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Radioactive
21 Nov 23 I am forbidden from babies for the night. There are no babies I cuddle in my life so it's a pretty low cost demand. Today a doctor injected radioactive dye in two places, above and below the nipple, and then did lots of scans and photos which could show them which lymph nodes my breast drains to. Or something. It's latish I am tired. Anyway, I think the dye helps them detect the most likely lymph node that will have cancer should the cancer have spread. Which is unlikely. Since finding out the lump had cancer, the various points at which there could have been unexpected bad news, there has been no bad news. The MRI found nothing further. The doctor had told me they did not expect to see more tumours, or to see that it had spread. There was nothing unexpected. There is a a single lump for them to remove. Tomorrow is the lumpectomy. Such an excellent and ridiculous word. And the day of the operation has got tied into preparing our 14 year old for Thailand. It is 10.13pm and just after 2am her friend E's father will come and pick her up and drive E and my Lexie to the airport. Lexie is trying to sleep. I told her to try at 9pm and if she woke up that was okay but otherwise I'm to wake her at 1am. I am a night owl so I'll stay awake.. Everyone else is in bed already. I have stacked the dishwasher, and tidied the lounge and tidied our bedroom in preparation for my recuperation. A wee gift to myself, to overcome my untidy tendencies and present myself with the calm space. Also my poet friend M. had sent me flowers. and those ones I wanted in my room and flowers look better in a tidy room. The other thing that is happening tomorrow is Maggie's last ever school exam. The last schoolish thing she'll ever have to do. I said to Joe, tomorrow Lexie has a flight, Maggie has an exam and I have an operation, what are you doing? And Joe said Sudoko. It will have to be a hard one won't it? said Maggie. 2am is the latest I can have anything to eat. I mean surely most people aren't awake at 2am but it happens that tonight I will be awake to check my child is all sorted and to hug her goodbye and I will in fact be awake at 2am and wonder if I should in fact eat something just because I can. There's a stillness isn't there? When everyone else is asleep in you house. I'm in our lounge. It's a 1960s house, the room is all sharp angles. It's got milky green walls, and a flowery cover over our screen which is above a grey brick fireplace. I made the cover out of a beautiful sample of material an ex-boyfriend gave me. His Mum was an interior decorator. A teal couch, blue buckety chairs, red carpet, pop art style posters Joe did for Maggie's Ruby Redfort party, my mother's paintings of the house I grew up in, with the light coming through those net curtains, more pictures. I'm not one for beige. Now it's summer I've put all the pot plants in the corner we usually keep wood in. Shimmery white on white curtains embossed with Chinese dragons. The coffee table my Grandad made from an old shearing shed and on it pink alstoemerias from my sister's new garden. There's a globe. Do other writers do this? Return to the basics, over and over, the room you're in? Like yogis return to the breath. I return to the fine black dashes on the yellow and pink petals of the flowers next to me. The globe which happens to have India facing me, and below that China and the South China Sea, and just out of view I know, because I looked before, the Gulf of Thailand, and the curling river through Bangkok, that our younger daughter is soon to travel on. 23 Nov 23 The lumpectomy Yesterday was sunny and bright and hot. I wore jeans to the hospital and an old striped blue sleeveless shirt that was soft with age even when I bought it from an op shop. I wanted something that buttoned down the front in case pulling stuff over my head got difficult. I had the post-op bra on, no wires. I wore jandals. I resisted being formal because it was a hospital. It was a vibe someone would say. I'm popping into the hospital, getting the thing yanked out, home for a late lunch mood. I was casual as. Everything was scheduled to start at 9.30 but it was a busy day at the hospital. Nothing happened for hours. I had to borrow Joe's jacket because the waiting room was cold and we were waiting a long time. At 11ish maybe, I get called to an room where someone explains they're running late, they get me to do paper work. They explain things. They take my blood pressure, they weigh me. We wait some more. It's a small room not intended for MRIs but they use what they've got. There are four clinicians inside. Joe is in one corner on a chair. I am told to lie on the bed. A radiographer give me local anaesthetic then pushes a wire into my breast via a needle. It's tricky. The wire leads the surgeon to the cancer. My cancer is difficult to get to through my breast's dense white tissue. The wire may be too flimsy. The needle is also white so it's difficult to see on the MRI. But I see the cancer, and I see the tip of the needle trying to push through. Then the radiographer has to pull the needle out while leaving the wire. She thinks she might need to do it again but it works. I have an actual wire sticking out of me. She tapes it down. She draws a big x on me with a vivid pen. X marks the spot. Then we go to another room and I have another mammogram. The machine where it all started. This one to check the wire is in the right place. It is. More waiting. I am starting to feel sick. A headache and a bit out of it. Maybe it's just the hospital. I meet the anaesthetist and ask her could the local make me feel sick, she thought not, but when I said I hadn't eaten or drunk since midnight, she gave me a glass of water and a lemonade ice block. It helps a bit. More paperwork. The same questions over and over. Waiting again and then I have to take a pregnancy test (all girls and women from 11 to 60 have to do this). Then I am put into another room under a warming blanket because it helps with recovery. More paper work. More waiting. I overheat so they turn the warming blanket off. The surgeon, who I have met several times now, comes into chat. A line is put in my hand. It will be for the general anaesthetic and for the pain relief. I am about to be wheeled into the surgery, Joe who has been with me kisses me and we go. Everyone, this is Maria, the nurse says as we go into the operating theatre. I say hello. They arrange me and the gown so they can access the breast during surgery. They connect a tube to the line. You'll start drifting off soon someone says. Fat chance, I think, I'm still perfectly awake. Then I am awake and someone's saying it's all done. More tests I think then wheeled to a recovery room and Joe comes and I still think for quite a long time, that I will be going home. But I am a bit off and if I move the breast is very sore, and the nurses say we will have to make a call soon as this room is closing at 6.30 and then they say you might need to reconcile with staying and I think yes, this pain is not a pain to take home. Joe says goodbye. I am wheeled into a room in a ward and curtains are drawn around me. My cubicle has a window and I am looking out on buildings and hills. I don't know if I can sleep. Nurses come in and take my blood pressure and temperature. I put on my post surgery bra and it makes everything more comfortable. I wake at 5.30 cold and I can move without pain and go to the loo and ask for a blanket but I am so much better and the pain is more a dull ache than the whamming kind of pain. I have to drink lots of water to get my blood pressure up. I eat breakfast. Joe collects me. At home there are more flowers, and Maggie on her first day of having no study, no exam, no school ever before is just getting out of bed. Get up get up! Freedom we yell at her. She tells us she'd like to clean windows on high buildings with an abseil. We are parents and take it seriously and talk about courses and certificates. Why, she says, does there have to be certificates for everything? Why can't they just send me up there? Are we taking this too seriously, I ask. And it's just that maybe you want to do this once? Yes, she nods laughing. I have Life360 on my phone and it is connected to Lexie's phone. She's in Bangkok. I can see where is and has been on a map. I message her hi, and say the operation went fine, but I had to stay the night in the hospital. That I hope she's having a blast. She writes back Cheers and nothing else. But I discover her host family owns a restaurant and went from the airport to the restaurant and Lexie loves food especially Thai food. My emissary though she would deny it. Who wants not much to do with us, who thinks it just a fluke she is ours. She is fierce and funny. Who once clung like a baby monkey around my neck, who is loving and dramatic, social and charming and rather pretty. But she's a teenager and she's Lexie, and her current job is to hide all of that. Yesterday I had the MRI. One of my sisters sends me a video of the very first MRI. The man who invented it built himself a chamber and climbed into it and he was locked into it. He didn't know if he'd have a cardiac arrest or not. It reminded me of the chamber a trapped man builds himself on a never changing house in Elizabeth Knox's Mortal Fire. He builds it to try and escape. I wonder if Knox was thinking of MRI machines. I have been warned about the noise. I am lying on my front and rolled into the chamber and there's a fan blowing and when the scans are happening there is continuous banging noise for one minute, then three minutes, then six minutes. I don't know if it's real or not but I feel like there are different waves of the banging, a jump in the rhythm where I feel one cycle is taking over from the other. I start putting words into it. I change the words. The wind blows on me. My head feels odd and hot. Can I feel the magnetic force? Is that possible? The internet says no. I buy a post-surgery bra. I visit my mother. I have a headache and today read that when you have contrast dye injected for an MRI that can cause mild headaches and nausea. My operation is on the 22nd of November. There's pink peonies on our coffee table in a green vase. They could not be more pink, more full of life. |
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