angelman had a syndrome named after himself: these severely disabled children loved water like toddlers do, but unlike most toddlers they would never develop normally.
After Celso’s birth, I almost didn’t make it to the cancer diagnosis.
You might lose your uterus. We won’t know until we open you up.
I was lying on a gurney with B behind me telling me he loved me and kissing my hair. I was in and out of consciousness, but when I was alert, I psyched myself up with I have a child now. We could adopt the next time. This played on repeat in my mind as I said to my stoic Irish obstetrician, That sounds a bit heavy.
Within five minutes I scrawled something like my name in red ink on the bottom of a medical ‘do anything to save my life’ consent form. Celso was in the neonatal intensive care unit, mainly because I was out of action and couldn’t feed him,
