by Andrew Daddo
‘Mum,’ I said.
She let out a long breath. ‘Sorry, I can hear how I sound. He just needs to know stuff and I can’t tell him because it’s all been happening to you, not me. It’ll help, okay.’
The waiting room was painted in the bright, happy colours of a kids’ TV show. Who were they kidding? The time for our appointment came and went without an apology or explanation from the woman at reception.
Mum played ‘Words With Friends’ on her phone, and the pluck pluck noise as she shifted tiles started to annoy me. When I asked her to mute it she snapped, ‘Sorry’, making me feel like a bitch.
She said it again, then asked, ‘Any ideas with these letters?’
The nurse saved us. She called my name and pointed down the hallway, smiling. ‘Last door. On the left. He’s not as scary as he looks.’
‘Funny,’ I said.
Mum mimed a thank you and we started walking.
If there’d been a soundtrack to that moment, it would have been a funeral dirge, or something near the climax of a splatter film. Dear God, I thought. Please let me be the spunk who survives.
Mum and I held hands and walked right into the office. The doctor was behind the desk and stood as we entered. He was tiny, even smaller than me. When I shook hands with him I had to check he wasn’t wearing silk gloves. They were so soft, almost shiny.
‘Hi, Em,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you. You look good.’
‘Thanks. I think. I feel good. Should I feel good?’
‘She does look good,’ went Mum. ‘I think she looks really good. Nice colour, eh?’
‘It’s probably all the carrots,’ I said, laughing a bit hard. ‘Carrots?’
‘Antioxidents. Cleansing, and stuff,’ went Mum. ‘Just in case. But she, you know. She looks great. I really think she does. I don’t think I’ve seen her look so healthy in ages.’
It was impossible. Dr Harrington could have made it all a lot easier by just telling us what the problem was, but he seemed to be fine watching us wallow. Maybe there was no problem. Maybe he wasn’t panicking because I was actually fine.
‘Okay, so,’ he said, pulling a folder off the top of a file with my name on it. ‘Before we get to this,’ and he patted the folder, ‘let’s go through it again, because I want to make sure we’ve got it right. It was headaches first, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mum. ‘They probably sta–’
Dr Harrington gently raised his right palm to Mum, then turned towards me.
‘Emily? It was the headaches, first?’
I nodded.
‘But you didn’t normally get headaches?’
‘Tell him,’ went Mum. ‘Words,’ she nodded.
I let out the breath I must have been holding for the last week and fumbled for the right words. ‘Not really. I get headaches. Everyone does, right? But not like that one. It wasn’t normal. Mum thought it was a migraine. It was like my head was going to blow off my shoulders, or like it was in a vice from the bottom to the top and it was slowly being crushed.’ I put one hand on my forehead and one at the base of my neck to show him. ‘I had to lay in my room in the dark. It hurt to move or have my eyes open.’
‘Just one episode like that?’ said the doctor.
I looked to the ceiling for answers; Dr Harrington’s staring was intense. ‘Pretty much.’
‘And then you went back to school?’
‘The next day, no, two days off. When did we see the doctor, Mum?’
Dr Harrington had his silky little hands steepled at the bottom of his chin, silently assessing the two of us.
Mum chimed in, looking at me but talking to the doctor. ‘About a month later, she had another headache, not as bad, but it wasn’t as if she’d had headaches like these before. We just thought it was best to check it out, you know? I did the right thing, didn’t I?’ Mum was talking way quicker than normal.
The doctor nodded passively. ‘Of course, of course.’ He opened the folder and moved his finger along the words as if it was doing the reading. ‘Dr Smythe – is it Smythe or Smith? Smythe. He sent you home. Couldn’t find anything. “All good,” he said?’
‘Yep,’ went Mum and I together.
‘Then you had another migraine – about two months later?’
‘Yep,’ we went again.
‘It wasn’t as bad though, was it, Em?’ said Mum. ‘The first one was the worst.’
‘It was pretty bad,’ I said.
‘But not as bad as that first one?’ said Mum. ‘That was definitely the worst, wasn’t it?’
We were both looking at the doctor. I wanted to scream at him, Just tell me what the fuck I’ve got! He barely changed the way he spoke, he was so calm and measured.
Then I started to figure, the longer he took, the better, because if it was really bad he’d be doing something. That’s how it is on the TV medical shows. If it’s an emergency, if you need a new heart or brain or kidney, they got you prepped up and sorted straightaway. Then they have some other problem, like the heart doesn’t arrive, or it does, but they lose it. But generally, on those shows, if there’s an emergency they all go into hyper-drive and fix the problem.
‘So the first headache was the worst of all?’ he said, rubbing his forefinger over the dent in his chin. He kept doing it, like his finger was drawn to that spot. Now that I’d noticed, I couldn’t stop watching.
‘Yeah,’ I went. ‘They’ve all been pretty bad, but maybe that was the worst headache because there was nothing to compare it to. Nothing like that had ever happened before, you know?’
‘And your mum, no, the doctor gave you Panadol? Then upgraded to Nurofen? And that was that, right?’
Dr Harrington was looking from me to his notes to Mum and back to me. Alternately nodding or shaking his head.
‘Pretty much,’ said Mum. ‘But that stuff didn’t work, the migraine just sort of went away, didn’t it?’ She nodded at me again.
I copied her nod. I think she was right, but it felt like so long ago.
‘Okay, great,’ went Dr Harrington. And it was funny how his ‘great’ buoyed me. It seemed to lift Mum, too.
‘So, what do you think?’ she said. ‘Are we good?’
‘Well, hang on, Gently Bentley. We’re getting there.’ He shuffled a few papers, but returned to the one he’d been looking at. ‘So, you kept getting them. August. October. Two in December, then pretty much once a month, maybe twice? You kept using the Nurofen, it sort of worked. And generally everything was okay. How was everything else? Your general health? Your period? That was fine?’
‘Yes.’ Awks.
‘Were you drinking much alcohol?’
‘No,’ said Mum. ‘She was fifteen when this was going on.’
He rubbed that spot on his chin again. He was either daring one of us to hit him, or he had something there. ‘Emily?’
I nodded. It was small, but enough to make Mum gasp.
‘Not much though, Emily,’ she said. I shrugged.
‘Much?’ said the doctor.
There was no point lying. ‘Oh, you know. Not really.’
The doctor pressed for more. ‘Enough to get drunk?’ I nodded. ‘Really drunk?’ Another shrug did the trick.
‘Emily?’ went Mum. ‘How often? Who with?’
‘It’s not really the time for that,’ said the doctor. ‘And honestly, it’s not really that important in the scheme of things. I don’t think this is an alcohol-related issue, it’s just to get a picture of what was going on. But it has to be a clear picture. Let’s paint it now and we can judge it later, eh?’ He smiled for the first time. ‘It’s not like Emily’s the first teenager to get plastered, right, Em?’
I felt better.
‘Did you ever vomit?’
‘A couple of times.’
Mum started rolling her eyes and tossing her head about. I knew I’d cop it in the car.
‘Drugs?’ Now Dr Harrington had his hands on the desk. They were clasped in front of him, and with each word his thumbs came up. ‘We
ed? Coke? Caps? Eccies? Pingers?’
‘Oh my God,’ went Mum.
I shook my head.
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Weed. But that’s pretty much it,’ I said. Mum threw her hands up and glared at me.
‘Pretty much? Exactly what is pretty much?’ The doctor’s tone remained even, as if he didn’t give a shit what I’d done.
I looked at her, almost pleading. ‘Mum?’
The doctor saved me. ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘why don’t you go and get a coffee, or get Emily a water? I just need the information, not the judgement. It’s history. Like I said, it might be important, it might not. But we’re kind of into the serious part of the game now. It’s the third quarter, time to kick some goals.’
I resisted rolling my eyes – making it about footy was so Melbourne.
Doctor Harrington smiled, but Mum grimaced.
‘Where are we really, Doctor?’
The doctor’s voice dropped a few octaves and he came forward in his seat.
‘Okay, where we are, now, in the story, is at your place in Benalla. You’ve got headaches, you’ve had medication. Your doctor’s misdiagnosed you on a number of occasions with migraines. It was lucky the time you couldn’t see him and you went to the hospital in Albury because that bloke in emergency figured it was something else entirely. You had the CT scan – that was inconclusive even though Blind Freddy could see something wasn’t quite right. I’m sorry the process has been so drawn out. It shouldn’t be like that, but it’s how it often is. There are lots of tests, and lots of them are inconclusive. So, like I said, we’re in the third quarter. I guess the question is, how much time is left on the clock.’
‘What the fuck?’ said Mum. Her voice was way up, she was forward on her seat, and while I heard what Dr Harrington had said, I’m not sure I processed it properly, because Mum had a whole other level of anxiety to mine.
‘What do you mean, how much time is left?’ I said. ‘What does that mean, Mum?’
When she looked at me, all I could see was fear. Tears in her eyes were ready to drop. Her lips had gone, making her mouth a sad kind of scar falling at the corners. She grabbed for my hand, I gave her both.
‘What does that mean?’ she said.
Dr Harrington took a breath and another look at his papers.
‘Okay,’ he said, staring at me. ‘Emily, you have a growth at the base of your skull. Like a tumour. It is benign, which is great. For now.’
‘Can’t you cut it out?’ went Mum. ‘Just get rid of it.’
The doctor shook his head. ‘It’s complicated. Technically, yes. Effectively, no. Basically, we watch it. That’s about all we can do at the moment.’
‘What’s benign, again?’ I said.
Mum’s voice was way up. ‘Why can’t you cut it out?’
He held his hand out to Mum, palm out, as if fending her off, before turning his face to me. ‘Benign is basically non-cancerous. It doesn’t have the capacity to metastasise or invade the neighbouring tissue – which unfortunately for us, is basically the brain and the spinal cord. And that’s why I’m reticent to operate, to be honest. Normally we’d get rid of it, but this one’s sort of got itself into an interesting spot that’s not just hard to get at, but comes with some pretty interesting risks. I think it’s better to watch it, at this stage, anyway.’
Mum was mental. ‘What risks?’
The doctor shook his head, then reached for a bony model at the corner of his desk. ‘This is the neck, okay. Your tumour is not sitting out here away from the spinal cord where it can be easily accessed, but it seems to be in the spinal canal and around the cord. So we can’t actually get to it without risking damage to the spinal cord. Do you follow?’
Mum nodded. ‘I think so. So, no treatment? Therefore, it’s not terminal?’
Then he rubbed the dimple in his chin again.
I couldn’t bear it and said, ‘What is it with your chin?’
‘It’s the stupidest thing. I must have missed that bit when I shaved and there’s about five whiskers there. I can’t stop rubbing them. It’s ridiculous, right? I’m going to have to shave them at lunchtime. It’s driving me mad. Can you see them?’ He stuck his chin out and I actually leaned forward to have a look.
‘Nup, can’t see ’em,’ I said.
‘Weird what you can feel, right?’
‘So, back to the growth in my daughter’s head,’ said Mum, desperately. She was trying not to sound pissed but it was an epic fail.
‘Sorry,’ said Dr Harrington. ‘Sorry. Look …’
That’s kind of the moment where it all got a bit much. There were words like malignant and benign, accessible, potential, residue. He said ‘waiting game’ a lot. I don’t know. As dumb as it sounds, it seemed to be out of my hands. I mean, I tried to concentrate, but as soon as he shook his head when Mum said ‘terminal’ I knew it was going to be okay.
Well, I kind of knew it was going to be okay. I was mainly scared because everyone else was, but really, deep down, I felt fine. So when the doctor said it wasn’t terminal, I pretty much relaxed. That’s all I had to hear. In my head, I was already halfway up the Hume to home. To Dad and Siss and my mates and that big bloody idiot Toby who’d tried to choke me.
I hadn’t actually admitted this to myself, but as much as I had thought I wanted to leave, I couldn’t wait to get back. I think it’d been like insurance. If I prepared for the worst, anything better than a disaster was actually good news. It’d be hilarious: ‘But you were leaving forever,’ my two besties, Tess and Raney, would laugh. ‘We bloody cried for you for days. You owe us some tears, ya mole!’ And Toby’d want to kiss me hello and I don’t reckon I’d stop him. I couldn’t wait to get on the phone and start texting!
I tuned back in to hear the doctor say, ‘So, look. I’d love it if you could stay in Melbourne. You’ve got family here, haven’t you? Do you think–’
‘Hang on,’ I whispered. ‘You said it’s okay, right? Like, it’s a good growth, not the bad kind. Right? And it’s not terminal?’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘That’s right, a growth that is not terminal. But –’
‘Well, so, why would I have to stay in Melbourne?’
‘Yeah,’ said Mum. ‘There’s a bit of a mixed message there, Doctor Harrington.’
‘Yes, and no. Look, you’re here now,’ he said, back to fingering his chin. ‘And I’m here, and I’d like to keep an eye on it. As in, fortnightly. And if you get a headache, I want to see you when it’s on, not wait two and a half hours for you to drive from Benalla. And yes, it is certainly benign, but it is a foreign matter near your brain and central nervous system and, call me cautious, but I want to watch it. Six months. I want to consult with some other doctors, consider our options from the inside. Maybe we can zap it. It might be chemo, it might be radiation, I don’t know. But first, we watch it and understand it.’
‘But, Mum,’ I said.
‘Hang on, darl.’ It was her turn to fend me off. ‘So it is a problem, Dr Harrington?’
‘It’s not, not a problem. It’s not good. But it’s not as bad as it could be.’
‘But it’s not going to kill me?’ I said.
‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’ His finger went back to his chin. ‘Put it this way, you have a far better chance of survival than these stumpy little hairs on my chin. Guaranteed.’
The best thing about Ethan’s running was his stamina. It was probably from footy and all the kilometres he did hunting the Sherin. Technically, he was an awful runner – he was all over the place.
He had this ridiculous stretching routine that doubled as a warm-up where he looked like he was trying to bend himself in half. He grabbed his ankles and bounced up and down a bunch of times before pulling the back of his foot into his butt to stretch his quads. Then he’d do these quick swivels with his legs apart, shoulders pointing one way, his dick the other. It was all over in less time than it’d take to boil an egg. I’d barely tied my la
ces and he was bouncing up and down shouting, ‘Let’s bloody go!’ like he was Ted Whitten.
‘Hang on a sec, mate,’ I said. ‘Give us a minute.’
I wasn’t going to just run off without being ready. There was every chance I might injure myself and there’d be no explaining that. Instead of bouncing through the stretches, I gently leaned into them giving the muscles a chance to elongate and loosen. There was a warmth to it, like standing with the backs of your legs in front of a fire, or feeling direct sunshine on your skin when the weather’s rotten.
‘Let’s go,’ said Ethan. ‘Come on. I haven’t got all day to piss-fart around watching you try and lick your balls.’
So we went.
A predictable schoolboy belt around the Tan. Ethan took off fast but slowed soon enough. I told him we’re not racing, but training – that the idea was to work together, get distance and strength in our legs and prepare for Districts, not kill each other. He stopped at the first watering station and noted I was barely puffing.
‘Yeah, well,’ I said, starting to heave for the sake of it.
‘You’re not even sweating. Like, at all.’ The curls on Ethan’s face and neck were dark with sweat, his top lip and forehead beading like the first drops of rain on a freshly waxed car bonnet.
‘Weird,’ I said, tucking my hands up into my armpits, hoping the t-shirt would come back damp. ‘Yeah, I am. Under here. Look.’ And I held my arm up so he could see I was at least sweating under my arms.
I felt like such a dick, but this was new territory I’d never been in before. The only person who’d questioned how much I was sweating was Dad, and that was usually because I was sweating too hard too early and therefore wasn’t fit enough. It’s how Ethan looked and we’d barely managed a kilometre.
‘I don’t sweat that much, anyway,’ I said. ‘Never have. We’re all different, right?’
‘S’pose so,’ he slurped.
By the time we got to the Anderson Street hill, Ethan was pretty well cooked, but I felt good. We trudged up the first half and walked the second. Near the top we walked through a bunch of school girls who left a narrow channel for us to get through. They were Grammar girls, I could tell from their sports gear.