Storm in a B Cup - A Breast Cancer Tale (26 page)

“When was the
last set of observations done?” he asks the nurse.

“At the end of
shift, doctor.”

“Has anyone
done the Dopplers?” he asks, addressing me again.

I don’t even
know what a Doppler is. Which I suppose means nobody has done them. This is my
fault. If I’d remembered what he told me instead of gazing into his eyes and
thinking rude things, none of this would be happening. I could have reminded
them about the heaters and the obs and the god damned Dopplers.

“Get me the
Doppler,” he growls at the nurse, who rushes from the room faster than I’ve
ever seen anyone run in a hospital.

She returns,
panting, with a small pen-like instrument which I gather is a Doppler.
 
Jared places it on my newly-made breast
and the nurse and I watch in nervous silence. I’ve no clue what we’re watching
for but from the expression on his face I’d say we haven’t seen it.

“Is something
wrong?” I venture.

“This machine
is like a mini ultrasound. We should be able to hear the blood pumping through
the graft.”
 
His ear is cocked to
the speaker as he moves the machine to another spot on my breast.

We listen for a
sound. Any sound. The nurse is visibly holding her breath. She’s straining so
hard, she’s almost willing a sound to happen. There’s nothing. Only a swishing
sort of noise like when my ears are blocked.

“Nothing.”

Jared hands the
Doppler back to the nurse so roughly, she almost drops it. She has this pained expression,
like she’s going to need to use my sick bag at any minute. Either that or she’s
going to burst into tears but it’s not her fault. She’s only just started her
shift.

“Excuse me.” Jared’s
face is thunderous, there’s no other word to describe it. Every aspect of my
aftercare, so carefully planned, has been ignored. He strides from the room
with the nurse in close pursuit. The door shuts behind them and from the other
side I hear the sound of raised voices, very annoyed, angry, raised voices. Jared
is throwing a massive hissy fit at everyone in sight.

This is not
good. Not good at all.

Then, Jared
reappears. He seems composed but I don’t think that’s the case. I think he’s
good at putting on a front. I mean, he has to be.
 
He’s a doctor.

“We’ll have to
go back to surgery,” he informs me. “The blood flow to the new breast has been
compromised and I’ll need to fix it. That’s why your breast is so cold. It’s
effectively dying.”

I feel like the
rest of me is dying with it. The pity in the room is smothering me.

“But how? I
didn’t do anything, did I?”

He looks down
at me. “This is not your fault, Sophie. I gave specific instructions for your
care and they haven’t been followed.”

I nod sadly. I
can’t reply. I’m stunned.

“I’ll organise
a theatre. We need to get straight on this. When was the last time you ate?”

“I had a bit of
a sandwich, but it was only a bite.”

“Right.”

The look on
Jared’s face makes me think maybe I should have waited until he told me it was
okay to eat. But seriously, the nurse gave me the sandwich. And I didn’t eat
it. not all of it. His pouting like a three year old isn’t going to change the
fact.

As Jared
strides from the room and the nurse returns to prep me for my second operation
in twelve hours, I fall into what can only be described as a bubble of shock. It’s
like this is happening around me; like I’m looking at it from above my body. My
senses are dulled to the point where everything is merging into one and all I
can think is ‘why me’? Wasn’t the fucking cancer enough?

Chapter 26

I wake some
hours later, disoriented, groggy and slightly disbelieving that what has
happened has happened. It’s surreal, like a scene from a medical drama, except
it’s happening to me. There are people calling my name, rousing me to
consciousness, the constant beeping of a blood pressure machine, an oxygen tube
in my nose. When a girl says she wants a bit of attention this isn’t exactly
what she means.

The space
around me is dim and curtains on either side shield me from view, so I know I’m
no longer in my room on the ward, the one with the TV and my own private
bathroom. Where the hell am I? There are other people here. I can hear their
machines beeping too. I can sense them, laying here waiting to die. It’s
depressing.

In front of me
there’s a wall with a large metal-rimmed clock. The red second hand is clicking
loudly around and around, marking each moment in time. I try to orientate
myself, to put myself back into time and space. The clock reads ten o’clock but
whether it’s day or night I’m not sure. There are no windows to give me a clue,
no crack of daylight or fresh air.

A hand reaches
out to touch my shoulder. It’s a nurse; she’s wearing a theatre gown of sorts
and a maternal smile. “Welcome back.”

I hesitate to
ask what that means. Have I been dead?

“You’re in the
Intensive Care Unit,” she explains.

My body tenses.
I search her face for an explanation. What happened while I was asleep? Why am
I here? Are my limbs still attached to my body? Has there been some horrible
accident and they’ve had to sew the fat back on that they removed? My mind
begins to swirl with a montage of scenarios, the majority of which my rational
brain knows can’t be true but is so fuzzy, might believe.

“No need to
panic, Sophie,” the nurse adds. “There’s nothing wrong. Dr. Hanson was concerned
at the level of aftercare. If you’re here, we can keep a good eye on you. We’ll
be doing fifteen-minute observations for the first few hours, but I’ll try to
be as quiet as I can. You get some rest.”

“Where’s Mum?”
I croak. My voice sounds like I tried out sword swallowing and failed.

“She’s in the
waiting room. I’ll go get her.”

“Is Rory with
her?”

“Is that your
little boy?”

I nod.

“He’s staying with
your friend. She left a message that he’s tucked up in bed and will be in to
see you tomorrow. She said not to worry. He’s fine.”

For hours after
this, I live in a blur of green and blue-robed nurses and a lovely young doctor
who looks like Blake Lively. She wears a tiny mini skirt, in which I’m sure she
can’t bend over, and a fluffy pink jumper with pearls. Lani would love her. She
also tells me I have an arrhythmia in my heart as she’s pondering why my blood
pressure keeps dropping to a level where I should be dead. I’m not happy about
this. I never knew I had it. How did I never know?

I hear her
bustling around the bed, tucking me in, washing me, massaging my head that’s
pounding from lack of water. I feel the nurses pumping me with more blood, placing
blood pressure cuffs on my arm and stethoscopes on my chest. Together we listen
with our breath held for the faint sound of my blood pumping through the blood
vessels in my breast. The sound is faint but it’s there. It’s establishing a
bond between my nurses and me, a shared intimacy that I never believed possible
with women I don’t even know.

Jared seems satisfied
when he stops by for a post-op visit and though he’s looking tired and crumpled,
his face tells me everything is well this time, that I simply have to lie here
and get better. The touch of his hand on my shoulder is reassuring, a small
gesture that tells me this means as much to him as it does to me.

So, I spend infinite
minutes watching the clock, its hand ticking slowly round. Time is almost
frozen and without the benefit of food, I have no way to delineate the parts of
the day. The nurses talk to me; we even share a laugh or two when one of them
calls Jared, Dr. Handsome. I think it’s a slip of the tongue until the young
Irish nurse tells me it’s the secret name the nurses have for him. Apparently,
there’s a book running on who will get him first. He’s rather elusive but there’s
a number of candidates in the running.

“It’ll be a
lucky girl that snags him,” the Irish nurse adds. “He’s an absolute darling.”
 
Then she takes my obs for the twentieth
time. She whispers to me about her home in County Cork and her Catholic
upbringing, so similar to mine yet so very different. By the time she’s made her
way from head to tail, it’s almost time to start the process again. I feel
stiff and uncomfortable but I sleep in fitful patches and as the minutes tick
by to the twelve-hour mark where the observations can be decreased, I begin to
relax. I think it’s okay, that the surgery has worked this time. This is, of
course, the moment my body chooses to let me know who, exactly, is in charge.
The unimaginable happens. Once again, the beating sounds from the Doppler disappear.

The doctor is
called. He appears quickly and every nurse in the unit, along with the duty doctor
descends into my space. We listen with baited breath and I see the sadness on
their faces, the deflation in their bodies at the sound of nothing. We feel
like failures, me especially, because it’s my body that’s the cause of the
trouble.

“It was there a
minute ago,” the Irish nurse says. Her eyes have filled with tears and she’s
struggling to keep the emotion from her voice. She literally turned her back to
fill in a reading on the desk-size chart at the end of my bed when it went.

I begin to cry
too. “She’s right. We heard it. It was so strong.”

Jared checks
again. His head is close to mine as he listens and though he appears outwardly
calm, a small twitch in his left cheek tells me otherwise. There’s something
else too, a feeling that wasn’t there last time he visited. He’s closed himself
off to me. The intimacy we were building has been replaced by a detached wall. He
straightens and turns to the nurse. “It’s not there now. Book a theatre, we’ll
have to go back to surgery.”

By the time the
orderlies wheel me to the operating theatre some time later, I’m hysterical. Tears
are streaming down the sides of my cheeks and onto the pillow. I can’t keep
doing this. It clearly isn’t working. Something is dreadfully wrong with me and
it’s not the fault of the medical team.

Jared’s waiting
at the door of the theatre when I arrive. Seeing my tears, his face softens
behind his surgeon’s mask. His eyes are feeling my sadness. He asks the nurse
to get a tissue and when she returns he dabs the tears away.

“Don’t cry,
Sophie,” he says.

The gesture is
not lost on the theatre staff. I’m sure they don’t see it every day. I give him
a limp smile. I hate that he’s being so nice to me. I hate that I’m putting him
to this trouble.

“It’s not
that,” I begin to blubber again. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take it.”
For the first time since my diagnosis, I want to give up. “I don’t have the
money to keep trotting in here every few hours.”

“You think I’d
do this for the money?” He seems quite put out that I would suggest such a
thing.

“NO! No! Of course
I don’t. I trust you completely. I know you’re doing the best you can do but I
…” And I descend into tears again.

I feel like
such a useless failure.

Then I feel a
hand, gently covering mine. A pair of sea green eyes pull me into their focus.
“You don’t need to worry. I’ll sort everything out.”

*****

It takes
twenty-four hours and another round of surgery before Jared and I concede
defeat. After being lulled into a false sense of security and fed my first meal
in five days, we find that the breast has decided to decamp. It doesn’t like
it’s new home on my chest, it wants to remain part of my stomach and in protest
has decided it will not go on living. I resign myself to the fact that this
avenue of reconstruction is not for me and, when we decide to return to surgery
for the final time to remove the graft, I’m not sad. In a way, I’m relieved
that the ordeal is over. If nothing else, I now have a lovely flat stomach for
the first time this millennium.

On my first day
back on the ward, Jared arrives early to do his daily rounds. I haven’t seen
him for over twenty-four hours and I’m beginning to suffer the effects of withdrawal.
 
We’ve been in such close proximity this
past week, I feel as if I know him intimately, even though I know I don’t. I do
know a lot about his eyes though. I’ve spent an awful lot of time gazing into
them.

I’m laying on
the bed. I’m showered, wearing my own clothes and feeling so much more like
myself, despite the ordeal. I’ve even managed to do my hair and add a squirt of
perfume. I know full well it’s playing with fire but I want to make an effort
for him.

Jared draws the
curtain and stops by the end of the bed, examining my chart. His face is
somber. No cheery smile, no cute dimple. And the air between us is so thick,
you’d need a chainsaw to dissect it.

Something is definitely
wrong.

“Things seem to
be progressing well. How does your stomach feel?” His voice is clipped and he’s
not looking me in the eye. He’s guarded. Very guarded.