by Lindy Dale
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Storm in a B Cup
Lindy Dale
©Secret Creek Press 2014
Prologue
Six Months Previous
“I see a tall, very handsome man. He has green eyes like the ocean. He is good with his hands. I see the fitness. I see him playing a sport with a racquet.”
I see a crock, I think, as I sit in the darkened den that is Madame Zara’s ‘Reading Room’ trying not to laugh out loud. Seriously, I have no idea why I agreed to this. A tall green-eyed, sport-playing man basically covers a quarter of the population of Perth. If she adds an initial to that description, I swear I’ll lose it.
“I see a ‘J’.”
I look at the angel pictures over her shoulder and try to keep it together.
“Or is it a B? Or an R?”
I’m impressed by her tenacity at trying every letter of the alphabet until she gets the reaction she’s after, but I’m not giving her a sausage of a clue. If she’s a real fortune teller, she should be able to tell me.
“Oh, it’s Brendan, it’s Brendan. He’s a ‘B’,” my friend Lani squeals, giving the game away.
“Yes, Brendan. A green-eyed man called Brendan. And you have been with this Brendan for a long period?”
Damn, now I have to answer. “About three years.”
The little woman sitting on the other side of the crushed velvet tablecloth has a sheet of paper in front of her. She picks up a pen and begins to scribble furiously using a combination of numbers that relates to my birthday or my address or something. She’s telling me that the green-eyed man will play an important role in my future and that very soon there will be unexpected announcements or some such twaddle.
“Brendan’s going to propose,” Lani whispers.
“Either that or he’s announcing that he’s giving up the real estate business to become a professional gigolo. That’d be unexpected.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, this is serious.”
Maybe for some of us.
I turn my attention back to Madame Zara who is now squinting over the paper. She asks for my hand and begins to examine the lines on my palm as if to confirm what’s going on in her head. I hate to tell her she won’t see a thing. I have so many lines on my palm, even a train driver would be confused.
She’s stopped talking now. She’s given me back my hand and is adjusting her black and silver kaftan so that the twin moons in the fabric are perfectly aligned with her nipples.
“What is it?” Lani asks. Then, as an aside she whispers to me, “Madame Zara always does that when she wants to say something of great importance.”
Oh for heaven’s sake.
Ridiculous as it is, I decide to play along.
We lean across the table. Madame Zara appears to have gone into some type of trance. Her eyes are closed and she’s swaying from side to side. At any moment her head may start spinning. She has gone a bit green.
“I see sadness at a loss and a little boy who wins a prize.”
Well, at least she has that part right. Rory is always winning prizes.
The medium’s eyes spring open. “You will live a long and happy life with the green eyed man,” she says, in a rather abrupt change of tone. “A long and happy life.”
Well, thank goodness for that. I was beginning to think the world was going to end.
Chapter 1
My name is Sophie Molloy. And I have Breast Cancer. Well, I don’t actually know I have Breast Cancer but the look on that woman’s face as she’s sliding the ultrasound thingy over my boob is sort of confirming it. She’s a little too glazed for my liking and she keeps stopping and peering at the screen in a squinty fashion that doesn’t appear entirely normal, like she’s forgotten her glasses or something.
I didn’t think it was cancer to start. Earlier today, on the way here, I was telling myself it was another cyst, similar to the one I had a few years back. I’ve been telling myself that since November. It’s nothing to worry about. Just a cyst. So confident was I, that I shared this knowledge over Christmas, much to the horror of my friends. They gasped at my blasé attitude. But I was positive it was only a cyst.
Of course it was.
I look at the screen and back to the girl’s impassive face. She’s frowning, but not because she can’t see the screen. This is a frown of concern and somehow, I don’t think the thing showing up this time is going to be sucked out with a syringe. It looks a little more sinister than that.
So how did this happen? How did I find the lump that is about to change my life?
Some time last November, I was sitting at my desk doing the accounts when I felt a twinge in my right breast. It was a stingy, stabby sort of pain that felt like I was being pricked with a needle. I put my hand to the spot and gave it a massage — ever since the cyst I’ve been fairly vigilant about checking my breasts, so it came as a shock that I could feel something there. As I ran my fingers over my breast, my mind instantly went back to the previous time, when I’d totally freaked out thinking I was going to die. Within the space of a week, I morphed from happy-go-lucky Sophie into a grumpy, pale-faced zombie. I slept an average of two hours a night and went around the place bursting into tears like a hormonal teenager. Heaven’s knows why. It turned out to be nothing. Bearing that in mind, I promptly decided to let this new lump be for a while. It had a habit of appearing and disappearing anyway, there one day and not the next, so it was most likely nothing.
Stupid idea.
This could have been happening five months ago if I’d gone to the doctor straight away. I could have been past this by now.
The sonographer’s voice draws me back to the present. “We might get the doctor to look at this,” she says. “To be sure.”
To be sure? Sure of what? That I have cancer? You’d think as a trained professional, she’d know.
A few minutes pass as I lay on the bed in the small, darkened room, biting my lip. There’s a crack of light peeping under the door and a nurse, I’m supposing that’s who she is, flits around making small talk. My watch is telling me it’s only two minutes since the last time I dared to look; yet time feels interminable. At last, the sonographer appears with a doctor. They have a student with them who would like to look too, if that’s okay? After he’s finished his sandwich, of course.
What do you say in this instance?
No?
Piss off?
At least finish that drippy egg and mayo sandwich before you lean over me?
The poor student has a tortured look that tells me if I say anything remotely negative he’s going to curl up in a ball and cry. So I nod an okay and they approach. They pull a privacy curtain, though why is beyond me as we’re alone in a room with the door shut.
Now, there are four people squished into a three metre space, all standing around the bed, umming and ahhing like a barber shop quartet in surgical get up. The nurse is on one side, stroking my hand, the doctor is mumbling and prodding, the student is trying to blend into the curtain while munching his sandwich and the sonographer is scratching her nose every ten seconds. It’s like some bizarre out of body experience.
The doctor studies the pictures on the monitor but his glasses are so thick I’m positive he can’t see through them. He could be making some dreadful error of judgment because he’s so myopic he thinks the shadow is something else. He leans a little closer to the screen and grimaces so deeply his big, dark eyebrows almost become a moustache. Then, he prods my breast and mutters something in my general direction.
I look up at him, bewildered. Heaven help me, I’m not a racist, but I have absolutely
no clue what he’s saying. I can’t fathom a word that’s coming out of his mouth. His African accent is so strong a communications expert for the Australian Army wouldn’t be able to decipher it.
“I beg your pardon?”
He repeats the muttering and I still have no clue.
Before I know it, the doctor thrusts a form and a pen in my face. The nurse explains to me about core biopsies. I don’t even know what a core biopsy is. I came here to have my boob flattened like a pancake in the mammogram machine and go home. I don’t want some man giving me a core biopsy. I look to the others in the room, trying to piece this together in my mind. What the hell is happening?
“Pardon?” I say for the third time in the conversation.
“We’ll do the biopsy now.”
“Why do I need a core biopsy again?” I ask. They must think I’m a complete moron.
“Standard procedure,” the nurse says.
“Easier to do it now than have you come back another day,” adds the sonographer.
Oh. Okay. I nod my assent and sign my name. I guess that makes sense.
The nurse takes the clipboard from me. “We’ll give you a local anaesthetic and insert the biopsy needle into your breast. The doctor will take three or four samples.”
“And the results?”
“It’ll take a week. Call your G.P. in a week.”
I’m dying, I think. I’m going to die of Breast Cancer. I might not have a week.
*****
An hour or so, and one painful breast later, I stumble into the car park, frantically clicking the remote on my keys in the hope that I’ll see the lights flashing on the car. I can’t for the life of me remember where I parked it. I’m so traumatised I can’t even remember what it looks like. Little blinking lights are my only hope.
Seeing the amber of the indicator lights, I race to the end of a row, open the door and heave myself into the safety of the cabin. I toss my bag to the passenger seat and my head and arms onto the steering wheel. Then I sob. Shoulders heaving and chest nearly bursting, I sit alone in the car park and sob until I can sob no more. It doesn’t make me feel any better. It only makes my face go red and blotchy. I know this because I can see my reflection in the rear view mirror. I look hideous, like I have a bad allergy for tears.
After quite a few minutes, I feel a little calmer so I scramble in my bag for my phone and dial Brendan’s number. He answers straight away.
“Soph?”
“Y… yes.” I sniff. I need to hear his voice, get some normality back into my day.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Of course, I’m not okay. Clearly, my voice is giving that away.
“I had the mammogram. They found a shadow.” I begin to cry anew and this time I can’t stop. “They made me have a core biopsy and it really hurt.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad. Calm down. You’re overreacting again.”
Overreacting?
“Can you imagine the pain of having a metal skewer stuck into your balls? Without the benefit of anaesthetic? That’s…that’s how it felt.”
“They didn’t give you anaesthetic?” Brendan sounds appalled.
Now, I’m bawling. Really bawling. Tears are running down my face and I can’t get air into my lungs. My chest feels like I’m having some sort of heart attack.
“Of course they did. But it wore off part way through. The doctor wanted to take as many samples as he could. It really hurt,” I repeat. “And the doctor was mean. I told him it was hurting. I told him I was going to faint if he didn’t stop and he said he must have hit a nerve.”
“But he didn’t stop?”
“No. He looked at me like I was behaving like a complete sissy and put the needle in on a different angle. I almost cut the circulation off in the poor nurse’s hand, it hurt so much.”
The memory of the doctor’s face, close to mine, glaring at me like I was a stupid girl makes me cry harder. I’m not a sissy. I pierced my own ears with an ice block and a sterilised needle, for heaven’s sake, and when Rory was three, I held his pinky finger in place all the way to hospital after he almost chopped it off in the doorjamb. How did that doctor not understand that I could feel everything he did?
“He shoved that thing in me, Brendan. I begged him to give me more anaesthetic and he didn’t fucking care.”
The other end of the line goes silent.
“Do you want me to come home? I can get off work early. I mean, I’m sure it’s perfectly normal but I can come home if you need me to.”
Jesus, fucking Christ. Has he not been listening? There’s a shadow. On my breast. That’s not normal.
“Soph?”
“Um. Er. No, I’ll be fine.” I sniff again.
Maybe I am being a drama queen. I probably need to suck it up and get on with it. Stop whining about the nastiness of my day. After all, there’s a million girls in the world who have it worse than me. “No. I’ll see you tonight.”
“You sure?”
I put on my Brave Sophie voice. Everyone knows I’m the rock in this relationship. Brendan couldn’t cope if I lost it. “I’m sure. Look, I have to go and get this stock sorted before I pick Rory up. I’ll see you tonight. Kisses.”
Taking a deep breath, I put my seatbelt on and turn the ignition of the car. I try to force the experience from my mind because I have a lot of things to accomplish between now and 3p.m. I have no time to sit around in a car park crying like an idiot. Anyway, there’s no point in jumping to conclusions, is there? I won’t have the results until I go back to my G.P. in a few days’ time and most abnormalities in breasts are not cancer. I remind myself again of Brendan’s words. It’s probably nothing.
But I have a shadow. There’s a freakin’ shadow.
Chapter 2
As I walk into the back room of the shop, my assistant Lani’s head pops from behind a large pile of cardboard boxes. She puts her clipboard down on the top of one and looks at me, pointedly. Well, as pointedly as a girl with a white blonde pixie cut and bright purple eyeshadow can look. Lani likes her eyeshadow to contrast with her clothing, which is why, today, she’s wearing an oversized black mesh singlet, cut off to reveal her belly, a pair of lace leggings and an orange Ra-Ra skirt straight from Madonna’s 1980’s wardrobe. The look is completed by an assortment of lime green beads that swing freely round her neck. There’s not a hope in hell anything could coordinate with that.
“What’s the verdict?” she asks.
I’ve had time to digest the incident and do some thinking on the drive back. Even though one in eight women in Australia are diagnosed with the disease in their lifetime, most shadows in the breast are not cancer. Still, the statistic is not a comforting thought. Nobody I know has the disease. I could well be the one in eight of my circle.
“I have a suspicious looking shadow which I’m guessing is cancer. I’ll know next week.”
The key Lani was about to slice along the tape of the box is suddenly poised in mid-air. She’s looking at me like I’ve announced Marilyn Monroe has come back from the dead and is out on the shop floor wanting to buy a hat.
“How can you be so offhand about this?” she says.
“I’m not being offhand, but there’s no point in worrying until it happens. And if I have cancer, I have it. Getting dramatic isn’t going to help. Besides, I cried for about half an hour in the car already. It’s time to move on.”
“You need to take this seriously, Sophie. My friend Lisa’s mother got cancer and she died three months later.”
“Yes, but that was Ovarian Cancer. I might have Breast Cancer and these days, Breast Cancer isn’t necessarily a life sentence.”
“My Uncle John died of cancer only last year.”
“He smoked for fifty-three years. And he was eighty-two.”
“Well, one in eight women will contract Breast Cancer,” she adds, sounding very much like she’s been on the internet in my absence. How else could she pull such facts out of her head at such shor
t notice? It never ceases to amaze me. Not when she looks like a bubblehead.
“Did you check out the survival rate while you were at it?”
“What?”
“Googling.”
A bashful look creeps over her face. “Eighty-eight per cent for those caught early.”
“Great. Let’s get back to this stock, shall we? I wouldn’t want to find out I’m one of the twelve per cent who die and not have the stock sorted. You’d never cope.”
Lani sighs and shakes her head. She picks up the clipboard and walks around the pile of boxes where she puts the clipboard back down, on the desk. She gives me yet another look, this time tinged with a hint of concern.
“I know you’re trying to hide your worry with jokes, Soph, and if that’s what works for you, go right ahead, but I want you to know you aren’t going to die. In fact, I don’t even think you have it. I mean look at you.”
She moves closer and wraps her arms around me. I feel like Henry the Octopus has been let loose from The Wiggles show and is squeezing me to death.
“And you know this, how?”
“I have a feeling. You know my intuition is strong. My mum thinks I’m a bit psychic. Plus, when I went to have my monthly reading with Madame Zara yesterday she didn’t mention a thing about it.”
I shrug her away. “Oh. Well there’s nothing to worry about then. If Madame Zara didn’t see it, I must be fine. For heaven’s sake, Lani, do you not see how ridiculous that sounds?”
“But she’s so accurate.”
“Not that accurate. Brendan hasn’t proposed yet. It’s been six months.”
“But he did announce he’d won that corporate client with the huge commission involved. Madame Zara said an announcement. She’s never missed a beat yet. It’s all to do with interpretation.”
“I have a strange feeling she might need a new drum. Now, come on, we’ve got work to do.”
I flip open the first carton. Bubble wrap and tissue fly into the air as I pull them away. Then I stare. I stare into the open box because my mouth is incapable of forming words. These are not the Spencer and Rutherford handbags I ordered. Nor are they the felt supplies I need for the berets I want to make for winter.