But I want to know what I’ve said.
Yes, I’ve had some interesting conversations. He stared up into the room’s cornice with a faint smile on his face as if recalling some former patient’s obscenities.
What if I say odd and embarrassing things?
He shrugged and smiled. See you soon.
I returned to reading The Brain That Changes Itself on brain plasticity. It was the chapter on pain where Norman Doidge told the story of the neurologist Dr Ramachandran, a renaissance man who’d assisted an amputee patient, Philip Martinez, to successfully ‘amputate’ a phantom limb by fooling the patient’s brain to ‘see’ his amputated hand move using a mirror box. The intense pain of Philip’s frozen elbow disappeared after one month.
Medical memoirs and readable medical books interested me in general, but my growing fears about Celso’s development made me seek out stories of atypical learners, stories about people whose behaviour or brain functioning made them appear ‘retarded’, a ‘playful’ insult unfortunately still bandied around today. It pulls me up every time I hear it. I wanted the stories of those who, in adulthood, finally functioned well in communicating their intellect or thoughts with others. They could still be atypical, just independent. (My searching would eventually lead to a play-based therapy, the Son-Rise Program, that did indeed begin to ‘awaken’ my son.)
Five trolleys were lined up side by side with no screens. I was on the far right. Covered in white blankets, and looking down the row of men and women dressed in white theatre gowns, I glimpsed a shimmering aura of emotion, almost physical in its presence. A young man held his body stiffly. He grimaced when he moved and stared straight up into the ceiling. The woman next to me had a round face. She was wearing a loosely knitted beanie and peered about with curiosity, as if she was at a party and hadn’t been introduced to anyone yet. I avoided eye contact so I could read.
What are you here for? she said by way of introduction.
I’m getting a portacath put in, I said, and returned to my reading.
I came here to get mine out.
I put my book down. What did you have it for?
Breast cancer.
Who’s your oncologist?
She had the same one as me, and said that she thought the oncologist was lovely and always dressed well.
I agreed with her about the dressing-nice bit.
She told me about the alleged side effects of one of her chemotherapy drugs, Taxotere, but she’d experienced none of them apart from tiredness.
You’re lucky, I said. I hope I have the same run as you.
Yeah, she said. She was likely somebody’s grandmother; I could see her sharing a sponge cake with a child and pouring pretend tea into plastic cups for as long as the child wanted to play the game. This woman had travelled lightly through breast cancer treatments. I envied her.
My sprightly radiologist swung back into view. He and a surgical nurse wheeled me down a short corridor towards the operating theatre. I checked the doctor’s name on my identification wristband.
I pointed to my left wrist. There’s a different doctor’s name on my tag here.
Yes, Dr _____. He’s operating in the other theatre. There have been some changes to the roster of patients. You can have him if you like.
No, I like you. And I did. My interventional radiologist was kind.
Good, I like you too. His nurse wheeled me in. The atmosphere in the room was of professionals who had worked many graveyard shifts and had established a playful manner with one another. My name replaced the previous patient’s – another woman – on the computer display screen, which hovered above the table.
Someone’s been knitting in here, said a young nurse. He untangled a black, rubber slinky with a probe on the end that clipped onto a person’s toe or finger to measure the oxygen levels in their blood.
I was shaking. My nerves were swamped – again – like they’d been the day I had my CT scan.
The anaesthetist who sedated me for my lumpectomy wrote a letter suggesting TIV (total intravenous anaesthesia) to reduce post-operative nausea. For days after the lumpectomy I’d experienced waves of intense I’m going to vomit surges, that hospital’s green carpet rearing up at me again and again. Being on my back, about to be put under and operated on so soon after my lumpectomy, even for a minor operation, made me fearful. The shaking went all the way inside to my mind. If there were grab bars above my bed I would’ve clung to them, trying to centre myself, knuckles white. Give me some control.
Later on another anaesthetist, a female one, got the cocktail right and informed me that the days of nausea after my lumpectomy were likely due to a reaction to the anti-emetics, not the anaesthetics.
The portacath procedure was straightforward. I didn’t get sick this time, and once the drugs were out of my system I could leave. I phoned B to come and collect me from the front so he didn’t have to get Celso out of his baby seat.
After I healed I headed to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH) to get an echocardiogram: an ultrasound scan of the heart. I was the youngest by 15 years or so in the waiting room – this had invariably been the case since my diagnosis.
The ‘echo’ checked my heart function and provided a base reading before chemotherapy’s rotgut commenced. My chemo regimen was TCH (Taxotere, Carboplatin, Herceptin). On Herceptin’s list of common side effects, first off the rank was moderate to severe heart failure. The uncommon side effects were acute respiratory distress syndrome (acute onset of severe shortness of breath) and pulmonary fibrosis (chronic lung damage).
My oncologist needed to know if there were changes to my heart after TCH started, so I would have an echo performed every ten weeks. They took about 15 minutes, but today’s took three-and-a-half hours; the sonographer had to rush to a patient
