Eating the Underworld (6 page)

I'm baffled too. There was no trace of the sound in the room as I was making the tape. And unless my body has produced some peculiar new pulse that it is transmitting straight to air, I haven't a clue as to the origin of the sound. But I am very, very irritated now. I have to make the tape for the third time! I decide to do a Scarlett O'Hara and think about it tomorrow. Instead, I get down to cancelling my patients for the next few weeks.

Within a couple of hours I've managed to contact most of them. When I explain that I need to cancel
appointments because of some unexpected surgery, I notice that my non-oncology patients assume it's something simple like a gallbladder or appendix. My oncology patients are the ones who immediately say, ‘Is it dangerous? Is it cancer?'

I wake in the morning and realise that I left an important suggestion out of yesterday's tape. If the distracting sound hadn't made me scrap the second tape, I would have taken it to hospital without thinking about it. Trying for third time lucky, I make the new tape, complete with new suggestion and minus the mysterious sound.

The mysterious sound is about to get more mysterious. A few days from now, I will wake in my hospital room. It is midnight. I was operated on at 4.00 pm and have spent most of the time since then asleep. The room is very quiet. As I adjust to the dark silence, I recognise a familiar sound. It is the soft, regular beat I last heard on my ditched tape. I have just worked out that it's coming from the intravenous drip when the door swings open and a torch, followed by a nurse, enters.

‘Just checking the drip,' she says, padding over. ‘Ah, it's running too slow.' She makes a few adjustments and the soft, beating rhythm speeds up. Just as it had on my tape.

The sound takes its place as one of those odd events that elude explanation. They arrive sometimes, like seeming wrinkles in time or space, and remind us that perhaps we do not know all there is to know. To this day, I have no idea what caused it.

In the months before all this happened, I'd been struggling with a major case of writer's block. My new poetry book is only two-thirds finished and I've been stuck. Finally I decide to turn instead to my new novel. The opening scene is set in an operating theatre. As I write, I realise I know nothing about operating theatres. Damn, I think, I'll have to find some way of seeing one. I am clearly offering myself up to be the embodiment of that cautionary phrase, ‘Be careful of what you wish for …' Ten days later, as I'm wheeled in for my surgery, I will be looking around me, frantically trying to memorise everything I see.

But in the meantime, the poetry has come back with a rush. It happened the instant I realised I was in for something serious, life-threatening. I have found the cure for writer's block! Words and images are flowing through, as if a door had suddenly been opened in my mind. It feels wonderful to have them with me again. I am gripped by the totally irrational certainty that as long as I write, I will live. The poems pour out, telling me what is happening to me, guiding me through the journey.

The Waiting Room

Packing for Hospital

Last Menstruation

Uterus

I
T TAKES ME A COUPLE OF
days to get through to all my patients. There is also the task of telling friends and family. One friend, whom I don't see often, says immediately, ‘Would you like me to come over?' I am enormously touched. We go for a walk together in the warm summer evening. I don't tell many people, only my closest friends. It makes an interesting touchstone. You find out quickly who you think are your closest friends, by who you decide to tell. As I ring them, I'm aware of a need to be in contact with people who care about me. It feels like a blanket I can bring with me into hospital.

My friends are concerned and supportive. But almost universally, they don't want to entertain the idea that it might be a deadly cancer. I can understand their reluctance: who wants to think about someone you care about having cancer? But the continued insistence that, ‘It'll turn out to be nothing', becomes frustrating. I don't want to dwell on the prospect of cancer, but I do want the chance to think about it, sort out issues and emotions, prepare myself.

And then, of course, there is the other end of the spectrum. Such as the acquaintance who, having heard the news, rings up to commiserate and tells me that regardless of whether it's cancer or not, the hysterectomy will be my undoing. I'll never be the same again, she informs me darkly.

I think back to what I know of ovarian cancer. If it is late-stage, I'm guessing that I may have a prognosis of about two years. Amantha is sixteen now. In two years, she will be eighteen. Too young, much too young to
lose her mother. I can't bear the thought of her being motherless at eighteen. I meet an oncologist friend for breakfast. She says that two years used to be the norm for ovarian cancer, but with the new drugs coming on the market, she thinks they can give me five years. I feel relieved. In five years, Amantha will be twenty-one. Still too young, but at least it's not eighteen.

How strange it seems now, from the vantage point of the future, to feel relieved at being told, at forty-four, that I might have only five years to live. How readily we get into bargaining positions with cancer. Everything becomes relative. A little more time, a little less pain, a little more mobility. All triumphs that carry with them hope, renewal, reprieve.

I am hyper-aware of my body. Not in a nervous or hypochondriacal way, but with a deep sense of amazement. Of awe. It is something, I remember now, that I have experienced once before, years ago, in the days following the birth of my daughter.

I remember the sense of being astonished, in the fanatical way of one who has seen the face of God, at what my body had done. It had produced life. It was as if I had been allowed a revelation.
My
body had produced this incredible, this extraordinary, this perfect human being. I was as stunned as if the broom cupboard with which I had lived all my life had suddenly unfurled wings, stepped forward and revealed itself to be an angel. The feeling lasted for a few weeks and then dissipated as invisibly as fine mist in sunshine. I did not come back to it until this moment sixteen years later.

And it is as if once again, I am aware of my body for the first time. Not the exterior of it, but the interior, the essence, the
work
it does. I remember reading a Jack London story as a child, where the hero is starving and close to death in the snow. His attention is caught by his hand and he notices for the first time what a miracle of engineering it is and how, in all the hours and days of his life, he has never appreciated it before. It is that same sense that I now feel, of being lost in a marvel. All the more so for the fact that it has been there all the time; going about its work humbly, unnoticed, unheralded, unappreciated.

It is not the way I expected to feel. Decades ago, I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid. It took years before a doctor ordered the simple blood test that confirmed the diagnosis. I didn't know why I felt unwell. All I knew was that my body wasn't functioning normally. Even though it was summer, I felt cold all the time. My skin, which had been oily, became dry. My hair grew thinner and felt brittle. My metabolism would have been perfect for a hibernating bear. I was permanently tired and every time I sat down, I fell asleep.

It was the time when food allergies were flavour of the month. It didn't take long before someone decided that they were my problem. For several years, I did the rounds of doctors, naturopaths, homeopaths and every other kind of
path
in an attempt to find out what was wrong with me. They put me on every kind of weird diet under the sun—although they managed to neglect boiled eye of newt and toad's testicles. When
the food combinations failed, they tried lack of food, prescribing three-day fasts, four-day fasts, six-day fasts. None of them did any good. Finally, I visited my old family doctor whom I hadn't seen for years. He listened to my symptoms and immediately sent me off for a thyroid test. Bingo! I was put on a small amount of thyroid medication and all my symptoms vanished.

During that time of feeling unwell, but not knowing what was wrong with me, I was enormously frustrated with my body. Why wasn't it working? Why couldn't it just function normally? I felt let down by my body, betrayed by it and at times enraged by it.

If I had thought about the scenario, I would have imagined that being diagnosed with cancer would lead me to similar feelings; an impatient anger that my body wasn't working properly. My actual response—this tender admiration for it and the work it does—has engulfed me without pre-thought or planning, and it startles me. I am flooded with a kind of loving wonder at the intricacies and genius of the body that I have ignored, even belittled, for so many years. It has the force of revelation.

I am aware too, of wanting to say goodbye to my uterus and ovaries; to farewell them and thank them for all they have given me during their time. My menstrual period isn't due until after my surgery, by which time, of course, it will have ceased to exist. Despite the fact that I have often cursed it and the discomforts it brings, I feel sad to think that I have experienced my last period without knowing it and without being able to acknowledge its departure. To my surprise and
delight, however, my period—normally as regular as the proverbial clockwork—comes early; a few days before the date of my hospital admission. I am absurdly moved. I feel as if it has come to say goodbye to me.

My patients' appointments have all been shifted. Before surgery, I have a few days completely clear. It is curious having so much free time in the day, as if I am on holiday.

It is summer and I sit outside, eating peaches and reading novels. I have a sense of being enclosed in a special space, a pause. The word ‘interstitial'—the adjective describing gaps, the spaces between parts—keeps coming to my mind. I am reminded of a magical clearing I once read of in a children's book. It is a quiet, grassy place. Within it are several still, deep pools. They are ‘doors'; the jumping off points for other worlds. The clearing, as I imagine it, is empty but in an impossibly beautiful way. Nothing has happened in it. Everything is about to.

In the evenings, when Martin and Amantha are home, life ambles along in its normal routine. I am aware of needing to keep the atmosphere relaxed and comfortable for Amantha. There'll be time enough to tell her after surgery, when the diagnosis is confirmed. I want to give her as much respite from this as possible. One of the cruellest aspects of illness is the way you become the unwitting cause of suffering to the people you love most dearly.

Amantha is about to start at a new school. She'll be starting while I'm in hospital. I worry that if the news is bad, she'll be in a strange environment without her
old classmates or teachers to support her. I am about to make an appointment with her class teacher to explain the situation, when I realise that with wonderful timing, a parent–teacher night is scheduled for the evening before I am admitted to hospital.

Martin and I turn up and make all the usual introductory small talk. Then I take a breath, knowing that what I am about to say sounds ridiculously melodramatic. I tell the teacher that I am scheduled for surgery tomorrow, for what will probably turn out to be cancer, and ask if she could keep an extra eye out for Amantha during that time. The teacher looks stunned. ‘But you look so well,' she says. And then, ‘This is very brave of you.' I am intrigued by this. What else am I supposed to be doing? And then I realise. It is what I am
not
doing. I am not doing the mad scene out of
Lucia di Lammermoor
. It is my introduction to the widely held tenet that all you have to do to be a heroine is go easy on any publicly displayed gothic tendencies, and get cancer.

One evening, both Martin and Amantha are out and I realise, quite urgently, that I don't want to be alone. I have been perfectly happy being alone in the daytime, but it is as if, in this delicate week, the darkness threatens to draw out all my nightmares. I go over to a friend's house and we sit chatting, sharing jokes and whiling away a couple of hours.

It feels good and I realise that more than avoiding darkness or nightmares, my real need was simply to be with people who care about me. I am struck again by the way this has been a dominant need this last week.
It feels as if it is not just for comfort, but something even more primal. As if the depersonalisation of illness strips us of some identity that love can return.

In all of this time, the classic ‘Why me?' question simply hasn't occurred to me. ‘Why
not
me?' makes just as much sense. Everyone has to face the chasm sometime. Now just happens to be my time.

A lot of this is luck of the draw, a combination of disparate elements—genetics, environment, biology, nutrition, stress—all coming together in a particular pattern, at a particular time. I get angry at the suggestion, so often made by the more superficial ‘New Age' practitioners, that all cancer patients have simply ‘willed' their cancers into existence. Psychological factors may well have some relation to tumour growth, but these simplistic formulations take no account of the biological/environmental factors that we already know trigger, or sustain, tumour development.

A diagnosis of cancer provides an unparalleled push to rethink your life. It can open windows that were previously stuck or opaque. But in order to use these gifts, you needn't have ‘caused' or ‘needed' your cancer. At the time of my diagnosis, only one person was idiot enough to grace me with the condescending phrase, ‘And why did you feel you needed to have this cancer?' Luckily for him, he lived interstate and out of my irate reach.

Right now, in that time before surgery, I am face to face with an enemy I have only seen on the other side of the desk. Although I don't believe I ‘caused' my cancer, I don't feel powerless in its presence. I know
there are many factors that can affect the course of the illness and I have the ability to access at least some of them. I know that if it is late-stage ovarian cancer, the odds are against me, but that there is still a window of ‘cure'. I can see it like a square of light in the distance, beckoning me, and I am determined to get there.

In a way, it's easy to feel like this right now. The race has just begun; I am freshly energised by the urgency, the seriousness of the situation. And I have barely met my opponent.

I forget who said that the prospect of impending death concentrates the mind wonderfully. They knew what they were talking about. Everything insignificant simply falls away. I am filled with a sense of acute clarity. I know what is important to me. I know what I have to do, and I know how to do it.

For the last six months, I have been terribly worried about my father, who is currently living with his second wife, Dorka, in New York. He is preparing to denude himself of his last assets and I fear for him. He is in his late seventies and I have been trying to persuade him to keep his assets for his own use and as a security blanket for his old age. Nothing I say can change his mind. Instead, he is becoming angry with me. I feel helpless. It is difficult to stand by and watch him do something that I feel could leave him in reduced circumstances. I am filled with a deep and
pervasive anxiety about him that I cannot shake off.

All of the time I've known him, my father has given away what he earns unstintingly, altruistically, quixotically. He has done this all his life. His family was wealthy in pre-war Poland, and he delighted in taking his friends to the theatre and sharing other treats they might not have been able to afford. He's a generous man, always happy to do favours for people or help them whenever he can.

As a child, I saw my father as a mountain of confident
bonhomie.
It was only as I grew up that I became aware of some of the complexities beneath his cheerful, easy-going surface and glimpsed the vein of insecurity that lay there.

When I was young, I had taken his descriptions of himself at face value. As an adult, I began to see the moving discrepancies between his words and behaviour. He proclaimed that he didn't care what people thought of him, but turned himself inside out to please. At work, he worried terribly about appraisals, even though it was clear that his work was extremely competent. He would go out of his way to help people. He loved to be of service. But sometimes there was the sense that even more than
wanting
to be of service, he actually
needed
to be of service. He told me once that as a young boy with more money than his schoolmates, he would bring lollies to school to ensure his popularity. I felt sad when he told me this. He wouldn't have needed those lollies. He is a warm, good-hearted person who would have been liked without them.