Advance Praise for Natural Killer
“The writing in Natural Killer contains the strange whimsy only the voice of a survivor can have. Recounting her cancer, Lye recaptures the state of grace teenagers live in even in the darkest moments. She then brings us close to the absurdity and wonder of childbirth. In succinct and addictive and generous prose she details the perils and miracles of living in a human body, on the days when it is out to kill us and those when it is making a whole other life inside us.”
—Heather O’Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Lullabies for Little Criminals
“Never have I read a more moving book on the fragile filament of life, the bond between people who love one another and struggle to find the words to express that love. The words are here, so wise and specific and drawn from the inward part. Harriet Alida Lye has no truck with fantasy or faith or folderol. She is a star witness to the bloom of life that surrounds death, and her work demands access to our unsentimental hearts.”
—Michael Winter, author of Into the Blizzard
“Natural Killer is less a cancer memoir (though it is that) as a wise and heart-affirming reflection on the ties that bind us to one another: on motherhood but also daughterhood, control and surrender, and the body’s limit experiences. Harriet Alida Lye brilliantly weaves her materials together, from firsthand memories to medical records, scenes of the body ravaged and scenes of the body creating, in a truly original work of autobiography.”
—Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
“Natural Killer is a breathtaking memoir full of clarity, courage, and wisdom. In opening up her transition from child to mother, Harriet Alida Lye shows how fear and love can become unifying forces in a body that both takes and gives life. This story will stay with me for a long time.”
—Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal
“A gripping memoir, told in an honest unassuming way that is inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time, and leaves you with renewed gratitude for life. I cried, I laughed, and I ached. The way Harriet weaves in her parents’ perspective gave me goosebumps as a mother. I read this book in one night!”
—Samra Zafar, author of A Good Wife
“What a rare thing to read a book that makes you pause in reflection on nearly every page. Natural Killer is a remarkable story of an inspiring family that is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Harriet Alida Lye’s writing, intimate and subtle, asks profound questions about life, death, hope, and trust that made me grateful to have spent time in her beautiful mind. This work, crafted so thoughtfully, will stay with me for a very long time.”
—Ashley Audrain, author of The Push
“Harriet Alida Lye takes the enormous cruelty of indiscriminate disease and creates something truly beautiful and deeply moving. A book about the terror of death that is brimming with the warmth and vibrancy of life.”
—Stacey May Fowles, author of Baseball Life Advice
“In this generous book, Harriet Alida Lye opens up her life—and her body—to us. She guides us through the peaks and nadirs of human experience with her sensuous prose, her keen eye for the beauty that exists even in the terrible moments, and, above all, her boundless, fierce love.”
—Anna Maxymiw, author of Dirty Work
“Everything about this book is exceptional: the writing, the potency of its images, the portrayal of two lives linked across time, the writer herself. I cannot recommend this enough.”
—Nafkote Tamirat, author of The Parking Lot Attendant
ALSO BY HARRIET ALIDA LYE
The Honey Farm
Copyright © 2020 by Harriet Alida Lye
McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4923-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7710-4924-8
Notes: while this is a work of non-fiction, it is also a work of memory.
The version of Alcestis quoted from was translated and adapted by Ted Hughes
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
Names of patients and medical staff have been changed.
Cover watercolour by Five Seventeen and Youn Joung Kim
Watercolour is based on an image of natural killer cell leukemia, courtesy of
Leibniz Institute, DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH.
Cell line: KHYG-1, DSMZ no.: ACC 725.
Emoji One [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.4
a
Contents
Cover
Also by Harriet Alida Lye
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
&n
bsp; Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
About the Author
To my parents.
“Natural Killer Leukemia is the rarest and worst malignancy.”
INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CASE REPORTS JOURNAL
“I have tried in my way to be free”
LEONARD COHEN
I got a bad cold in March and it never properly went away. It was 2002: I was in grade nine, and on March Break vacation with my parents in Niagara Falls. In the hotel swimming pool, I felt as though I was dissolving. As though I’d already disappeared. I could see people, flesh all around me, and I could feel the tepid chlorinated water on my skin, but I had the distinct feeling that I was no longer there, that these observations were coming from an objective, all-seeing place. I don’t mean this spiritually—it felt factual. Like I’d forgotten I was alive.
I was in my first year in the drama program at a performing arts high school in suburban Toronto, and for the end-of-year play, I was cast as one of three girls playing the titular Queen in Euripedes’s Alcestis. Our teacher, the director, had chosen to have the actors who played Alcestis also play the part of Death.
“When I awake in the body of Alcestis,” I would say as Death, “she dies,” and then I’d pull back the hood of my black cloak and stand up as the self-sacrificing Queen.
Do you know the story? Beloved King Admetos is destined to die but his servant, the god Apollo, negotiates with Death to have a substitute die instead of the King. But nobody in the entire kingdom agrees to take his place. Not even Admetos’s elderly parents, “two walking cadavers,” will die to let their young son live. Finally, his wife Alcestis volunteers. Admetos suddenly regrets his cowardice and says he’s now willing to die if his wife can live, but by this point, her offer cannot be retracted. Alcestis is taken away by Death.
“A god is deciding this”—her stoic parting words to her husband—“not me.”
By April, I was pale and tired and too thin. In the last weeks of rehearsal I kept coughing through my lines. Just before the show, I woke up with burst blood vessels in my eyes, which, within hours, had drained to become deep bruises. I looked like I’d been punched.
I remember looking at myself in my bedroom mirror, staring at these candy-coloured purple smears around my eyes. The colouring was dappled, not consistent. It was pretty, blurred as if by water. I patted heavy concealer over the bruises, but a purple glow still shone through. People at school thought I was trying a weird new eyeshadow technique and when I told them it was blood, their faces registered fear.
My mum took me to a walk-in clinic, where the doctor dismissed me. “Her platelets must be low,” he said, not thinking it was important to figure out how low, or why the drop.
“Can we get her a blood test?” my mum asked. “Maybe she needs to change her diet?”
“I’m not giving her a blood test to see if she needs to eat more steak,” he said. “You can feed her as you like.”
In my school play, Alcestis was carried offstage to face her fate, but at the last minute, young Heracles came to the rescue. “I fought with the God of Death,” the boy playing this role, my friend, would recite with warmth and mockery, explaining how he got me back from the grave. “I surprised him, and trapped his neck in a lock.”
Since I played Alcestis as well as Death, I wore both a gauzy white dress and a gauzy black cloak. Alcestis was stoic, devoted. Death was acerbic, exasperated. Both accepted things for what they were—I suppose you could say both were resigned.
Following the script, I died and came back to life in every show. I napped during intermission one evening, missed some morning classes in order to sleep in and stay late for the show, but I refused to miss a single performance despite my increasing inability to stay awake.
My body continued to break down: the back of my mouth started bleeding from an abscess developing on my tonsils; I woke up in the night because my arms had fallen asleep and the pain of the pins and needles would startle me out of my dreams. Once, right before my fifteenth birthday, I peed the bed. I was so embarrassed having to tell my mum what had happened. At first, she didn’t even believe me.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know, nothing. It just happened.”
“Should we go to the hospital? Let’s go to the hospital.”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
After the final show, though, when my indefinable illness had dragged on for nine weeks, I finally had blood tests done at the same walk-in clinic. This time, seeing the pools of blood underneath my eyes, the doctor did not refuse us. My mum brought me, and I brought along the neighbour’s kids I was babysitting, since the clinic closed before my job ended. Bringing people for whom I was responsible made me feel less afraid: I had to be brave for someone.
When the results came back several days later, we got a call. I heard the voice mail, and was confused. “But why do I have to go back in?” I asked my mum. “Why can’t they just tell us over the phone?”
My mum did well to mask her panic. I know now that she must have been terrified, that she must have sensed something. I obviously did, too, but we each needed to pretend to be fine for the other.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said, echoing me. “They just need to see you in person.” An explanation that was no explanation at all.
At this point, the whites of my eyes were again filled with blood—like an oil spill, the fresh red all over the white, not mixing—and the bruises underneath my eyes were swollen. My skin was pale and glowing, like paper held to a lamp, and the abscess in my throat made eating painful. (I remember craving a Chicken Caesar sandwich from Arby’s that was being advertised on TV at the time, and a freshly squeezed orange juice. I’ve never liked orange juice, and months later, when I finally got around to eating one of those Arby’s sandwiches, the lettuce was slippery, the bread stale, and the dressing tasted like preservatives: it was not my fantasy at all.)
My mum took me back to the clinic and the doctor just stood there, holding the sheet of blood counts in his hand, looking at me with his eyes full of the fear that comes from facing the unknown. “I think you should see a specialist,” he said, hurried. “I called a hematologist up here, but they don’t have any appointments for a few weeks…”
He said some numbers, but the numbers didn’t mean anything to me. They were my counts of hemoglobin, platelets, neutrophils. Numbers that I would become very familiar with soon. On his paper, they were all practically at zero.
Did this mean I had no blood in my body? I didn’t understand.
“I’ll take her to Sick
Kids,” my mum said. And then: “Should I take her to Sick Kids?”
He nodded.
We left.
That line ran through my head incessantly: “When I awake in the body of Alcestis, she dies.” I was the girl, and I was death; both elements were within me.
My family doctor is a sixty-something hippie who runs courses on how psychotropic drugs can aid with finding peace at the end of one’s life. He is constantly urging me to meditate instead of take sleeping pills, and when I had a concussion from a car accident, his recommendation was that I try interpretive dance. “Just feel your feelings,” he said.
I go to him when, at thirty, I find out I’m pregnant.
“What news!” he says, clearly emotional. He, more than anyone, knows what a shock this is. All the drugs I was given as a teenager, the doctors told me back then, meant conception would be unlikely, if not impossible.
Now, my doctor gently smiles and pushes away from his desk to recline in his seat and takes off his glasses. I see a shine in his eyes, not quite tears.
With his words, he remains neutral. “Is this good news?” I love the generosity of his openness and feel grateful to him in the present as well as in some kind of alternate path, one in which my feelings about the pregnancy were different, and I didn’t consider it to be good news. When I tell him that yes, it is good news, that my partner, Cal, and I are surprised but excited about, he smiles and sits back in his chair, putting his feet on the desk.
“What your body is doing now is completely magical,” he says. “Not even science can explain it. Neurons are firing, eyeballs are growing, nerves will extend and then somehow miraculously land on all the right spots. Know that even if this baby does not get born, as miscarriage is fairly common, it is alive within you right now and you are holding this life.”
I wonder if he would have been so forthright with a different patient. If it would have been necessary to bring death into the conversation so early. In his way, from the beginning, my doctor is reminding me to accept death within life. The baby is not a baby yet: it is a becoming.
He asks me if I’ve told my mother, also his patient. “No,” I say. “Not yet.”
“She’ll be thrilled.” He knows her well.
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