Storm in a B Cup - A Breast Cancer Tale

Storm in a
B Cup

Lindy Dale

©Secret Creek Press 2014

Prologue

Six Months Previous

“I see a tall, very handsome
man. He has green eyes like the ocean. He is good with his hands. I see the
fitness. I see him playing a sport with a racquet.”

I see a crock, I think,
as I sit in the darkened den that is Madame Zara’s ‘Reading Room’ trying not to
laugh out loud. Seriously, I have no idea why I agreed to this. A tall
green-eyed, sport-playing man basically covers a quarter of the population of
Perth. If she adds an initial to that description, I swear I’ll lose it.

“I see a ‘J’.”

I look at the angel
pictures over her shoulder and try to keep it together.

“Or is it a B? Or an R?”

I’m impressed by her
tenacity at trying every letter of the alphabet until she gets the reaction she’s
after, but I’m not giving her a sausage of a clue. If she’s a real fortune teller,
she should be able to tell me.

“Oh, it’s Brendan, it’s
Brendan. He’s a ‘B’,” my friend Lani squeals, giving the game away.

“Yes, Brendan. A
green-eyed man called Brendan. And you have been with this Brendan for a long
period?”

Damn, now I have to
answer. “About three years.”

The little woman sitting
on the other side of the crushed velvet tablecloth has a sheet of paper in
front of her. She picks up a pen and begins to scribble furiously using a
combination of numbers that relates to my birthday or my address or something. She’s
telling me that the green-eyed man will play an important role in my future and
that very soon there will be unexpected announcements or some such twaddle.

“Brendan’s going to
propose,” Lani whispers.

“Either that or he’s
announcing that he’s giving up the real estate business to become a
professional gigolo. That’d be unexpected.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,
this is serious.”

Maybe for some of us.

I turn my attention back
to Madame Zara who is now squinting over the paper. She asks for my hand and
begins to examine the lines on my palm as if to confirm what’s going on in her
head. I hate to tell her she won’t see a thing. I have so many lines on my palm,
even a train driver would be confused.

She’s stopped talking
now. She’s given me back my hand and is adjusting her black and silver kaftan
so that the twin moons in the fabric are perfectly aligned with her nipples.

“What is it?” Lani asks.
Then, as an aside she whispers to me, “Madame Zara always does that when she
wants to say something of great importance.”

Oh for heaven’s sake.

Ridiculous as it is, I
decide to play along.

We lean across the
table. Madame Zara appears to have gone into some type of trance. Her eyes are
closed and she’s swaying from side to side. At any moment her head may start
spinning. She has gone a bit green.

“I see sadness at a loss
and a little boy who wins a prize.”

Well, at least she has
that part right. Rory is always winning prizes.

The medium’s eyes spring
open. “You will live a long and happy life with the green eyed man,” she says,
in a rather abrupt change of tone. “A long and happy life.”

Well, thank goodness for
that. I was beginning to think the world was going to end.

Chapter 1

My name is
Sophie Molloy.
And I have Breast Cancer. Well, I don’t
actually know I have Breast Cancer
but the look on that woman’s face as she’s sliding the ultrasound thingy
over my boob is sort of confirming it. She’s a little
too
glazed for my liking and she keeps stopping and peering at the
screen in a squinty fashion that doesn’t appear entirely normal, like she’s
forgotten her glasses or something.

I didn’t
think it was cancer to start. Earlier today, on the way here, I was telling
myself it was another cyst, similar to the one I had a few years back. I’ve been
telling myself that since November. It’s nothing to worry about. Just a cyst.
So confident was I, that I shared this knowledge over Christmas, much to the
horror of my friends. They gasped at my blasé attitude. But I was positive it
was only a cyst.

Of course it
was.

I look at
the screen and back to the girl’s impassive face. She’s frowning, but not
because she can’t see the screen. This is a frown of concern and somehow, I
don’t think the thing showing up this time is going to be sucked out with a
syringe. It looks a little more sinister than that.

So how did
this happen? How did I find the lump that is about to change my life?

Some time
last November, I was sitting at my desk doing the accounts when I felt a twinge
in my right breast. It was a stingy, stabby sort of pain that felt like I was
being pricked with a needle. I put my hand to the spot and gave it a massage
— ever since the cyst I’ve been fairly vigilant about checking my breasts,
so it came as a shock that I could feel something there. As I ran my fingers
over my breast, my mind instantly went back to the previous time, when I’d
totally freaked out thinking I was going to die. Within the space of a week, I
morphed from happy-go-lucky Sophie into a grumpy, pale-faced zombie. I slept an
average of two hours a night and went around the place bursting into tears like
a hormonal teenager. Heaven’s knows why. It turned out to be nothing. Bearing
that in mind, I promptly decided to let this new lump be for a while. It had a
habit of appearing and disappearing anyway, there one day and not the next, so
it was most likely nothing.

Stupid idea.

This could
have been happening five months ago if I’d gone to the doctor straight away. I
could have been past this by now.

The
sonographer’s voice draws me back to the present. “We might get the doctor to look
at this,” she says. “To be sure.”

To be sure?
Sure of what? That I have cancer? You’d think as a trained professional, she’d
know.

A few
minutes pass as I lay on the bed in the small, darkened room, biting my lip.
There’s a crack of light peeping under the door and a nurse, I’m supposing
that’s who she is, flits around making small talk. My watch is telling me it’s only
two minutes since the last time I dared to look; yet time feels interminable.
At last, the sonographer appears with a doctor. They have a student with them
who would like to look too, if that’s okay? After he’s finished his sandwich,
of course.

What do you
say in this instance?

No?

Piss off?

At least
finish that drippy egg and mayo sandwich before you lean over me?

The poor
student has a tortured look that tells me if I say anything remotely negative
he’s going to curl up in a ball and cry. So I nod an okay and they approach.
They pull a privacy curtain, though why is beyond me as we’re alone in a room
with the door shut.

Now, there
are four people squished into a three metre space, all standing around the bed,
umming and ahhing like a barber shop quartet in surgical get up. The nurse is
on one side, stroking my hand, the doctor is mumbling and prodding, the student
is trying to blend into the curtain while munching his sandwich and the
sonographer is scratching her nose every ten seconds. It’s like some bizarre
out of body experience.

 
The doctor studies the pictures on the
monitor but his glasses are so thick I’m positive he can’t see through them. He
could be making some dreadful error of judgment because he’s so myopic he
thinks the shadow is something else. He leans a little closer to the screen and
grimaces so deeply his big, dark eyebrows almost become a moustache. Then, he prods
my breast and mutters something in my general direction.

I look up at
him, bewildered. Heaven help me, I’m not a racist, but I have absolutely no
clue what he’s saying. I can’t fathom a word that’s coming out of his mouth.
His African accent is so strong a communications expert for the Australian Army
wouldn’t be able to decipher it.

“I beg your
pardon?”

He repeats
the muttering and I still have no clue.

Before I
know it, the doctor thrusts a form and a pen in my face. The nurse explains to
me about core biopsies. I don’t even know what a core biopsy is. I came here to
have my boob flattened like a pancake in the mammogram machine and go home. I
don’t want some man giving me a core biopsy. I look to the others in the room,
trying to piece this together in my mind. What the hell is happening?

“Pardon?” I
say for the third time in the conversation.

“We’ll do
the biopsy now.”

“Why do I
need a core biopsy again?” I ask. They must think I’m a complete moron.

“Standard
procedure,” the nurse says.

“Easier to
do it now than have you come back another day,” adds the sonographer.

Oh. Okay. I
nod my assent and sign my name. I guess that makes sense.

The nurse
takes the clipboard from me. “We’ll give you a local anaesthetic and insert the
biopsy needle into your breast. The doctor will take three or four samples.”

“And the
results?”

“It’ll take
a week. Call your G.P. in a week.”

I’m dying, I
think. I’m going to die of Breast Cancer. I might not have a week.

*****

An hour or
so, and one painful breast later, I stumble into the car park, frantically
clicking the remote on my keys in the hope that I’ll see the lights flashing on
the car. I can’t for the life of me remember where I parked it. I’m so
traumatised I can’t even remember what it looks like. Little blinking lights
are my only hope.

Seeing the amber
of the indicator lights, I race to the end of a row, open the door and heave
myself into the safety of the cabin. I toss my bag to the passenger seat and my
head and arms onto the steering wheel. Then I sob. Shoulders heaving and chest
nearly bursting, I sit alone in the car park and sob until I can sob no more.
It doesn’t make me feel any better. It only makes my face go red and blotchy. I
know this because I can see my reflection in the rear view mirror. I look
hideous, like I have a bad allergy for tears.

After quite
a few minutes, I feel a little calmer so I scramble in my bag for my phone and
dial Brendan’s number. He answers straight away.

“Soph?”

“Y… yes.” I
sniff. I need to hear his voice, get some normality back into my day.

“What’s
wrong? Are you okay?”

Of course,
I’m not okay. Clearly, my voice is giving that away.

“I had the
mammogram. They found a shadow.” I begin to cry anew and this time I can’t
stop. “They made me have a core biopsy and it really hurt.”

“I’m sure it
wasn’t that bad. Calm down. You’re over-reacting again.”

Over-reacting?

“Can you
imagine the pain of having a metal skewer stuck into your balls? Without the
benefit of anaesthetic? That’s…that’s how it felt.”

“They didn’t
give you anaesthetic?” Brendan sounds appalled.

Now, I’m
bawling. Really bawling. Tears are running down my face and I can’t get air
into my lungs. My chest feels like I’m having some sort of heart attack.

“Of course
they did. But it wore off part way through. The doctor wanted to take as many
samples as he could. It really hurt,” I repeat.
 
“And the doctor was mean. I told him it was hurting. I told
him I was going to faint if he didn’t stop and he said he must have hit a
nerve.”

“But he
didn’t stop?”

“No. He
looked at me like I was behaving like a complete sissy and put the needle in on
a different angle. I almost cut the circulation off in the poor nurse’s hand,
it hurt so much.”

The memory
of the doctor’s face, close to mine, glaring at me like I was a stupid girl
makes me cry harder. I’m not a sissy. I pierced my own ears with an ice block
and a sterilised needle, for heaven’s sake, and when Rory was three, I held his
pinky finger in place all the way to hospital after he almost chopped it off in
the doorjamb. How did that doctor not understand that I could feel everything
he did?

“He shoved
that thing in me, Brendan. I begged him to give me more anaesthetic and he
didn’t fucking care.”

The other
end of the line goes silent.

“Do you want
me to come home? I can get off work early. I mean, I’m sure it’s perfectly
normal but I can come home if you need me to.”

Jesus,
fucking Christ. Has he not been listening?
 
There’s a shadow.
 
On my breast.
 
That’s not
normal.

“Soph?”

“Um. Er. No,
I’ll be fine.” I sniff again.