It’s 2 a.m., why are all these people here? Exhaustion from a 25-hour labour, a caesarean and powerful painkillers had altered my state of mind. I sat on the operating table as a burly, pierced man clamped my head with two bear-like hands and my anaesthetist put in the second epidural. My body was gripped by the shakes. The obstetrician’s sense of humour had returned now that the transfused blood was working and surgery was imminent. You look like a truck’s hit you, she said.
It has, I replied, staring at the linoleum of the surgical theatre.
I woke up in the intensive care unit with an efficient nurse flapping around me. Mechanised tights, the medical version of leg warmers, pulsed up and down my calves to prevent deep vein thrombosis. The brown-eyed nurse picked up an intimate conversation with me as soon as she saw me stir, as if my waking had merely interrupted what we’d been saying, like we were two old friends. The possibility of dying in childbirth sends a shudder of horror through any woman, including nurses. I’d lost over four litres of blood from a massive post-partum haemorrhage. From kind strangers I had received 13 units of A+ blood. The relief of surviving the intensity of the situation, and of knowing my son was okay, relaxed me for the first time in a very long day.
The walk to the shower involved a rolling stand holding all my intravenous lines for medications, a nurse, and one of those frames the elderly use to walk to the shops. I was the medical version of an octopus.
An on-call obstetrician had saved my uterus. I remember seeing him slapping his own face to heighten his alertness – he’d arrived straight from his bed at home. When he walked up to my ICU bed I shook his hand. Thank you for saving my life, I said.
No worries, he replied. Next time, have a planned caesarean.
The irony was that if I’d lost my uterus after my son’s birth it would’ve been one less thing to contemplate removing a year on.
Until Celso’s surgery for a juvenile larynx at four months, his breathing was laboured and noisy. After surgery he couldn’t take bottled milk (he had still never managed to breastfeed) or keep any food down – at all. Little did I know at the time that watching Celso drinking from those initially heartbreaking bottles would be something I’d come to crave. Soon he would need a feeding tube. Life with my son was harried and the days were long, but they also passed as quickly as the crack of a whip. There was no time for anything else. Not even my regular breast checks.
Being a carer, where you’re forced to put another person’s life ahead of your own, fitted like an itchy, tight woollen jumper. I went to pull it over my head and it stuck across my shoulders. I couldn’t get it off, so I smoothed it back down over my chest. Celso played happily at my feet, but my head often lifted up to the horizon where I mentally planned my escape back into my brain. I thought this forward planning a sign that the mountainous road we’d been walking on as a family was levelling out.
Then the cancer diagnosis arrived.
After both the scans I stood on the street and simply breathed for a while. The entrance to the old veterans’ hospital was off a laneway; nearby a metal sword was thrust vertically into stone to mark the grave of the slain warrior, and of Christ. In front of me a courier dropped off a document and jogged back to his car. The world continued to spin in its normal way, but my world had shrunk to two envelopes. My future was in my hands, but I was in no rush to see it. Standing there, I felt the temporary relief of not knowing. Unopened, the results were a choose-your-own-adventure novel: one way led to surviving, the other …
It was peak hour so I phoned B. I’ll catch a bus into the city then get home on the busway, I said.
On the way I went into Myer and bought myself a red handbag with zebra-print lining. Buying it cheered me up, but a buzzing in my stomach akin to nerves told me I had to get home to see Celso. The emotional cord that stretched between him and me pulled my attention back if I spent too long away, as it had when I cared for my mother.
On the bus I opened my scan results and read the doctor’s notes. There was, they said, no evidence of metastatic disease.
Portacath: could I think my way out of cancer?
Despite technological advances, the most useful tool available to a doctor remains their patient’s voice.
Gabriel Weston, Direct Red
Welcome! my interventional radiologist boomed into the waiting area. He stood looking down at me on the trolley. He was mid-40s, with well-combed short hair and a likeness to many men I’d danced with platonically in the 80s as an underage raver in Sydney. He was going to fit a portacath into my chest by inserting a ten-cent-sized pincushion under my skin above my left breast; sewn in place the portacath’s tail would thread up and over my left clavicle and into my jugular vein. Chemotherapy would deliver its chemical power straight into my heart.
I piped up at him, There’s a letter from the anaesthetist who did my lumpectomy about drugs to avoid. I get intensely nauseated.
I’ve read it. Don’t worry, because I’m sending you into a twilight zone. You’re not going under a GA. Most people don’t wake with nausea. You’re actually conscious and able to
