‘Through here?’ They started towards where Dad was hovering in the bedroom doorway. I nodded.
‘She’ll be right,’ the tall officer said, winking kindly to me, and I desperately wanted to believe him. But I had my doubts. From where I was standing it seemed that, when it came to our family, anything that could go wrong, would go wrong; and anything that would go wrong was going really pear-shaped right now.
‘Breathing?’ It was the tall ambo and he threw the question at his shorter colleague, who was a few steps ahead of him, already bent over Mum’s impassive face.
‘Breathing. Airway clear. Pulse present. Unresponsive. Dissociative state,’ came the staccato reply. Tall officer nodded as he crouched down in one surprisingly smooth movement and began unpacking supplies from his backpack with expert efficiency.
If this was anyone else’s mum, in anyone else’s family, she would go through cancer surgery and then come home and get better, I raged to myself, my fear giving way to fury now. There’d be no panic attacks or hallucinations or collapsing dramatically; for anyone else this would all just go smoothly. End of story. But, no; not for us. It could never be that simple for us.
‘Oxygen?’
‘Active.’
‘Blood pressure?’
‘50/30.’
The ambos volleyed information back and forth as Dad and I watched on, bewildered. Mum didn’t stir.
Of course, years later I’ve come to realise that there are many, many families out there who suffer just as much as we seemed to. Some suffer even more. I know people whose mother was taken away by an ambulance and never brought back again. Ever. But at the time it was beginning to feel like maybe we really were cursed and that the possibility of Mum never coming back to us might be exactly where we were headed.
‘IV line?’
‘Stabilising now.’
The medics began to administer clear fluid through a drip they’d set up in the middle of the bedroom. At the same time they continued to check Mum’s pulse and to monitor her breathing. For two large guys, working under pressure and in an overcrowded bedroom, they were impressive. Seeing them move around in their matching white uniforms was like watching some strange but highly choreographed ballet.
And then slowly, so slowly, Mum appeared to regain consciousness. Her eyes, which had been spookily open the entire time, like some unblinking doll who was made without eyelids, now flickered slightly. For a moment she seemed to be aware of what was going on around her, although her body was still rigid and unmoving and she made no attempts to speak.
‘Julie-Anne!’ Dad said and rushed over to her bedside.
It was strange to see Dad cut up like this. Normally he was Mum’s rock; he was everybody’s rock. I wasn’t sure how to react to Dad being exposed. I felt like I should look away. Dad was such a man’s man—all motorbikes and beer and Sky News—it was like I was intruding somehow by seeing this vulnerable man who was hovering at Mum’s bedside. Mum and Dad were like two halves of the one coin. Dad cooked and Mum cleaned; Dad drove and Mum navigated. They seemed to do everything together and I just didn’t know what Dad would ever do without Mum.
‘Mum?’ I asked warily, but she just stared blankly in Dad’s general direction, her eyes as frozen and unmoving as the rest of her body.
‘See? Told you she’d be apples,’ the tall ambo said brightly as they continued to busily inject and insert and administer and monitor and all with no less urgency than before. ‘Reckon we might whack her into Manly Hospital for a bit, though, just to keep an eye on her.’
I watched in silence as they wheeled Mum outside to the waiting ambulance. Her face was deathly pale. She didn’t look very apples to me. Dad clambered into the back of the vehicle next to her and the last I saw of them he was gripping her hand tightly and looking grim-faced. Then the doors slammed shut and I was left alone on the kerb.
I sat in the gutter for a while after the ambulance had gone. I wasn’t sure what else to do so I just sat, stabbing uselessly at the warm concrete with a broken stick I picked up off the lawn. Mum was gone again. And Dad this time, too. Nan was still inside somewhere. My brother would be home later and after mooching around the house for a while might come and shout through my bedroom door: Where’s Mum and Dad? I tried not to think of what my friends’ families would be doing today.
Not dying, that’s for sure.
As it turns out, our mum wasn’t, either. When Dad rang from the hospital later, it was to tell us that Mum was doing okay. She’d woken up and had stabilised nicely. Talking to me afterwards, Mum said that the closest thing she could equate the whole episode to was an out-of-body experience. Despite being seemingly unconscious, she could, as I suspected at one point, hear a little of what was going on around her. She said she felt as though she had drifted in and out of consciousness and did, for instance, remember the ambulance officers arriving. Mostly, however, everything was a blur and she certainly couldn’t have responded, even if she’d wanted to; her mouth was rigidly shut. The strangest and most frightening part for her, though, was the way in which the whole thing came on. Mum said she knew something was wrong when she suddenly felt no pain for the first time since her operation. Having been in the most terrible pain for more than a week, Mum recalls how a beautiful, serene feeling came over her and how she felt like she was hovering several centimetres above her body.
‘Mark, I think I’m dying,’ she’d said calmly to Dad. ‘I feel like I’m drifting away.’
Dad, practical as ever, had rushed over to her bedside and grabbed her wrist to feel for a pulse.
‘You’re not dying, Julie-Anne,’ he told her firmly. But he’d immediately snatched up the phone and called the ambulance.
After being rushed back to the hospital only four hours after she left, it took another four hours for Mum to regain full consciousness. Her doctors determined that it was one of the post-operation drugs she’d been prescribed which had caused her reaction, as well as all of her other preceding symptoms, and so they immediately removed it from the cocktail of medications she was taking. They were confident, now, that they had her medication right and so they assured us that today’s emergency was unlikely to happen again.
I was relieved, of course; we all were. But I didn’t go to the hospital to visit Mum. I figured she’d be home soon enough. And after that? Well, she’d probably be back in hospital again before too long, I thought bitterly. So if I really wanted to hang out in Manly’s intensive care unit I was sure I’d still have plenty of opportunity.
Back in the gutter, I stood up and kicked the concrete. Twice. Stupid family, stupid Mum, stupid, stupid cancer. I hated them all and I walked around the front yard now, slashing at things with my stick. Stupid tree, slash. Stupid letter box, slash. Stupid, stupid white pillar. Slash, slash, slash. I left a satisfyingly long scratch in the paintwork on the veranda pillar. It felt good to be the one breaking things for once, rather than sitting around waiting for the next blow to land on us. I was so scared and so distraught and so utterly miserable these days that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was scared of Mum’s cancer and I was scared of Mum dying. I was scared that she’d had to have her breasts removed and I was scared witless at having just seen her collapse. There had been some strange delineation in my mind that hospitals were the place for sickness and death but at home we were somehow protected from all that. Now, though, having just seen Mum unconscious in her own bedroom—having seen her look, for all intents and purposes, like a corpse lying there on her bed—it broke down some final barrier in my mind. Nowhere was safe anymore.
Most all of, though, I was scared of sitting alone in the gutter outside our house, with its neatly tended lawn and its wide, welcoming veranda, but with no living people inside. No Mum, no family, no cancer survivors to speak of. And one day, I figured, I wouldn’t be there, either. This stupid cancer would come for me, too, and then our house would finally be empty.
The way I articulated these fears, however, was to beh
ave worse than ever before. Sure, I realise that before Mum got sick I was never a contender for Daughter of the Year. But after her diagnosis I really took things up (or, more correctly, down) a notch.
Mum’s cancer was just the excuse I needed to truly start rebelling. I had no shame exploiting her illness to my advantage and I regularly used it to get out of trouble. Failed to hand in an assignment? My mum has cancer. Busted smoking? My mum has cancer. Absent from school? Drunk again? Rude, argumentative, annoying as all hell? My mum has cancer, my mum has cancer, my mum has cancer!
Whatever my latest offence, I would simply pull my teacher aside and have a quiet word with them. ‘Look,’ I’d say sagely, acting as though I was letting them in on this for their own benefit, ‘I don’t know if the school has explained my situation to you but … my mum has breast cancer. In fact, she’s at home right now recuperating after having had her breast surgically removed. So hopefully that sheds some light on my current behaviour.’ Then the two of us would perform this ludicrous dance: me, the overwrought daughter, only driven to misbehave by fear for my mother; and the teacher, guilt-stricken and paralysed from punishing me out of concern for my welfare.
When in reality we both knew I was just being a shit.
The best example of this, and the one I’m nearly too ashamed to write down, is the day Mum was admitted to hospital to have her mastectomy. On that day, my brother and I were instructed to stay at home with my nan but, unimpressed at being ‘babysat’, I decided I’d rather go and hang out with my friend Lisa at her house. Watching Rage and reading TV Week sounded like a better option than being stuck at home with my nan. Nan, on the other hand, was (understandably) distressed at the time and so any complications—even complications that involved getting her delinquent teenage granddaughter out of her hair for a few hours—were a no-go.
‘I’d rather you just stayed here with me and Andrew,’ she said. ‘At least that way, I know where you are.’ (And ‘what you’re up to’ was the subtext, although she didn’t need to say it.)
Not one to take ‘no’ for an answer, I immediately phoned my parents at the hospital. ‘Nan won’t let me go to Lisa’s house!’ I screamed at my startled parents. The outrage needed no preamble in my mind; the facts, well, they spoke for themselves. ‘It’s like a jail here!’ I shrilled. ‘Nan’s not the boss of me!’ On this, I was indignant.
Now, there’s a right and a wrong time to call your parents with this type of gripe. And the few precious moments your mum and dad have together before your mum is wheeled away to have cancer surgery is surely not the right time. Mum and Dad patiently explained to me that, while they weren’t there, Nan was in charge, but that things would be back to normal soon and I could hang out with Lisa as much as I liked then. I’m sure they were trying to convince themselves as much as me that better days were just around the corner, but all I heard was ‘hang out with Lisa’ and ‘soon’ and ‘as much as I liked’ and so I gave in and grudgingly agreed to wait it out with Nan. We hung up then and I returned to the minutia of my teenage-girl day, while my parents prepared for my mum to have her breast cut off.
It’s amazing to think I could be so insensitive to their trauma, but at the time I never gave it a second thought. And I’m afraid, even now, I couldn’t tell you why, other than to offer my age as some sort of lame and shameful explanation.
And yet it was hard to be a 14-year-old kid with a mum who had cancer. To an outsider seeing me at that age, I was cocky and confident and not intimidated by anything. But I could get embarrassed just like any other teenager and, despite my shows of bravado, in truth I found it mortifying to have to go to school and tell people that my mum had been diagnosed with cancer. I hated their sympathy and their well-meaning arm around my shoulders and their saccharine quotes about strength and perseverance and footsteps in the sand. I was fourteen years old, for godssake, and all I wanted was to be like everyone else in my class. I didn’t want the boy I had a crush on finding out my mum was having her breasts removed (breast cancer was such an embarrassing cancer). I didn’t want to be separated from my friends to ‘take time out in the library’ if I needed it. I didn’t want to go home from school to a mum who was sick and pale and clinically depressed; who couldn’t come to my netball matches; who couldn’t yell at me to stop watching Neighbours and go and do my homework; who couldn’t nag me about my uniform being too short. I wanted my mum, my normal old mum, and not a mum who had cancer all the time.
Looking back, it seems ridiculous that I was ever worried about stuff like having to say ‘breast cancer’ in front of boys, especially when Mum was suffering the way she was. But the universe according to a teenage girl is a strange place and, much as I’d like to, I can’t change how I felt back then, and how I felt was embarrassed.
To make things worse than they already were, the blame for Mum’s cancer lay squarely with me. And for once this wasn’t something dreamed up or exaggerated by my adolescent mind; it was the actual accusation flung at me by distraught family and friends.
‘The reason your mum is in hospital is because of all the stress you put her through!’ was the charge.
‘Your poor mother wouldn’t be going through this now if you hadn’t worried her half to death!’ they’d say.
I guess I can hardly be surprised that this is the conclusion people came to. After all, these same friends and family had watched me torture my parents with my misbehaviour. They’d seen my parents arrive at work with bags under their eyes after staying up all night waiting for me to come home, or they’d listened to my mum pour her heart out over the phone about her out-of-control daughter. So I guess it was only fair that when things got really dark for Mum, and when those closest to her flailed around looking for someone or something to blame, that finger of blame inevitably landed on me.
Some people, I’m sure, only said it in an attempt to shock me into improving my ways. For others, it was a completely unintentional outburst, usually uttered through tears in some dreaded, sterile hospital room as we waited to hear Mum’s latest prognosis, or stood around anxiously for her to be wheeled back to us after surgery, pale and frail and unconscious. Whatever the reason, each time it was uttered I felt like it was my own strange, black tumour eating me up inside. To be the reason for my mother’s cancer was a devastating thing to have to carry around with me and I didn’t realise till much later how deeply it affected me. At the time I mostly brushed it off, denying it to myself and even, on occasion, openly challenging the person who said it. Even as a kid I knew enough about medical science to know that my wagging school didn’t cause a malignant lump in Mum’s breast. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t take at least part of what they said to heart, and it would be years before I could begin to let that go.
I’m not, for one second, saying ‘poor me’. Not at all. And I realise that emotional damage, if you want to call it that, is vastly different to the devastating physical wreckage that I was seeing all around me. It’s just that to understand the person I am today, you need to see how much cancer has shaped me, in so many ways, and from such a young age.
For as long as I can remember, cancer has been part of my life. Some of my earliest memories are infected with cancer, though I couldn’t see it at the time. I remember having baths with my nan when she came to stay with us from New Zealand. Sitting opposite me in the tub, surrounded by a flotilla of cheerful plastic bath toys, Nan had nothing where her breasts should have been, only ribs and skin. She’d undergone a double mastectomy in the late 1970s and early 1980s after being diagnosed with a malignant tumour in her right breast and back then the surgery was pretty primitive: no cosmetic consideration, no prosthetic inserts. As a result her chest was in pretty bad shape, with one side completely flat and the other devastatingly concave. Yet, to me, her barren chest was totally normal; I never realised that a nan might look any other way.
After our bath I used to think it was fun to slip Nan’s rubbery prosthesis down my cotton pyjama top and parade around the hous
e pretending to be Dolly Parton. ‘Look at me; I’m wearing Nan’s boobs!’ I’d say as I posed in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ room.
It was only when I was much older that I realised how bizarre this was and understood just what it means for a family to be surrounded by so much cancer. You mean other kids don’t play dress-ups with prosthetic body parts? Or don’t know how to spell ‘malignant’?
And if my childhood was infected with cancer, then my teenage years were riddled with it. Once, when I was fifteen and after Mum had endured her mastectomy, I convinced myself that I’d found a lump in my own breast. Images of my devastated future flashed through my brain. Spending ‘Work Experience Week’ in oncology but as a patient and not a budding surgeon … wearing a wig to my Year 12 formal after losing my hair to chemo … missing Schoolies Week on the Gold Coast while I was hospitalised for a double mastectomy … It’s laughable, now, to think I might have been harbouring a tumour in what little breast I had inside my training bra, but at the time I was near-hysterical with fear.
Clutching my breast I ran screaming to Mum, who was chopping vegetables in the kitchen (and probably near-sliced a finger off). ‘I’ve found a lump! I’ve found a lump!’ I screamed in panic and slumped dramatically onto the kitchen floorboards. Crying and pounding the timber, I wailed: ‘I’ve got cancer like you! I just know it!’ My adolescence, just like anyone else’s, was a highly emotionally charged time. The only difference was that mine had a nucleus and that nucleus was cancer. It defined me; and in an exclusively negative way.
The Lucky One Page 4