Infidelity for Beginners (17 page)

See, the trouble is, there's no screening test for ovarian
cancer – unlike pap smears or mamogram tests for cervical and breast
cancers, so more often than not the little bastard's already set up home before
anyone knows he's in there. Hence the poor survival rate.

And ovarian cancer’s nickname as the silent killer.

Look, I think I'm going to stop there, not least of all
because I don't want to turn this into
The
Vagina Monologues
. I just wanted to fill in a little detail and put you
into the picture as to what sort of foe we were up against.

We? Okay, Sally.

*

“Am I going to die?” Sally asked the
doctor.

“People hear the word cancer and they immediately think the
worst, but in reality there are lots and lots of women with quite progressive
cancers, who live with their disease for many years,” the doctor replied,
sounding half like he meant it too. “Now, we're going to get things moving
right away and book you in with the oncologist. This means we’ll need to
perform a surgical procedure called a staging laparotomy, just to take a peak
inside you and then debulk the main affected areas. We’ll send anything we find
away for analysis then consider what further treatment, if any, is required
when we get the results back. Okay?”

This all sounded okay to me, but then again I wasn't the one
who was going to die.

I managed to remove my hand from Sally's long enough to dig
out my handkerchief, but she looked up at me in surprise and even managed a
smirk when she felt how wringing wet it already was.

“Sorry,” I coughed, doing my best to run through all the
brick walls of emotion to be strong for my wife.

“Now, if it is only a small tumour on one ovary, then we may
have to remove that ovary. If, however, the cancer has spread, then this may
involve a hysterectomy, so it’s important that you understand the full
implications of this procedure,” the doctor said, as scarily as possible.

He then went on to expand on the implications and Sally
squeezed my hand so tightly that the doctor had to take a quick look at it
before we left with all our unvoiced questions still bouncing around our
brains.

“I'm really scared,” Sally said, shivering in my arms in the
early spring chill once we were outside.

“It's okay. Honestly, it'll be okay,” I tried to reassure
her, though what I was basing that on was anyone’s guess. Still, it seemed more
helpful than rattling her by the arms and screaming into her face, “Me too. Oh
God, what the fuck are we going to do?”

“Why us? What have we done to deserve this?” Sally
swallowed, leaning against the car for support.

“Nothing, love. Absolutely nothing. I don’t think it works
like that,” I told her, shaking my head when I thought about all the
terrorists, torturers and playboys out there who were walking around smug and
cancer-free. “Besides, you heard what the doctor said, there are thousands of
women who have well progressed cancers who are still able to live perfectly
normal lives.”

“I didn’t hear him say thousands,” Sally pointed out.

“Didn’t he? Well that’s what he meant. I don’t think he
would’ve mentioned it if there was only one or two. Look, all you need to know
is that these people are experts. They know what they're doing and they’re
going to get you better. I don’t even have any doubts,” I promised. I was about
to expand on this point but Sally cut me short by burying her head into my neck
and bursting into tears.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she just kept blubbing
irrationally, over and over again. Several hospital visitors looked our way,
but none of them lingered long enough to intrude on the moment.

“There there. There there,” I muttered, rubbing her back and
doing all I could to sooth her shakes.

*

Incredibly, Norman absolutely
insisted I took a week’s compassionate leave to be with Sally when she went in
for her surgery and this was even more astonishing when you considered that
he’d already been covering for Tom for the past five weeks. I asked him if he
was sure he could do both magazines and Norman assured me that the work load
was no problem and that he was actually enjoying getting his hands dirty again
after so long in “the big office”.

I was a little wary of him covering for us both, because I
was worried he’d see how little actual work there was to do, but then Tom
pointed out that Norman had a full-time job at the company too and no one was
covering for him while he was playing in our seats so what could he say?

Anyway, it was a nice thing for Norman to do and I couldn’t
help but feel bad for some of the things I’d said about him in the past.

*

The days leading up to the
laparotomy were a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. Sally was both anxious
about her surgery and frantic to have it done. Every hour she went without
treatment was another hour the enemy had to grow.

Sally wanted it out and she wanted to be free. But most of
all, I sensed, she wanted not to be scared any more.

She felt particularly bitter towards her cancer because of
the deception it had pulled. She’d showered her little miracle with love and
hope for almost a month before the doctors had told her the truth and the
betrayal was nothing short of cruel. It knocked Sally for six and left her
helpless as a kitten, so I took it upon myself to be her one-man support
network and made sure I was never further than a groan away. As it turned out,
it only took me a couple of days to realise why there wasn’t a queue of
volunteers stretching around the block for this particular job.

“What?”

“Tea. Can you make me a cup of tea?” she flapped wearily.

“Another one? You had one only twenty minutes ago.”

“No, I didn’t drink it and it went cold,” she said, pointing
to a full cup of tea by the side of her bed.

“Well, do you want me to put it in the microwave for thirty
seconds then? Warm it up?”

“Urgh no, I don’t like it like that.”

“It doesn’t make any difference, it’ll just warm it up.”

“No, it makes it taste funny. Oh don’t worry about it then,”
she heaved miserably, her body language lamenting
first cancer, now this
.

“No no, I’ll make you one if you want one,” I insisted,
finally leaping into action.

“No, don’t bother. I don’t think I want one now.”

“It’s all right, it’s no bother.”

“Just forget it,” she grumbled.

I bit my tongue, counted to three and went and made Sally a
cup of tea anyway. As I was doing so Tom wheeled himself over to see how we
were doing.

“How are you Sugar?” Tom asked, his nickname for her at
university. Sally replied by bursting into tears and leaning on his wheelchair
so hard I had to grab one of the armrests to prevent them from both rolling out
of the house.

“Not bad,” she finally croaked, a big brave smile across her
face. “How are you?”

“Getting better with every passing day. You’ll see what
that’s like soon enough,” he winked.

I’m having my surgery this morning
and I’m scared. I know it’s a standard procedure but I’m still worried. I’m
sorry to admit this but I’ve always been a coward when it comes to doctors. I
know there are people in other parts of the world that have more to be scared
about than me right now but I can’t help myself. Injections, examinations,
stitches and operations; they all bring me out in a cold sweat. A few years
ago, I cried the morning I had to have two wisdom teeth out. God, I wish I were
having two wisdom teeth out today. I’d give anything to be having two wisdom
teeth out today. I’m scared of the anaesthetic. I’m scared of the drip. I’m
scared of having to just lie there and let a lot of people in masks take
scalpels to me. And I’m scared of what they might find when they do.

I have such a longing to run and hide but there’s nowhere I
can run to because the thing I long to run from is inside of me. I’m scared of
all of these things and more. But most of all that the cancer has spread.
Because if that has happened…

It’s not fair. It’s just not fair…

I tried to smother Sally with as
much reassurance as I could but I don’t know if any of it got through. Actually
I think I just made myself more nervous. Sally looked so small and so helpless
amongst all those grown-ups that ten years of lost love caught up with me like
a rocket-powered boxing glove. Actually, that’s not true. My love for Sally was
never lost, it had just taken a wrong turning a few years back and had got
sidetracked looking through lingerie shop windows.

“Right then, come along. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask
you to leave us now,” the nurse informed me in a way that made me want to suck
my thumb. “Say goodbye and then go and get yourself a cup of tea. Don’t worry,
your wife will be fine with us and you’ll see her later.”

I stopped my bottom lip wobbling just long enough to press
it against Sally’s and told her one last time that everything would be okay
before I was finally ejected out into the hospital corridor.

My last glimpse of Sally was of her nervously unbuttoning
her cardigan as the nurse busied herself around the bed. When the door finally
clicked shut I stared at it for about a minute and suppressed the urge to start
barking. But then the door opened again and I almost collided heads with the
nurse when I tried to look inside for another quick peak.

“Come on now, shoo, shoo, off you go,” she insisted, pushing
me back away from the door and verbally clipping me around the ear. “Your wife
is in the best of hands. Now go and get yourself a cup of tea.”

A cup of tea was possibly about the last thing in the world
I wanted but I knew I had to get out from under their feet, so I decided to
play ball and go and do the thing we English did best in times of crisis.

“Where do I get a cup of tea from?” I asked the nurse.

“From the cafeteria. Down the corridor and turn left, through
the doors, down the stairs and follow it round. You can’t miss it,” she
replied, though twenty minutes of blundering around the corridors of the
hospital proved she was no judge of orienteer.

Still, at least it gave me something else to think about and
for that I was marginally grateful.

As I searched for this mythical cafeteria, I couldn’t help
but wonder at how brave Sally was being. I’d never liked hospitals myself. I
mean, who does? But they’d always scared the bejesus out of me in particular.
In the movies, hospitals were usually crisp, clean places, where concerned
doctors outnumbered the patients five-to-one and dramatic music and beeping
life support machines conveniently glossed over the cacophony of coughing and
constant buzz of unanswered telephones.

Outside of the movies, hospitals were frighteningly real
places. In fact, they were the most real places on Earth. And the long, bright
corridors and cold, hard fixtures just underlined this every blundering
footstep of the way.

Radiology. Anaesthetics. Cystic Fibrosis. Diabetes.
Dietetics. Special Care Baby Unit. Teenage Unit. Physiotherapy. Intensive Care
Unit. Accident & Emergency.

Cancer Unit.

These signs were posted in every corridor and on every stair
well and they all scared me to tears although the scariest of these had to be
Chaplaincy. About the only sign they didn’t have was Cafeteria, so I kept on
searching until I found an equally lost sole staring up at a big board of
signs.

“Excuse me, but do you know where the cafeteria is?” the old
boy asked as I stopped to examine the board myself.

“Hopefully somewhere near Frimley,” I replied, this being
Frimley Park Hospital.

“Yes, it’s a bit tricky isn’t it,” the old fella agreed.

By lucky chance, my new friend managed to snag a passing
nurse and we squeezed a new set of directions out of her, which seemed to
involve returning to Go and starting again.

“Do you think they’ve actually got a cafeteria here?” the
chap asked, as the clatter of the nurse’s brogues faded down the hospital
corridor.

“Perhaps we should’ve got her to draw a map,” I replied.

“Hmm, yes. Well, do you want to see if we can find it
together?” he offered and to my surprise I found myself saying yes.

The old boy looked almost twice my age but good with it. His
shirt was ironed, his shoes were polished and his jacket was pressed. He was
also clean-shaven and combed, whereas I was none of these things. I had
four-day stubble, flyaway hair, a jumper that looked like it had last been worn
by
The Thing
and a jacket that had
less of an idea where the dry cleaners was than I did.

I guess one of us had been in the army when we were younger.
Or at least, had come from a generation whose Sunday dress was Sunday best, not
tattered old jogging bottoms and an egg-stained T-shirt.

“This looks the ticket,” he said, when we finally spied a
Cafeteria sign. We followed subsequent signs through one last corridor before
finally locating the tinkle of cutlery and the squeaking of chairs.

“Can I get you a cup of tea?” he offered before I had the
chance to do likewise.

“Please, thank you,” I replied, and found us both a table.

He brought us back a tray of all the various bits and bobs
they give you whenever you buy a cup of tea in a cafeteria and we settled
either side of each other and poured the contents all over the table.

“I can never get the hang of these blasted tin spouts,” he
replied, frowning at his little metal pot and mopping up the worst of the
spillage with a napkin. “Are you here visiting someone?”

“Yes, I’ve come with my wife,” I replied, then almost choked
when I said the words, “she’s got cancer.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that,” he sympathised and even
though he didn’t press I ended up telling him all about her condition and all
about her operation until all the tea was gone. “I see,” he said.