The Girl With Nine Wigs

by Sophie van der Stap

  The scan takes about twenty minutes. During that time, everyone else has to leave the room because of the radiation. I enjoy the sudden peace and quiet and somehow end up falling asleep, which is as heavenly as waking up is difficult.

  When it’s over, my mother and I sit down in the row of chairs lining the hallway. I don’t really know why; we won’t even get the results until the following week. Maybe we both need to exhale.

  The technician in charge of the scan comes outside. My mom looks up to him, her face as tense as an elastic wire. He holds his step and breaks the silence. “It looks good.” I don’t understand. Isn’t that for the doctor to decide? I assume he means the pictures have turned out well. You know, like good positioning and no blurriness. Luckily, my mother is a bit more alert than I am. The tension must have been so visible on our faces that the technician decided to informally bring us the good news straightaway. He has to repeat himself three times before it sinks in. My mother jumps up and starts hugging him. I follow suit. Two cheeks, two women, two sets of lips. He hardly knows what to do with himself.

  We run off in search of the rest of the family. My father is just turning down the hallway. I run toward him down the long, empty corridor, shouting: “Dad! Dad, it’s not in my bones! My bones are clean, I’m going to get better!” I fling myself into his arms and he falls to his knees. Later he tells me that this is the moment he most vividly remembers from those horrible early days.

  But this is hardly the end of the tests. The next day I’m scheduled for a bone marrow sample. Going back to that awful hospital is the last thing I want to do. My knees start to tremble the moment I walk in. I hate my new doctor and everything about him. He pulls out a long needle and what looks like a screwdriver and goes to work in the neighborhood of my hip. He warns me it will hurt, but by this point pain is my last concern. The fear has numbed me so much that I barely even notice as he drills into my bone.

  Mom holds on to both my hands and looks me straight in the eye. I’m twenty-one; I’m supposed to be an adult, a grown-up who can take care of herself, but I’m scared shitless. I’m so afraid, I can’t stop shivering. Afraid of doctors and their words, a language completely deprived of empathy and nice vocabulary. Afraid of cancer. And, most of all, afraid of what’s still to come.

  I’m left with a small hole in my side, which the nurse covers up with a big white bandage. “There we go, all done. You did really well.” She’s sweet, with a short, trendy haircut and flashy earrings. For a little longer than necessary we share glances. I recognize her. She treated my mother a few times during her chemo. How sweet life can be.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 29

  I STARE INTO THE CAMERA and stick up both of my middle fingers in defiance, telling my cancer to go fuck itself. It’s Saturday and everything is different now. Different from yesterday, different from last week, different from last year. I didn’t go to the market this morning or drink coffee on Westerstraat. On Monday, instead of going to class, I’ll be checking into the hospital for my first week of chemotherapy treatment. For the next two months, I am expected each week for a dose of vincristine, etoposide, and ifosfamide and God knows what else they’re going to pump into me.

  But today I’ve decided I don’t have cancer. I’m at my friend Jan’s studio, with the Rolling Stones blaring through the speakers. I love Mick Jagger’s raw voice and the rip of Keith Richards’s guitar. I asked Jan to document me without cancer. Because after Monday, I’ll be different: I’ll be a cancer patient. Who knows what cancer will do to me?

  I’m smiling, pouting, making all sorts of faces for the camera; I’m free. It’s the furthest I’ve been from tears since I got the news. This is the first time since last week that I’m not being comforted or trying to comfort someone else. In front of the lens, I feel myself growing bigger and stronger. I don’t feel sad and weak. I am going to get through this. With every click of the shutter, I grow, I let loose completely. My eyes glisten. I’m still afraid, but here, in front of the camera, my fear changes into anger.

  MONDAY, JANUARY 31

  VITA BREVIS READS THE GABLE stone on the building across the canal from our house. I’ve stared at those words from my bedroom window my entire life. It’s the tallest and broadest building on the block, reaching up far above the other houses. It’s hard to miss, but today those words speak to me in a way they’ve never spoken to me before. Vita brevis: Life is short.

  I gather my things and walk outside, packed and ready to go to the hospital for my first week of chemo sessions. I’ve got so much stuff it looks like I’m going on vacation. My mother, sister, and I watch as my dad packs the car. From their faces I can tell that this is all just as frightening for them as it is for me. To be honest, they seem as sick as I do. The only thing that seperates us is that the cancer is inside my body, not theirs. But it’s only when we get to the hospital, where there is one bed waiting, one bed with my name on it, that this separation is made.

  When I arrive at my ward, C6, I am assigned to a shared room. Next to my bed there’s an old woman crawling around on the floor by her bed, making strange screeching noises. She makes me question the ward I’m in. Oncology or psychiatric/neurology? The two other beds are taken by men old enough to be my grandfather. My heart sinks—I don’t want to be surrounded by three old folks who already have one foot in the grave, even without having cancer. Looking at them, all I see is death. Teary-eyed, I plead with Dr. L, aka Dr. Prick, to be given a private room, just for my misery and me, but he doesn’t budge. Luckily the nurse on duty, Bas, takes pity on me. He immediately starts running around switching bed assignments. If I’m in a room of my own, looking at my own white walls, maybe I can fool myself that I’m just passing through.

  Bas doesn’t look like a typical nurse. He has a shaved head and his arms are covered in tattoos. A thick silver necklace hangs around his neck. Not the type you would think to bring to your family’s Christmas dinner, but I have let myself be fooled by appearances again: He’s one big teddy bear. On the way to my new room we pass an office with nurses and a few doctors milling around inside. They look up and take note of the newcomer. We exchange a hesitant smile.

  My new room is nothing to write home about, but it’s all mine and I’m thankful. Bas doesn’t waste any time and tells me in a single breath that I have my own bathroom and that I will lose all my hair after about three weeks.

  “All my hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even my eyebrows and eyelashes?” I ask.

  “Those as well.”

  “And my pubic hair?”

  “Yes, that, too.”

  “Great. A prepubescent pussy.”

  “Isnt that the fashion these days?”

  “True.”

  I run my fingers through my hair and wonder what my head underneath looks like. My hair has never been glamorous, but today I am more than happy with what I’ve got.

  Chemotherapy is much less exciting than it sounds. I will be bedbound twenty-four hours a day. For eight of those hours I will be hooked up to an IV of chemo drugs. For the remaining sixteen I will be hooked up to an IV of water to flush out those drugs.

  Thrilling.

  Bas whistles as he hooks up some bags to the IV tube coming out of my arm. It looks innocuous enough—a bag of yellow stuff next to two bags of clear fluid. Bas fiddles around with the tube while another white coat makes notes on my file. I watch as the tube connected to my arm slowly fills with the yellow fluid. I carefully observe the yellow creeping closer and closer to my vein.

  “Is this the chemo?”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t know if I want to take my arm away from this yellow gunk or if I want to leave it where it is and surrender. “Will it make me throw up?”

  “It might,” says Bas, “but not necessarily. Do you see this bag?” He points to one of the clear ones. “It’s an antinausea drug.”

  The name of this miracle drug is dexamethasone. It has one unfortunate side effect, though: fluid
retention. Within an hour I look and feel like a puffer fish from all the fluids I’m holding in. My cheeks are red and my face and arms are completely swollen. I don’t throw up but it feels as if I have to, which is much worse than actually throwing up. Finally, my stomach can’t take it, and a wave of bile comes out. I can smell my last meal: a tuna salad sandwich. No more tuna salad for me. Ever. I am nauseous for the rest of the day, but luckily I only vomit that one time.

  My first bonus.

  TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 1

  MY FAMILY TURNS MY HOSPITAL room into a command center. My mom stays with me twenty-four hours a day so that we can sleep off this nightmare together. She spends each night on a cot next to my bed. Although I don’t have much to do, sleeping in is not part of the package. Every morning at seven we are woken by the morning crew: nurses, needles, and a shrill lady pushing a coffee cart. The cancer makes me feel like a little girl again, and I desperately need my mom. Every time I have to go to the toilet she detaches my IV pump from its socket, and when I feel too sick to get up she brushes my teeth with one hand and holds a spit bowl under my chin with the other. She helps the nurses to look after me, and when I sleep she watches over me.

  My father takes care of the business side of things, doing background checks on my doctor with all his medical friends and researching my disease. He has lunches and dinners in private clubs and calls it networking, and as far as I know that’s what he does between nine A.M. and nine P.M. He’s been talking to everyone in the hospital, and now he’s heard about the Mayo Clinic in America and has turned it into his new project. In the past few days he has developed more of a relationship with my doctor than I have. While I look the other way, my father chases Dr. L to offer his latest advice on my treatment. I myself am not so keen on contact with Dr. L. To me, he is just as nasty as my disease.

  I’m happy to leave the research to my father. When I first got my diagnosis I tried to do the research thing, but I failed miserably at it. When I typed “rhabdomyosarcoma” into the Internet search bar it generated 846,000 hits. So much for a rare cancer. The statistics weren’t much better. I slammed shut the lid of my laptop. It felt as if each one of those hits killed one of my dreams.

  So far the cancer has brought one good thing: I have my sister back. Our fights are a thing of the past. The looks we exchange are different. The hostility is gone. Love has taken its place. It’s maybe strange to say, lying in a hospital bed at all, but every time she walks in I feel really happy.

  Sis has her role too. She keeps everything going at home, which is much more than feeding our blind, demented cat and taking out the trash. She makes sure my father eats proper meals and that Mom is surprised with phone calls, sandwiches, and glossy magazines. Where she finds the time to do all that, finish writing her thesis, and visit me, I have no idea, but she shows up at the hospital every day armed with fresh pasta, organic soup, body lotion, and a beaming smile.

  Me, I have only one job: surviving chemo. To get sick and then get better. So that’s what I do. The only thing on my to-do list is survival. I lie in bed, determined to leave this mess behind me. Nothing moves me, not even the pain I feel when they insert the IV or when I’m throwing up into a bucket between my mother’s hands. I don’t know if I feel depressed. If this is what depression is like. I do know that I’ve never felt so empty in my life.

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 2

  “LOOK AT THE STATE of her! It’s completely unacceptable. If you don’t do something about it immediately, I’m going to take the poor thing out of here myself.”

  From inside my room I can hear Jan with our other close friend, Jochem, scolding Dr. L in the hallway. Jan, a well-known TV host and enfant terrible of the Netherlands, can get away with basically anything—whether he’s hosting his TV talk show or hounding my doctor. I can hear Dr. L speak uncomfortably to Jan, and it makes me smile.

  My head has expanded from a puffer fish to the size of a football the color of a tomato, and my arms do not even remotely resemble their old shapes. That I am about three kilos heavier than yesterday does not escape Jan’s and Jochem’s attention.

  “Hey, cutie! You’re positively glowing today. That shade of crimson is very becoming on you.” Jan produces a carton of fresh blueberry juice from his bag. “For the antioxis or something.”

  Jochem presents me with two more bottles of dark red fluid. The label reads ELDERBERRY. “I asked for the one with the most vitamins,” he says quietly. “The lady behind the counter said this is really good for you.” He bends over and kisses me on the cheek.

  Besides my family, there’s only a handful of friends I’m happy to have around me these days. There’s my best friend Annabel and then there’s Jan, Jochem, and Rob, number three of the gang.

  The boys are a great gift as they are always available (being retired, freelance, and jobless) and make me laugh the whole time, but it is Annabel who visits me nearly every day. We have known each other since we were learning to read and write in kindergarten. Since then not a day has gone by that we don’t know what the other is doing, and with whom.

  As we are very different characters but both Geminis, Annabel explains that there are two kinds of Geminis: those with more characteristics of a Taurus and those with more of the Cancer sign. According to her, she’s more Taurus and I’m more Cancer. Well, we’ve just about proven that bit. I never really pay attention, but I’m sure she has an astrological explanation for why she went on to study marketing at university while I opted for political science. Annabel is not just my partner in crime but also my fashion guru; somehow between the Chanel tops and vintage bags we find time to discuss solar energy, inflation, and genocide in the developing world.

  We discovered the world together. As small girls, as teenagers, and now as (supposedly) adults. We’ve eaten snails in the Dordogne and sweets in the harbor of Copenhagen. We’ve stood openmouthed beneath Josephine Baker’s chandelier in her French château filled with bats. We’ve swum, screeching, through seaweed in Denmark and bought our first pair of velvet lady shoes in a boutique in London.

  We have only ever been apart twice. First when I left for the Himalayas and later when Annabel went to do an internship in New York, where she worked in a small fashion house specializing in bridal couture. She’d just returned when cancer entered our lives, though looking back we could both see the signs that something had been wrong. I went to visit her in December, to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s together. She’d be three blocks and two Starbucks ahead of me while I was still panting my way up the city’s endless subway steps. And it definitely wasn’t like me to be partied out by one A.M. on New Year’s Eve when there was a cute New Yorker standing in front of me. Luckily I wasn’t too tired to take his business card, which led to Sunday morning at MoMA, which turned into Sunday afternoon at Pastis, which ended up in a romantic dinner with plenty of red wine (and bed). The next day I woke up coughing and trembling on the Lower East Side. I was covered in sweat and felt sick. It was still dark out when I silently closed the door behind me.

  This is the second time the boys have come to visit me. Last time Jan brought me a lollipop in the shape of a heart; Jochem brought a bunch of flowers. And, of course, Jan always comes with a pile of tabloids and magazines. They make a fuss when the nurses come in bearing needles, telling them to keep their hands off me.

  Today it’s Nurse Bas who comes in to reinsert my IV. As soon as he brings out the needle, Jan’s and Jochem’s expressions change. They turn silent and carefully step aside. For once, neither of them makes a joke. I’m not one of the guys anymore; I’m a sick puffer fish hooked up to an IV.

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5

  THERE IS A KNOCK AT the door. It’s the not-so-charming doctor from the pulmonary department who told me I have cancer. Poor guy, it’s not his fault he just happened to be taking over for my beloved Dr. K on that particular day. I jump when his head suddenly appears from behind the curtain that closes off my bed from the rest of the hospital (and everything walkin
g, throwing up, and screeching around inside it). He wants to know how I’m doing. Besides the nausea and bloated head from all the drugs being pumped into me? I tell him I’m fine.

  I tell everyone who asks that I’m fine. Don’t ask me why.

  He leaves and the tall figure of Dr. L appears, with a swarm of students following him. They walk in without warning and surround my bed, twelve eyes boring into me. I hate it when he brings them along. It’s embarrassing and awkward to be looked at like a science experiment, ressembling a puff fish. But I guess that should be the least of my worries now. They simply walk in, take up position, and start staring.

  “Good morning, we’ve come to take a look at you,” says Dr. L.

  Duh, I can see that. I look past the collection of strange doctors from the oncology and hematology departments, scanning for “Dr. McDreamy,” who had been kind enough to help me pull down my camisole over my shaking back the day he’d drained the fluid, when it wasn’t clear yet that an entire family of tumors had attached itself to my lung. (Correction: to the fleece surrounding my lung, also called “pleural space.”) The one who came to visit me every day and ask after Anna Karenina. But Dr. K is not among them.

  There is something different about Dr. L today: He’s smiling. The first time I’ve ever seen him do that.

  “I have two pieces of good news. One: We have the definitive lab results back, and your bones are indeed clean. Two: We have taken another look at your photos and have come to the conclusion that the cancer is only in the pleura. That means the tumors are limited to the thorax and have not yet penetrated the right abdomen. The stinging you feel around your liver is just a shooting pain. Which means there is the probability of dissemination, but it is not organ-to-organ, and although I can’t guarantee anything since your illness is quite rare and the lab still isn’t sure of the exact diagnosis, this could make the prognosis a lot more optimistic.”