After Cleo

by Helen Brown

  As she fished through my toiletry bag, I realised, with a creeping sense of shame, that I’d forgotten to pack a comb. Nurse Mary offered to buy one for me from the hospital shop. Returning soon after with the new comb, she stroked it tenderly through my hair. Kindness personified. Unable to sit up and barely able to move my arms, self-grooming was out of the question.

  Visitors. An elating, daunting prospect. Even though Lydia spent hours at my side, I didn’t count her as a visitor because she didn’t demand conversation or any kind of performance from me. She was more a presence, a lucky charm, providing reassurance and serenity by simply being there. She didn’t mind if I drifted to sleep. Knowing she was there made it easier to sleep.

  I longed to see the family, but not if my hissing legs and bottles of blood draped around the bed like macabre Christmas decorations caused alarm. Two figures appeared at the door that evening. Rob and Chantelle. Armed with bottles of mineral water and fresh limes, Rob knew exactly what was needed. He arranged my bed at the most comfortable angle, made sure the nurse call button was within easy reach, ran a watchful eye over the level of fluid in the drip. My mouth was dry as kitty litter and the mineral water spiked with fresh lime was nectar.

  Philip’s anxious face appeared regularly. He stroked my forehead, admired the flowers, and asked if there was anything he could do. The best gift he brought was our Bose radio from home. Tuned quietly to a classical music station, it provided bedside companions in the forms of Bach, Beethoven et al. Mozart and flowers. What more could a girl want?

  Another indispensible comfort was, oddly enough, a lambskin recommended by a nurse friend who’d been through similar surgery. Cast on my back for days and nights I welcomed its softness, and the way it seemed to let air circulate underneath me.

  During a day shift, a young nurse accelerated my drip. Nine litres later my abdomen was bloated with enough fluid to resemble a seven month pregnancy.

  Looking down at my distended abdomen bursting out of its corset, it reminded me of how Mum looked in her final days with bowel cancer. I felt nauseous. A ring of concerned nurses appeared.

  ‘What’s your pain level on a scale of one to ten?’ one of them asked.

  My stomach was a sack of broken glass. I felt on the edge of passing out, but didn’t want them thinking I was a whiner. To be conservative I said six.

  The nurses looked at each other. One of them said ‘As much as that?’

  I was in too much pain to reply.

  ‘It’s subjective,’ the senior looking nurse said to the others. ‘If she thinks it’s as high as six that’s what it is.’

  Nurses will sometimes talk as if you’re not in the room, calling you ‘she’, which gives you an opportunity to eavesdrop and find out how sick you really are.

  They decided it was nothing to worry about and gave me an injection. Greg’s corset was exchanged for a softer body stocking. A few hours later, May appeared and wiped me down like a distressed baby who’d fallen out of its pram. She smoothed the sheets and settled me for the night. The woman deserved a sainthood.

  Greg, a regular visitor, appeared soon after and announced his gardening efforts had succeeded. The transplant was thriving. I thanked him. He said it was the first time he’d seen me without my hair all over the place. The flatterer.

  Encouraged, I ticked boxes for tomorrow’s menu. Mediterranean Pasta with Spinach and Parmesan followed by Crème Caramel for desert. It looked haute cuisine. Hospital food’s the same everywhere, though. The main course turned out to be made of cardboard, the Crème Caramel unapproachable.

  Next morning, some drainage tubes were removed and the catheter was tugged out with a sting. I’d rather hoped to hang on to it. A permanent catheter would simplify plane trips and visits to the theatre no end. And now I had to hobble, bent double like a hag in an old fairy story, to the loo.

  Not only that, it was now necessary to confront the lonely fear of ‘sitting out’. Perching on a chair next to a bed sounds simple; hardly even an activity. Good for you too, according to the nurses. It opens your lungs and gets your blood moving in directions it never goes when you’re lying down. The sitting out chair was hard. My tailbone hurt. I stared longingly at the bed, willing it to glide over and envelop me. Twenty minutes of sitting out was more than I could achieve. I pressed the buzzer after a few minutes and asked to be helped back to bed.

  Then there were the arm exercises the hearty physio insisted I did ten times a day. Standing facing a wall and creeping my fingers up the wall was barely possible.

  I hadn’t cried yet. Was something wrong? Philip brought Katharine, looking pale and falsely jolly. She wanted to show me a video on her camera of her school music concert. I agreed just to humour her. But as young soloists launched into the opening bars of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, just missing the top notes, my chest contracted.

  The song reminded me of the pain that has always accompanied the challenge of being human, and the saintly beings who give solace through music and their own translucent purity – or (in some cases) hospital-strength medicine. For the first time since the last phone call with Lydia, I wept uncontrollably. Not the desperate barking of the previous episode but with the steady flow of an underground river.

  Hospital time was both urgent and meaningless. The difference between going home on Monday or Tuesday could mean tears or elation. The woman two doors down who’d had surgery the same day as me was going home a day earlier. She was officially ‘doing better’ than me. I didn’t envy her. The idea of going home and learning to look after myself, specially with two drainage bottles attached, had no allure.

  On some of her visits, Lydia helped me hobble bent double in a tangle of tubes and drainage bottles along the corridor. If I was feeling adventurous we’d catch the lift downstairs. I’d venture into the hospital courtyard and gulp gallons of fresh air. Tainted with cigarette smoke, it was raw and exhilarating.

  Days became cycles of routine – the sulky Eastern European woman with her cornflakes, then pills, surgeons’ visits, temperature and blood-pressure taking. It’s surprising how quickly the adjustment’s made. Probably the same thing happens in prisons. Comfort sprang from unusual sources – the tea bag sheathed in its blue envelope; diced tinned fruit I’d never eat at home.

  It was almost impossible to sleep with the hissing tubes massaging my legs. There was no point counting the hours of restless wakefulness. Four a.m. was much the same as 4 p.m., except there were no visitors.

  Of all the night noises keeping me awake, the one that was most irritating was the sound of snoring across the corridor. How dare anyone indulge in the luxury of uninterrupted sleep?

  On the third night, I became engrossed in a programme about English architecture on the tiny TV high on the wall in the right-hand corner of my room. Admiring the Royal Crescent of Bath, my thoughts drifted to something that’s a milestone after any operation. The first bowel motion.

  I summoned Nurse May, who helped me creep to the loo, hanging on to her elbow. Draped with drainage bottles and wheeling my drip, I made sedate progress to the bathroom like a 110-year-old woman. Clutching the stainless steel rail, I lowered myself on to the seat. May slid the door discreetly shut and said to press the buzzer if there were any problems. I sat anxiously enthroned while the television presenter continued his erudite description of how the city of Bath became extremely fashionable in the 1700s and how the stone chiselled from nearby hills contributed to architectural masterpieces.

  Unfortunately, the commentary wasn’t accompanied by any architectural masterpieces of an intimate nature on my part. Where was May anyway? There were no rustles or throat-clearing sounds from the other side of the door. She must’ve hurried away on some nursey business. I was alone and suddenly frightened.

  A wave of dizziness. The harshly lit bathroom, along with the television presenter’s carefully enunciated praise for the architecture of Bath, merged into a sickening blur. With a clatter of bottles and tubes, I spiralled off th
e seat toward the floor, just managing to press the emergency buzzer on my way down.

  The door slid open. A forest of nurses, including May, appeared above me.

  ‘Get the commode!’ snapped an authoritative voice.

  ‘She’s anaemic,’ said another. ‘She’s been pale ever since she came out of theatre.’

  ‘Sleep deprived too,’ said a third.

  The old ‘she’ again. Thanks for letting me know, girls.

  ‘Her oxygen levels are okay, though,’ said May.

  I was wheeled back to the room to be lowered painfully into bed. Glumness hovered for a while. The bedside phone screeched. In no mood for the Herculean task of answering, I flipped the receiver off with my hand and lowered my head into position.

  It was the breast cancer surgeon, loud and a little breathless. Results were just back from pathology. She was confident the cancer had been removed. The growth was even larger than they’d thought. Another six months and it would’ve been absolutely everywhere, she said.

  Absolutely everywhere. Wasn’t there a rock song with a name like that? Thank goodness I’d ignored the GP who’d suggested I take the slow track to breast screening.

  Wonderful news. So good I made her repeat it three times. To celebrate I was allowed to summon bedpans for the rest of the night. Pure luxury.

  Next morning when I was ushered into the bathroom, I produced a masterpiece worthy of the Royal Crescent of Bath. Pale green, it was the colour of Play-Doh, and probably a result of the pre-surgery scan when they’d pumped me full of radio active dye. Bending uncomfortably to flush it away, I issued a silent apology to the environmental engineers who ran the municipal sewerage ponds. The last thing they wanted was radio active poo.

  After breakfast, Nurse May hauled me out of bed and helped me into the shower. She said she’d seen the fear in my eyes in the bathroom the previous night, but I’d turned a corner today. When May said she liked the perfume in my hand cream, I made a mental note to send her some when I got home.

  How painful it must’ve been for wounded soldiers, young and frightened with holes shot through their bodies. Almost every one of them must’ve fallen for a nurse. I was half in love with them myself, the competent ones at least. Good nurses are angels, kind and strong. I loved their gentle strength when they lifted me in their arms to rearrange my pillows or help me stagger across the floor.

  Soon, however, I was going to have to get by without them. Very soon.

  Entrapment

  Never swear you’re not getting another cat

  Clutching Philip’s arm and creeping down the hospital steps, I entered a world of eye-stinging colour. Winter grey streets and footpaths pulsated with vibrancy. The red of an advertising sign glowed so aggressively I was forced to look away. Maybe being in hospital had heightened my senses. Or I’d forgotten to notice how vivid everyday life is.

  Lydia and Katharine trailed behind us like anxious bridesmaids carrying my bags and what was left of the flowers.

  It felt too soon to be going home. My abdomen was still swollen and a drainage tube somewhere below my right ribcage remained attached to its Christmas bauble bottle. I’d rather have stayed tucked up in hospital until they’d removed that thing. But the nurses had made it clear enough. If I’d insisted on roosting in their airless corridors I’d have been ignored, pretty much. There were new patients to tend to..

  Six nights in hospital is long enough anyway: the food, the noise, the awful artwork. Presumably the nearly seven centimetres of high-grade cancerous growth removed from my right breast was now floating around in the clouds over our heads, merging with other particles and about to be drizzled down on the city. Technically, I had a pert new breast made from tummy flab and a reduced and lifted left breast to match. Somewhere underneath the bandages and swelling was a new woman. In reality, I was a patchwork quilt and felt a wreck.

  Driving home, Philip abandoned his usual Roman-taxi-driver-on-steroids technique and nursed the car along as if a bomb was lodged under the bonnet. When he pulled into our driveway, I looked up at Shirley. It was good to see the old girl. In my previous life I’d barely noticed the slope up to the front door. Today it looked like the path to Everest Base Camp. As I hobbled up the paving stones, drain sloshing inside a discreet pink drawstring bag, my lungs sucked and puffed. I felt like a building due for demolition. One nudge in the basement and I’d crumple.

  Being home was good but frightening. The table was set for lunch, except for one glaring omission. There were knives and plates – but no forks. The old me would’ve sprung into the kitchen and slid the forks out of the drawer before you could flick a dishcloth. Now I could only sit and wait for someone to notice and do something about it. They didn’t.

  ‘Forks,’ I wheedled in my post-operative voice.

  There was a pause bred from years of me leaping around to fix things before they’d started going wrong. Mother’s syndrome. When does it start? Must be in those moments after birth when a woman sees her baby for the first time and feels like a god. Giving birth is the ultimate act of creation. No wonder Mother Earth was the first deity. She brought things to life and helped them grow. We handed religion over to men just to keep them occupied. Our devotion to our creations, our kids, has no limits. I’d heard an eighty-year-old woman angst over her sixty-year-old son as if he was still in nappies.

  It’s a two-way disorder. Mum becomes a compulsive nurturer. Dad and kids play the role of domestic dimwits. Once it sank in that I could not, would not, jump up from my chair to collect the forks, Lydia hurried over to the kitchen to get them.

  Motherhood has a habit of turning women into martyrs. I’d always believed I was too liberated for that to happen. Yet the decades had eroded me into someone just as subservient and resentful as my own mother. Jeez, I had three aprons hanging from a hook beside the fridge! I even wore the one emblazoned ‘Desperate Husband’.

  There are no medals for being dictator of the small island nation that is a household. Maybe breast cancer would bring the dawn of a freer, more democratic society to our place. Perhaps I’d learn to step back and take care of myself more. It might be good for all of us.

  I couldn’t sit at the table for long. A hot dagger was digging into my ribs. Bed and the forgiving softness of the sheepskin were welcome relief.

  It soon became clear that the new regime was going to require patience. I couldn’t bend over to pick a towel off the floor. Or stoop to collect crumbs, or petals from wilting floral arrangements, the way I always had. It was time to adopt selective blindness like everyone else, and not notice anything below waist level.

  The only suggestion Greg had given to ease the abdominal swelling was gentle massage. Limited arm movement made it impossible to perform the task myself. Understandably, there weren’t many volunteers. To my astonishment Lydia stepped forward and offered her services. Twice daily she instructed me to lie on the couch while she rubbed almond oil on my belly. Her willingness to overlook my gruesome wounds, her tender dedication, was overwhelming. I’d never have been so physically intimate with my own mother. Lydia cooked meals, brought cups of tea and took over the running of the household.

  Whenever I asked about her time in Sri Lanka, her gaze drifted sideways. Her descriptions were vague. She’d meditated a lot, often more than twelve hours a day. (‘How do you sit still that long?’ I asked. ‘Oh, sometimes I’d get up and do walking meditations,’ she replied.) There had been outings with the monk, blessing a few bits and pieces, and taking part in ceremonies.

  I still couldn’t get a feel for the place and why it held such magnetism for her. The more I probed, the less willing she was to talk. Nevertheless, I was so overjoyed to have her home I didn’t want to do or say anything to make her uneasy.

  When I asked what had happened to Ned, she looked away and said they’d broken up. Another No Go area.

  Assuming her father Steve had paid for her return fare to Melbourne – there was no other possible way she could have afforded t
he ticket home – I wrote him a fulsome card of thanks. For all the disagreements we’d had in the past it was heartening to know he understood the importance of family.

  Soon after I posted the card, I dreamt Lydia’s monk was sitting in a pool of light at the end of our bed and laughing good-naturedly. With his maroon robes folded neatly around him and his bald head gleaming, he looked so amiable my animosity toward him faded temporarily. I wanted to thank him for the cave ceremony, but by the time I’d woken up properly the monk had disappeared.

  It was the second outlandish visitation I’d had in a couple of months. Maybe it was just a matter of time before I’d be wandering down streets muttering to myself. There had to be some explanation for the visitations. The first one with Mum in the wellness retreat was probably due to caffeine withdrawal. And the monk to a hangover from hospital drugs.

  Steve didn’t reply to the thank you note, but our relationship had never been straightforward.

  Forbidden to vacuum, lift anything weighing more than a kilo, drive or pick things up off the floor, I struggled to adapt.

  ‘Don’t bend over like that!’ Lydia snapped as I stooped over to pick an envelope off the floor. Her tone was sharply maternal. The power dynamic had changed.

  A patient is so called for good reason. In the early days after surgery, progress had been fast. In hospital I’d woken one morning suddenly able to creep to the loo. Once I was home, improvement slowed. Some days I even went backwards. A drive to Rob and Chantelle’s for pizza one night was surprisingly harrowing. I’d forgotten to wear the surgeon’s ‘corset’ that held the ghoulish grin of stitches in my abdomen together. It was a lovely evening but I was wrecked the following day. Then there was the night I spent bonding with Katharine watching Dr Who with a hot-water bottle on my stomach. I’d forgotten that a wide strip of flesh there had no feeling. In the morning it was bright red and accessorised with two large blisters.