Eating the Underworld (10 page)
Read Eating the Underworld Online
Authors: Doris Brett
Intravenous Drip
The thin man is always beside me.
He was there when I woke,
holding my wrist like a genteel
hospital visitor.
He feeds me
nutrients, water, morphine.
Drop by drop, the most
devoted mother.
He performs magic too,
thanks to him the flowers
have started to beat like hearts
in their baskets.
and when the nurses come in,
I smile at them gauzily.
He is deeply attached.
And it shows.
He would follow me anywhere,
even to Fairbanks, Alaska.
I am his life, he exists
only to serve me. He says
this over and over
the way the wolf speaks
to the moon's rising.
Sometimes at night I see
that if I just lie still,
I will be fed forever.
G
REG COMES BY ON HIS
daily visit the first day after surgery. He tells me what he has foundâearly-stage ovarian cancer, confined to one ovary. No sign that he could see of any spread. Martin has already told me this, but I like hearing Greg repeat it. I like hearing
anyone
repeat it.
Greg has taken samples of the fluid in my abdomen, as well as tissue samples from various neighbouring organs. All of these are currently being examined by Pathology. If they show microscopic traces of tumour cells, Greg tells me, I could suddenly find myself classified as having late-stage, instead of early, ovarian cancer. This sobers me briefly, but only for a minute. I'm betting on my luck this time.
After Greg's visit, my nurse arrives. To my horror, I discover that I am supposed to get up and attempt to walk. Sitting up in bed is excruciating. Attempting to swing my legs over the edge of the bed is worse. Hanging on to the nurse, I manage to put one foot in front of the other and execute a few wobbly steps around the room. She pronounces herself satisfied and helps to lever me back into bed. I resolve never to move again.
Hospital stays are like being a vampire's house-guestâsomeone is always coming at you asking for blood. I'm getting so conditioned that I grit my teeth, roll up my sleeve and offer my arm the minute a strange face enters the room. Occasionally, the strange face turns out to be the cleaner.
The cleaners, overall, are the friendliest staff members. My nurse and her successor are still into the
Sturm und Drang
method of care-taking. An Irish nurse has been assigned to patients in the rooms opposite mine. I hear her cheery morning voice saying, âAnd what can I do for you m'darlin'?' as if she really means it. I lie there silently thinking, âI want
you
! I want
you
!' willing my thought-beam to invade the nursing roster and bring her to my side. One afternoon for a brief two hours, the universe accedes. I am in seventh heaven as my fantasy nurse helps me up and disentangles me from my drip with gentle, loving care.
The pathology results are supposed to be due back on Friday. I look up hopefully when Greg enters the room, but there's been a delay. The same story is repeated on Monday. On Tuesday, Greg comes in grinning. They're clearâit's a confirmed stage 1. âWow!' I say, with stunning eloquence. The tumour was twelve centimetres, grapefruit size, and grade 3âmeaning it was large and very aggressiveâbut somehow it hadn't spread. I have a vision of it as a big, overgrown bully-boy, who is secretly agoraphobic and doesn't want to leave home. I am also to discover that grapefruits will never again look the same to me. Beside myself with excitement, I ring everyone I know to tell them the news.
Twice a day, I haul myself up and go for a little stagger around the ward. The first few days of this are agony. Any movement involving my abdomen sets off sensations that feel like the classic torturer's implements. I shuffle a few feet around the ward and return to bed feeling as if I've completed six marathons. I am stunned by how weak I am. It's as if I've aged a
hundred years in a few days. I set myself a goal of a few more minutes, a few more yards each day and enter into the challenge with the machismo of an elderly Schwarzenegger.
One morning, a middle-aged woman tentatively enters my room. I figure she has come in by accident, looking for someone else. But no, she sits herself down by the side of the bed and smiles at me. I smile back, wondering who the hell she is. âI'm a chaplain,' she says. And smiles again. I smile back. Silence. I smile again. She smiles back. Silence. I am sure that chaplains are supposed to speak comforting words to their patients. Perhaps she got confused and went to psychoanalysis school by mistake? She smiles again. I smile back. I deduce that she is actually very nervous and doesn't know what to say. She must be a trainee chaplain. I decide to put her out of her misery. I'm feeling fine, I tell her. I don't really need to talk. She sighs with relief and becomes positively expansive. âThat's wonderful,' she says. And leaves. I feel exhausted.
I have to decide what to do about chemotherapy. From the outset, I have been expecting to have it, but Greg tells me that it's not considered necessary for a stage 1a. He knows that I was presuming I would have it, so he's gone ahead and got a second opinion from another oncologist. He, too, says no chemo necessary. An oncologist friend of mine agrees with him and consults another colleague as well. Yet another voice saying no chemo. And so I figure that with four oncologists saying I don't need chemo, it would be verging on masochistic to go ahead.
Australia follows the European line; that chemotherapy isn't needed for 1as. America takes a different position. Over there, a stage 1a tumour that is grade 3, ie. very aggressive, would be given chemotherapy. There's no right or wrong position here; it's an illustration of the tricky decisions that need to be made with early-stage ovarian cancer.
By far the greater majority of stage 1as will only need surgery and be cured. Their cancer will never come back. A small percentage of 1as who only have surgery will experience a recurrence of their cancer. If they had initially been given chemotherapy as well as surgery, it is possible that fewer of them would have experienced that recurrence. This poses the dilemma: if most 1a women don't need chemotherapy, then by routinely giving chemotherapy to 1a women, you are subjecting them to very toxic chemicals that may harm and won't help them. Is it worth doing this to the majority of women in order to catch the small number of 1a women who
will
need chemotherapy? It's a hard one to answer.
The hospital recovery period is dotted with small victory flags. My bladder works smoothly when the catheter is removed. My bowels are back on line with equal efficiency. (I'm sure the hypnosis is helping with this.) The bandage is taken off my abdomen. This leaves me amazed to see that I really have been cut open and sewn up. It is astonishing to see the long line of black stitches; like a child's sewing sampler executed on living flesh.
It is disconcerting too, in another way, to see the
concrete evidence of what has actually happened. On the one hand, it is one of the most intimate contacts anyone has ever had with my body. And on the other, it has been conducted in the most impersonal way possibleâmyself unconscious and draped, a mere body part, and everyone else masked, gowned and gloved. It is the most paradoxical of experiences. I imagine how disturbing it would feel if you had a difficult relationship with your surgeon. Entering into this intimate, total relinquishing of your body to another person's hands requires an enormous leap of trust. And yet this experience, with its underlying emotional subtext, is spoken about in terms akin to entrusting your car to a skilled mechanic.
The Lady Next Door
The lady next door is having visitors.
Their voices murmur
like knitting, like the soft
clicking of distance
as the railway line speaks
to the sun. They believe
in the weather, that it is
still going on out there.
Their voices go backwards
and forwards like the sea
that I have invited into this bed
with me, with its salt memories
and old tongues
that roll in on the night,
tidal, swelling
messages from the long,
lost continents of health.
I let them wash over me ⦠Grandmothers talking,
neighbours, aunts that I never knew.
Outside, they continue to say, the weather
is still going on.
They are talking of light and shade,
the summer rain, of what to do with tubers,
Sarah's plants, the niece's cure,
and what the ground really says
if you sift it through.
I only know the weather of rooms.
Here in this temple of voices
sounds float in with the doors,
the odd drift, the wrecking sounds of illness,
the day's single eye
clicking into night.
At eight-ten, she has her daily appointment.
I hear her footsteps, tentative
at first, trembling
from the night's dark
labour. And then
she comes into view.
She inclines her head gracefullyâ
a slow, great queen
and I see that she is guided,
that she has roses in her mind
drifting from the hard
hospital ceiling, that the nurses,
attendant as tug-boats,
are only part of the circle
shifting around her
where she waves,
the mother-ship leaving safe harbour,
and makes her way upwards, stately, serene â¦
Each morning, she goes out to meet
the radium of love.
The End of Visiting Hour
Is when all the sets revolve.
The flowers get up and change
places. They walk on their thin
green legs all the way up the curtain.
Somewhere behind there is the forest
where the sleepwalkers go at night,
circling and circling, their eyes wine
red, the tablets powdered on their tongues.
The tree, whom I think of as my friend,
stands at the edge of all this,
guarding me, I think,
from the witch in the corner.
This is the one with the hook
embedded in her nose.
She laughs at anything,
especially at me in the iron bed
at the end of visitors' hour
listening to the footsteps
tapping down the corridor
always going home.
After the Operation
Some time afterwards
you see the zip
in your body and you begin
to realise what really was done.
You apologise to your body,
you wish it to excuse
such indignity,
after all, it was to save a life.
Your body says nothing.
It trusted you,
believed you would take care
of it, steer it across roads,
avoid fires, not approach
strange men with knives.
âNo,' you say. You lift a hand,
your wrist comes into view
pivoting on its ballet-bones,
(miracle of miracles)
âIt wasn't like that,
I thought of you,' you say,
âbefore the operation. I pictured
you opening, mysterious flower,
and instead of intrusion,
I thought “hands”, “healing hands”,
the master gardener tenderly
tending the plants.'
Your body stirs. It's getting
interested. You think of all the slurs,
the sullen chants and incantations
you've poured on it for yearsâ
the workhorse, the slavey, the drear.
And how it's remained faithful,
silently serving your needs,
asking for littleâsome food and drink,
a simple place in the corner
of your syndicated life
And how, all the while,
and now you see it,
is the daily miracle,
wilder than flying fish or falling
loaves, the thin exquisite
sheath of bone and blood
the pumping heart and lungs,
the secret liver, the moss
of tissue, the living
muscle's curve. Here
are the networks of nerveâ
cathedrals under the skin,
the whole waiting
city beneath the lake
that you wake to deeply
at moonlight while the bells
ring miracle, miracle â¦
And because there seems
no other word, you say
it again âmiracle, miracle'â¦
and your body purrs,
hums and begins to heal.
O
N THE LAST DAY OF
hospital it's time for the stitches to come out. âWill it hurt?' I enquire nervously of Greg. âNo,' he says in confident, assured tones. A pause, while he grins, âIt's never hurt me.' In fact they don't hurt; it's more like an odd, pinching sensation. Of course, the knowledge that this pinching sensation is due to thread being pulled through your flesh adds a certain frisson to the experience.
One thing I notice over the week is that apart from Greg, none of the hospital staff ever mentions the word cancer to me. It feels odd to have the reason for my being in hospital cloaked in such silence; as if it is hidden, unspeakable. I'm feeling buoyant and savedâI don't feel a need to talk about cancer to the staffâbut I wonder what it's like for those who are struggling with their feelings and fears.
At last, it's coming-home day. Leaving hospital is as exciting as stepping into a new life. I'm thrilling with the anticipation of an ordinary shower and sheets that aren't lined with rubber. And putting some distance between me and the all-pervasive scent of hospital disinfectant.
Oddly enough, some years later, I am writing an essay on the hospital experience. I have been trying to put myself back there, imaginatively, but some of the scenes are blurry after all this time. I walk into my hotel room in San Francisco and am suddenly overcome by a Proustian flood of memory. The cleaning lady has just been and the bathroom smells exactly like my old hospital room. I run down the corridor after her and jab at her collection of bottles.
âThe bathroomâwhat do you use to clean it?' I say, excitedly.
She steps back nervously. She is used to nutcases in San Francisco. âI don't know,' she shakes her head. âPlease, ring housekeeping.'
I get on the phone to housekeeping. âI ⦠I adore the scent of your bathroom cleaning fluid,' I improvise wildly. âCould you tell me its name?'
There is a startled silence. Clearly this is not a common request.
It turns out to be a generic brand which sounds something like 1 2 3. I make a note of it and then promptly lose it. Still, I feel sure it will be waiting to surprise me in some other bathroom, in another time, some other place in the world.
I've been experiencing drenching night sweats â partly a post-surgery reaction and partly my accelerated introduction to menopause. Because I no longer have ovaries, I have the express ticket to those menopausal treats of night sweats and hot flushes. The sweats and hot flushes are a drag (forget about wearing delicate silk blouses), but otherwise I'm feeling great. By six weeks post-surgery, I'll be feeling fit, energetic and better than I've been in years.
The day after I come home from hospital, Martin and I hire a video,
Sommersby
. We've picked it almost randomly from the shelves and it turns out to be a story about a man who takes someone else's name and creates loving family links under his assumed identity. When a jealous neighbour threatens to unmask his deception, he chooses to die rather than reveal that he
has been an imposter. The final scene is wrenching, as his wife begs him to admit his guilt so that he can live and not be parted from her. Watching the death scene does it: I have a sudden lurching encounter with the reality of how close to it I have come. I spend the rest of the evening in tearsâan odd combination of fear, relief, horror and gratitude. Martin joins in. Amantha's turn comes a few weeks later, when she unknowingly hires the video of
Beaches
, where the storyline involves a young woman dying and leaving her child motherless. Enough said.
At home, in the early days after hospital, I'm still sore and geriatric in my ease of movement, but having a great time. I don't do very muchâI'm still on painkillers every four hours, still weak, and my walk is more of a wobble than a strideâbut I feel terrific. It's a cliché, but the world has never seemed so fresh. On my twice daily walks, I pause because I am struck with amazement at the sheer wonder of it. I am soaking in the sun, the sky, the leaves, the birds; everything that I took totally for granted before. I alternately read, write and nap for the rest of the day. I feel utterly at peace. I continue to be astonished at the marvel of my body. I see it growing stronger and younger every day. After all that it has gone through, it is quietly and patiently healing itself.
I am finishing my poetry book. The third that stubbornly remained a blank during my writing-block months before diagnosis is turning out to be a poetic recounting of the journey through cancer. The writing is flowing. It's exhilarating to be writing again. Like coming home.
The only sour note happens a few days after I get back from hospital. A woman who has been a close friend for decades breaks off all contact, never to resume it. I have heard countless patients' stories about disappearing friends but nothing prepares me for the shock. I am hurt, angry and bewilderedâall at once.
Another old friend also reacts oddly. Although we only see each other irregularly, we've always had the comfortable bond that comes from so many years of knowing each other.
I ring her after I come home from hospital. She is shocked when she hears I've just come home from cancer surgery. âWhy didn't you ring me before?' she asks. I explain that I didn't want to worry her unnecessarily, but that I'm home now; the cancer's been caught early and everything's okay.
âI'm so glad,' she says and then suddenly, âI've just got something on the stove. Can I ring you back in a minute?'
âOf course,' I say and hang up. I never hear from her again.
But in general, friendships are proceeding as usual. A couple of years down the track, I will realise that in fact they were never really tested during this first experience with cancer. It is all over so quickly and the outcome is so positive that I haven't really needed much from friends.
I make decisions about my life. I realise I haven't been giving myself enough time to write. The books that I've written have been crammed into the minute spaces left in a week of intense, energy-demanding
work as a psychotherapist. I decide to leave my consulting work at the hospital and keep only my private practice. I'm sad to leave my hospital work, but it's also liberating to have more time to write.
I resolve, too, to let go of the family issues that were distressing me before cancer claimed my attention. I am going to put it all aside, I decide. I imagine myself sealing it up in an airtight jar and stowing it away on the highest, furthest shelf I can find.
The sun is shining, my book is on track and I'm feeling fantastic. We're having an extended summer. The gravel shimmers like a houri when I walk on it; the trees are tremblingly green. I feel deliriously a part of it all; as if Nature, the living world, is carrying me along, celebrating with me.
