Silence. I don’t really understand what he has just said. Bones, organ-to-organ dissemination, thorax? But Mom makes a high-pitched noise and starts to sob. That’s quite rare for her. Slowly I realize that she’s crying tears of joy. This is good news. Really good news! Dr. L is telling me my liver is clean—and by now I know that cancer in the liver usually means picking out a spot at the cemetery.
I can’t help but smile. My mom squeezes my hand.
“It’s still going to be a long treatment,” Dr. L continues. “We’re going to schedule you for fifty-four weeks of chemo. For now you’ll come in every week for treatment. Later on we’ll reduce it to every three weeks. Once this IV drip is done, you can go home for the weekend. I’ll see you on Monday.”
When he leaves, Mom is still sobbing.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17
I LOOK IN THE MIRROR at the lady standing behind me. Strange hands pick through what’s left of my hair. Clumps fall to my feet. She doesn’t look like the kind of lady I would take fashion advice from, but today I haven’t been given a choice. This time of my life seems to be all about surrender.
Wig shopping isn’t new to me, but I never thought I would be wig shopping for myself. Last year my mother went through the same hell during her breast cancer. I accompanied her to two shops, and I didn’t bring any good memories back of those visits. They were weird places with saleswomen trying to make us feel we were out shopping for something nice. At the time my mother still wore her hair piled on top of her head. Now it’s short and messy.
She underwent two operations to cut out as much of the cancer as possible, followed by five weeks of radiation, and then chemotherapy at the same hospital where I am now a patient. It was a scary time for all of us. The doctors’ words became increasingly more frightening, from surgery to radiation to chemo. The last stage was the worst. Chemo and death seem so close together.
We did leave with a wig for my mother, but it all felt very mechanical. There was none of the joy or relief that comes with finding what you have been looking for. A woman in despair, deprived of her hair and her femininity. A saleswoman holding a soft hazelnut-brown wig that came closest to the hairdo my mother had said good-bye to. Then the sound of a bank card being swiped. My mother rarely wore it, preferring to wrap her head in a scarf. I never told her this, but to me the wig always looked unnatural.
This morning there was hair on my pillow when I woke up. Clumps of hair in my hairbrush. Despair in the sink. Nurse Bas was right. Three weeks to the day. It’s the strangest thing: Yesterday my hair was still glued to my scalp. I even believed for a minute that maybe chemo wouldn’t affect me the way it affects others.
While the saleswoman leaves to search for wigs that would suit me, I gently run my fingers through my hair, a new bunch of strands coming out in my fingers. I look at a brush lying on the table. It’s evil. The clumps, the brush, the mirror.
The wig shop is situated in the central lobby of the hospital. Handy for the oncology patients, who can stop by straight after being unhooked from the IV. Sitting beside me are my mother, sister, and Annabel. We’re all quiet and uncomfortable, until Annabel breaks the tension by trying on one of the wigs. It looks ridiculous. We burst out laughing.
I see the saleswoman taking a wig out of its box. Be positive, Sophie! I fail. “I’m losing tons every day,” I say as she combs my hair. She looks at me in the mirror. I’ve brought pictures with me of how I like to wear my hair. They are the ones Jan took three weeks ago, when I still had a full head of it. I look less and less like that girl from the pictures now that my hair cells are losing the fight against the chemo. The pictures are lying on the table, next to a brochure for wigs and a sample of yellow-blond hair that has just appeared. Maybe something like this? Not even close. All these hairdos make me look like a drag queen, and when she presents me with a bunch of long dark hair, all I can think of is that guitar player in Guns N’ Roses. It might work for MTV, but not on my head.
What a fucking disaster.
I look at my sister, with her dark hair twisted up in a bun. She looks beautiful. Like me, she prefers to wear her hair up and pushed back, slightly messy. I look at Annabel’s thick black hair, again at my sister’s shiny locks, then at my mother’s short do and back to the few pathetic wisps left on my head. The past three weeks whiz through my mind, but I still can’t quite grasp how I got here.
I want to escape, to hide behind the safe walls of my home. Not just from this disease, but also from the reactions of those around me that confirm everything I want to forget. Neighbors with pity in their eyes. The man in the grocery store sneaking an extra bunch of vitamins into my shopping basket. Friends hugging me tight. Family crying along with me. I look into the mirror with glistening eyes and let the lady fiddle around with my hair. Of my full lips, only a sad stripe remains, running straight across my face. The more she pulls at my hair, the thinner my mouth becomes and the more lost I feel.
In the end, nothing looks right and I choose a prissy head of hair that comes closest to the way I used to look but that somehow doesn’t look like me at all. It’s ugly and it itches like crazy.
The woman is talking to me encouragingly.
“It will take a little while for it to feel like ‘you.’ A wig never feels right on the first day, but play around with it, try it out, and within two weeks it will be totally you.” She’s been in this business for twenty years and claims she’s one of the few who works with the hip, young wigs from Japan. “That’s where all the fun, fresh looks come from. Perfect for young girls like you.”
Hip? Young? It’s practically a beehive! Poufy and outdated. I look like some Waspy girl who drinks white-wine spritzers and plays golf on the weekends. This isn’t me. This is an uptight snob. In an attempt to find something that looks the most like me, I end up with something that doesn’t look like me at all. How did that happen?
I turn around to my mother and see that she, too, is close to tears.
In the elevator I look for myself in the mirror, but all I see is a stranger.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18
“YOU LOOK EXACTLY LIKE that Vermeer girl, the one with the pearl earring.”
It’s a big improvement over what springs to my mind whenever I see my new reflection in the mirror. After a long session experimenting with Annabel’s headbands and the hair spray in a weird white canister that came with the wig, I come down to the kitchen around midday. My mother and her friend Maud are having coffee. I smile, kiss Maud’s cheek, and fill the kettle.
“I swear, the spitting image,” I can hear her continue. It’s a sweet thing to say, but that’s all it is. Mom smiles at her friend. I scratch my head aggressively, hopelessly trying to combat the eternal itching. I need to get rid of the last few hairs; they’re making my head look even sicker.
I disappear back upstairs to the mirror. In front of me on the chest of drawers lies a large agenda, one of those professional day planners. It is dedicated to the fifty-four weeks of chemo and radiation which sums up my life for the next fifty-three weeks. The first week is triumphantly crossed out.
In the ninth week I will have my first evaluation. I’ll be scanned to see if all the throwing up has been good for anything at all. I’m scared to death. That the next scan could also mean my life will take a turn for the better is something I won’t allow myself to consider. It will only make the blow harder to bear when it comes. I try to contemplate the worst-case scenario: the tumors growing, the cancer incurable, me at the end of the road. I pick up our old cat, Saartje, and hold her close while I wonder who will outlive whom. For the first time in my life, I have become aware of my mortality, of being human, a part of a cycle much bigger than myself, where there’s no room or need for individuality. Funnily enough, it’s kind of liberating.
Today is the first day I reach for the wig—after putting on my mascara. For the moment I still have eyebrows and eyelashes. When will they go? I’m shuffling through the house in my mother’s slippers and a soft
, fluffy white dressing gown, which I got from the greatest boyfriend in the world. Unfortunately he’s not mine but my sister’s. Even so, I get some of the perks. The theme of my life these days is receiving, receiving, and more receiving—flowers, gifts, hugs. And I need it all—I soak it in like a sponge, not having anything left to give back in return.
I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind having a boyfriend of my own these days telling me I’m still pretty, that I’m still a girl worthy of snuggling up to. It would make the nights a lot less lonely. But at least I have my sister back. Sometimes she leaves her beau alone and cuddles up next to me. I like listening to her when she talks about her daily life, but hearing her talk about her future hurts. I don’t have any future to talk about. I want her to be happy, but it’s difficult, very difficult when you don’t have something to be happy about yourself.
I feel heavy and numb, even though my body seems to be disappearing before my eyes. The scales show another kilo gone. Same as every day this week. I have discovered the perfect diet: fear, stress, and tumor sweat. The night sweats started a few months ago, another one of my inexplicable symptoms before the diagnosis, but they were never as intense as they are now. I wake up a few times a night bathed in sweat. Concave belly, heaving rib cage. Everything soaking wet, either from sweat or tears. “Tumor fever,” they call it. For me it starts every night at nine. This morning, at four A.M., I peeled off another drenched T-shirt reeking of tumor sweat. There are four others beside my bed, two dirty and two clean. My mother unfolded a fresh T-shirt and helped me pull it on. My body leads a life of its own, responding to something I can’t see that has taken control. It’s times like these that my disease is closer than ever.
I’ve been sleeping in my parents’ bedroom. Not something to brag about at age twenty-one, but it’s just the way it is. I’m back to being the little girl I once was.
“I’m so scared,” I whispered into my pillow last night.
My dad wrapped his arms around me. “Sophie, you mean everything to me.”
I released myself into his big embrace. My body was damp to the touch. After a while my mother joined us.
“What if I die?” I held them tightly and looked over my father’s shoulders through a slit in the curtains. The slit was just wide enough to see the night. A bare tree, a piece of the not so friendly gable stone of the house on the opposite side of the canal, a sliver of moonlight, a dark backdrop.
“You are not going to die.” My mother’s voice.
“But what if I do? What if my tumors don’t go away? I am so afraid of the scan.” My whole body felt as if it were weeping.
“So are we, Sophie, so are we.” My father looked at me helplessly. I felt relieved that he let me speak about my greatest fear and didn’t try to brush it away. It’s exhausting to put on a brave face when behind it there is only fear. Still I keep on trying.
* * *
The few hairs still clinging to my scalp itch like crazy and look ridiculous. I decided not to wait any longer and called up Sis to see if she can help me out with the task. She’s at the door half an hour later with an electric razor. Maud gets up and leaves us alone.
“This is supposed to be a really good one, I just picked it up from a friend who works as a hairdresser,” my sister says.
She and my mother hold up a mirror while I switch on the razor. We are sitting at the kitchen table, three pairs of eyes fixed on my hands steering the machine carefully but determinedly over my scalp. Although there’s not that much left to shave, I feel a burst of strength running through me: shaving myself into a skinhead before the cancer can do.
In a few minutes’ time it’s done. While shaving, I managed to look only at my hair and not at my face. But now that it’s finished I am as bald as a bowling ball. I look revolting. I tell myself that G.I. Jane did the same thing and she was still a hot chick, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. For the next few weeks I avoid every mirror. I hate my new head, with or without a wig.
MONDAY, MARCH 14
SIX WEEKS HAVE PASSED since my first admission to C6. Today I’m back in the hospital to be admitted for the second time. I have to be admitted twice in a nine-week cycle, in the first and seventh weeks. During the in-between weeks, I go in for my shots and injections at the day-patient ward, which takes a few hours. This routine is only for the first block—the first nine weeks; in future blocks I’ll go in for more day treatments.
My schedule is demanding and I barely understand it. Doctors like to make things complicated, it seems. When I’m not doing chemo, I spend most of my time resting or going back to the hospital to get my blood checked. In short, my life as a patient is almost as busy as it was as a full-time student, running between classes, dates, and part-time jobs. I’m starting to enjoy things more and more when I’m not in the hospital: brushing my teeth, doing the grocery shopping, getting dressed, watching TV. It’s quite a feast compared to lying in C6 with tubes stuck in me.
Today is Sis’s birthday—she’s twenty-five. A quarter century already. Despite everything, I’ve always known that I love her, but knowing and feeling are two different things. Knowing is two-dimensional. Feeling is tangible. I carry the feeling with me the way I carry mam’s chestnut with me. I enjoy it strongest when she’s caressing my back as I fall asleep, but also when she’s just sitting next to me at the kitchen table, absorbed in her studies.
We’ve gone through all the sisterhood stages: best friends, best foes, and now back to best friends. She’s always been very caring, the person who silently moves around the house to make sure everybody’s okay. When our mother turns moody, she silently goes and does what needs to be done, while I would be too occupied by being moody that my mam suddenly turned moody. And then, when we were still younger, she would even make me a cup of tea and bring it to me—with all the stairs in the house that’s quite a task—checking to see if I was okay.
I had forgotten about these cups of tea.
Dr. L stops by to see how I’m coping with the side effects of the chemotherapy and to check the color of my cheeks. He mumbles something, looks uncomfortable, and gets down to business as soon as he possibly can.
“Are you noticing any tingling in your fingertips and toes?” he asks. “We need to keep a close eye on the side effects of the vincristine because you’re getting plenty of it.”
I shake my head. No tingling, but I have been feeling stabbing pains everywhere since the chemo started. As if fighting my disease had truly woken it up and sent it raging throughout my body. I start to wonder why we aren’t called “chemo patients” instead of “cancer patients.” It’s hard to feel the difference between the stabs from the chemo and those from the cancer. Sometimes I get an overwhelming premonition that the cancer has spread through my entire body, but one of Dr. L’s assistants has done a good job of convincing me that this is almost impossible—a shame Dr. L himself doesn’t possess that gift.
“Your HB, your red blood cell count, is a little low”—doctor-speak for “You look washed out”—“so at the end of this week I’ll give you a blood transfusion. There is always a small risk attached to transfusions”—a risk of like one in a million, that is—“but I prefer them over EPO.”
“EPO?”
“A hormonal injection to stimulate the production of red blood cells in your bone marrow. It could also stimulate the growth of your tumors.”
“Oh. Like Lance?”
“Something like that. And how are the night sweats?”
Dr. L sure knows how to keep a conversation going. The tumor sweat has been pouring from my body for the past few weeks and has my parents in its hypnotic grip. On the worst nights my bed is remade three times and my T-shirts changed up to five times. I keep getting weaker and losing more weight. “It’s getting better, but last two nights were pretty wet.”
“That’s not a good sign.” My mention of “getting better” goes unnoticed. “We’ll keep an eye on it.”
Nearly two months have gone by, but as far a
s I’m concerned, Dr. L is still the nasty man who turned my whole life upside down. As if he’s the one to blame for the tumors in my body. He’s the one who gave them a name, after all. His nametag says DR. L, but the nurses call him by his first name. So do I. Calling him “Prick” to his face might not be the best idea. He comes by virtually every day, to see how his cancer-patient vegetable garden is doing. His bedside manner varies between rude, stiff, and socially awkward. Toward his patients, that is: I often hear him laughing and joking with his colleagues. He’s clearly one of those docs who prefers to hide behind their medical jargon, without ever offering his patients a glimmer of hope. He wants nothing to do with the psyche or positive thinking; after all, you can’t measure that.
But he is also my doctor, my hope, and my healer. My medical magician. I’m not talking a wand and disappearing bunny rabbits, though. No, he is pure medical science; honesty and persistence to help all his patients get rid of their cancer nightmares. When it comes to being my savior, nobody else comes close. Not even Dr. K.
This is the first week I’m shuffling around the hospital with my bald head. I can’t decide which is uglier: Sophie with a beehive or Sophie as a skinhead. So I’ve wound a scarf around my head, and you wouldn’t be able to tell me apart from the cleaning lady who comes in each day with her bucket of chlorine and a mop. Nurse Bas calls me “Baldy” now. When he says it, it makes me laugh. I started calling him Nurse Betty—he’s the only male nurse on this ward and I feel that he deserves some special recognition. At eight o’clock he wakes me up with “Morning, Baldy”—like I’m the only one on this floor—and helps me pull on a clean top. It can be quite a challenge with all these tubes coming out of my wrists. After that he gives me a pat on the head and sits down for a chat as he changes the bandage around my wrist meant to keep all that tubing in place.
The Girl With Nine Wigs Page 3