This is Gail

by O'Brien, Gail

  Lying there in the darkness next to Chris, Gail remembered watching him as he strode into his consultation rooms two months before. With his thick black hair swept back and blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves, her heart had fluttered. But now his skin looked grey. She felt an intense presentiment for his responsibilities and the demands on him.

  The next morning — a Thursday — Chris woke to the sound of his alarm clock with the ABC news fanfare. He dragged himself to the bathroom, stood at the basin and placed his palm over his right eye. Gail slipped out of bed and silently leaned against the doorframe. ‘I’ve got this bad headache behind my right eye,’ he muttered to no one in particular. He picked up the packet of Panadol he had used the previous few days, swallowed two pills and got ready for work.

  Chris and Gail had plans to meet Luc, Michèle and other friends for dinner at a restaurant. That evening, Gail sat at the table on a Paddington footpath, waiting for Chris. The surrounding chatter faded as the minutes passed and she grew more anxious. Then, to her relief, she saw him drive past. But he passed the restaurant again and again, failing to find a parking space on the busy surrounding streets. Half an hour later, he finally appeared on foot, looking ashen. His face seemed slightly puffy and his right eye appeared to droop. ‘I ran into the kerb a few times,’ he murmured to her after saying his hellos. ‘I just ran off to the left. It was strange.’ To most at the table, he appeared somewhat rundown but still his usual self. Then he leaned over to Gail and said. ‘I’m going to be sick.’ They excused themselves and walked slowly down the street. Chris gulped deep breaths of air, preparing himself to vomit into a gutter, but nothing came up.

  On the Friday, Chris emerged from his office and asked his assistant for more Panadol. Gail had arrived and the two women glanced at each other as Jenny popped the pills from their casing. They were at the Sydney Cancer Centre, so fortunately there were no patients for Chris to see. But a constant stream of colleagues and staff came to his office needing attention. ‘Next!’ he would call at the end of each meeting.

  In a spare moment, Gail went to the door. Chris stood before his desk, which was piled with a chaotic mountain of paperwork. ‘Look. Look at this,’ he said, then held up his hands and let them fall. He looked beaten, defeated. Gail had never seen him look like this before.

  On the Saturday, Gail woke early and turned off Chris’s alarm clock, something she would never normally do: I’m just going to let him sleep, she thought. She was still thinking he had a migraine or a virus, that he was exhausted and overworked. Perhaps he still hadn’t recovered from jet lag after a recent conference in the USA. She went out to do some shopping and when she arrived home he had left for his Saturday rounds and meetings.

  She rang his mobile.

  ‘Hello?’ he answered in a low, soft voice.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Are you in a meeting?’

  ‘No, I’m just so sick.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Fear swelled inside her. ‘I think you should come home,’ she said. At midday he arrived home and went to bed, telling her he had been forced to cut a meeting short and stop the car on the way home to be sick.

  ‘I’m going to call tomorrow off,’ Gail said, referring to a lunch they had organised at our house. But she realised she didn’t have the phone numbers of the neighbours Chris had invited. She ran up the road and knocked on the door of Joe and Mel Hockey’s house, explaining that they would have to cancel the lunch. She visited other neighbours with the same message: no cause for alarm, but Chris was not well.

  At four o’clock, Gail rang her father for medical advice, as she had often done when the children were small. Still working as a general practitioner, nearing his sixth decade as a doctor, Murray had an encyclopaedic knowledge of medicine and Gail valued his advice over anyone’s. ‘Take him to the hospital,’ Murray said after Gail recounted the symptoms. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking he has a brain tumour. Don’t leave it too late. You’ll never forgive yourself if you do.’

  A brain tumour had not occurred to Gail. She hung up the phone as James came downstairs. It was his year eleven semi-formal and he was all dressed up in a sharp suit and with dyed blonde hair. He had just gone to show his dad how he looked. ‘Jeez, Dad’s not very well, Mum,’ he said. ‘I heard him vomiting.’ Gail ran up the stairs three at a time and found Chris in the bathroom hanging over the toilet.

  Bang bang! The doorknocker slammed downstairs. James opened it and welcomed a horde of excited teenagers. Gail was supposed to drive them to the pre-formal drinks.

  ‘I’m taking you to hospital,’ she said to Chris.

  ‘Call RPA, would you?’ he murmured. She knew the RPA switch number off by heart and asked to be connected with emergency, then handed the phone to Chris. He spoke to the emergency physician. ‘I think I might have meningitis.’

  Gail ran downstairs and greeted the beaming boys and glowing girls. Quickly she started phoning other parents, asking them to take the kids to their celebration.

  Chris, standing near the car, seemed to be panicking. ‘Gail, come on. Come on,’ he said urgently. He sounded desperate, but Gail had no choice but to sort out the house full of teenagers. Finally the phone calls were made and she could drive Chris to the hospital.

  Chris held his head in his hands on the way to the hospital and dragged himself into emergency. The triage sister greeted him, ‘Oh Chris, you must be overtired or something.’ He sat in a chair and Gail sat next to him, rubbing his back. Around them in the emergency waiting room, drunks argued with each other and vagrants wandered in and out. A young man with a dislocated shoulder was called, followed by an elderly woman with a wheezing chest. Chris and Gail sat there for forty minutes, waiting their turn in the hospital where Chris had worked for thirty years. The staff were busy and overworked and saw him as soon as they could. That wait marked a turning point in Chris’s and Gail’s lives. Life would never be the same again.

  While Chris underwent a CT scan, Gail waited in a small cubicle walled in by dividers that didn’t reach the ceiling. She could hear the beeps of machines attached to other people.

  Eventually Chris was wheeled back with the emergency physician not far behind him. ‘Chris, there is something there,’ she said.

  ‘Is it a neoplasm?’ He meant a tumour.

  ‘Yes.’ She paused, then added, ‘I wish I didn’t have to tell you this.’

  ‘Can it be treated?’ asked Gail.

  The neurosurgery registrar answered, ‘Yes, it can be treated, but it’s incurable.’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be all right.’ Chris reached out for Gail’s hand.

  Gail didn’t understand. Nothing made sense. Why was everyone so quiet? Did she understand this correctly? She was already fearful. The world had tilted off its axis.

  Gail called my brothers and me on our mobile phones. When she called me to say that Dad had a brain tumour, the words were barely out of her mouth when I began to sob. ‘No, no, no!’ I cried. With an effort, Gail kept her voice steady, repeating the simple truth. Already in the car, having just finished consecutive shifts at each of my part-time jobs, I arrived at the hospital ten minutes later. Next she called Adam in Goulburn who, with his gentle and steady nature, absorbed her words quietly, asked a few questions about Dad’s physical state and resolved to drive home the following day. James, sitting inside a friend’s house at the semi-formal after-party was excited when he answered. Gail was reluctant to break the news to him in that moment but when he insisted on staying the night at his friend’s house, she had to tell him why he couldn’t. She heard him gasp in shock. He agreed to come home straight away.

  Chris was breathing deeply as the sedative took effect, safe in the hands of his hospital and resigned to the stillness of the moment. But Gail was slipping into shock. Her mind raced to practical details: the mortgage, the practice, leased cars, school fees. Chris’s employees. His patients! So many peop
le were relying on him. No sick leave, redundancy or bonus. No partner or structure to absorb the work or clean up after him. Besides, their wonderful life together seemed to be imploding, but Gail couldn’t understand this yet. Her mouth was dry and she was pacing back and forth, up and down again and again in the small cubicle. ‘Would you like to sit down?’ a sweet nurse asked. Gail couldn’t have done that, even if she had wanted to. Her heart was pounding through her chest and her throat was burning.

  Professor Michael Besser arrived. He had already seen the CT scans and heard the news. He was regarded by many, including Chris, as the best neurosurgeon in the country. He spoke to Chris surgeon-to-surgeon. ‘Chris, it’s bad,’ he said. ‘It’s a glioma. The best is six to twelve months.’

  Gail watched them talk and their voices melted to silence. In that situation some people might have asked a thousand questions, trying to get all the information possible and make sense of it all. But the news was so bad that Gail went the other way. She recoiled from it, withdrawing into herself. She crouched down by the wall and held her head, rocking back and forth.

  Michael knelt beside her, reached out and touched her hand. Gail lifted her head. He looked at her gently, his eyes saying everything his words could not. Gail still remembers this tender, compassionate moment. Michael had talked colleague-to-colleague with Chris. He hadn’t minced words or tried to hide the truth. All he could do for Gail in this moment was touch her hand and look into her eyes. That’s what he did, and for that she is still grateful.

  Chris was put on a drip of steroids to reduce the swelling in his brain and admitted into the intensive care unit. Over the next few days we would discover the answers to the health issues of those past few perplexing weeks. As the cancerous cells inside his brain multiplied rapidly, nearby blood vessels were releasing fluids that supplied an army of white blood cells to the surrounding tissue. The extra fluid was building until the immense pressure inside Chris’s skull made him feel his head was about to explode. Twenty-four hours later he would have been unconscious; had the intracranial pressure reached this level a few weeks earlier Chris might have been alone in a hotel room in Cleveland, Ohio, or on a plane over the Pacific Ocean.

  The pressure extended to his brain stem, which had caused the vomiting, and was centred behind his right eye, pushing it to droop. It caused a large blind spot in the lower left quadrant of his left eye, which explained why he had kept hitting the left-hand gutter that night in Paddington.

  There was a long list of symptoms, and the question might arise: why didn’t Chris suspect sooner that something was so wrong? He was a doctor, wasn’t he? But the dots hadn’t been connected. They just didn’t know what they didn’t know.

  Meeting Despair

  When we arrived home late that first night, Luc, Michèle and Gareth made us something to eat as James and I sat quietly at the kitchen bench. My mother had people around her, yet she felt like she was alone at the bottom of an abyss. She had to decide when and how to spread the news. Chris’s brother, Mike, and sister, Carmel, needed to be told. Gail desperately wanted to call her sister-in-law as Carmel and her husband, Phil, were pillars of family support. But Gail decided to tell them, and others, the following day. Let everyone have one more night in the world as it was, she thought.

  Gail lay alone in bed and at some point crashed into an exhausted sleep. At about six the next morning, she blinked open her eyes and ever so briefly forgot about the events of the night before. She turned her head and saw the place where Chris should have been and everything flooded back. Instead of waking from a nightmare, she woke into one.

  While James and I slept, Gail got up and padded downstairs. Luc was in the kitchen unpacking the dishwasher. He told her that he planned to drive to Goulburn to bring Adam home. Gail was grateful that Luc and Michèle were there. She roused our old dog and took him out for a walk. Woolwich Road was the same as ever on this Sunday morning, one of spring’s final flourishes before summer crowded it out. The day was ready to sparkle as the sun quickly rose into the sky with the background sound of birds singing. The occasional car passed. ‘Good morning!’ a neighbour called out. Gail looked around at the scene which was so familiar yet somehow changed. She was dressed in light clothes but felt as though a lead cloak was hanging over her shoulders. She trudged along, concentrating on the concrete and placing one foot in front of the other.

  When she arrived home she phoned Carmel and gave her the news, saying she hadn’t called earlier because she hadn’t wanted to give Carmel and Phil a sleepless night. Gail then called her parents and some close friends.

  Next, she looked up the number of their financial adviser, Noelene Watson, a terrier-like woman who could always be relied upon for incisive advice. Noelene’s bluntness had matched Chris’s five years before when she had told Gail and Chris that they needed to take out risk insurance. ‘Well, how much is that going to cost?’ Chris had asked, while Gail cringed. He could be embarrassingly rude at times, she thought. But Noelene hadn’t backed off. ‘Chris. This is what you need. If something happens to you, what’s Gail going to do? How are the kids going to stay in their schools and you all stay in this house?’ Chris had given in; Gail would file the insurance bills away before he saw them so he wouldn’t change his mind. One evening she accidentally left an invoice on the kitchen bench and he spotted it. ‘Look at this! I’m out there working like a slave so you can all live like millionaires when I’m dead and gone. I’m going to call Noelene tomorrow.’ Mum had looked at me and rolled her eyes; it was difficult to tell whether or not he was joking. Luckily, he hadn’t made that call. Now it already seemed that the advice had been prescient. Gail spoke to Noelene, who immediately said that she would look into their financial options and insurance entitlements.

  By this time, James and I had already returned to Dad’s bedside at RPA. Gail got changed and followed. When she walked into the neurosurgical intensive care ward, Chris was sitting up in bed. The intravenous steroids had acted swiftly, he had slept soundly and woken refreshed and headache-free. He was wearing a hospital gown but looked anything but sick. His muscular legs were stretched out and crossed over one another. His strong arms and hands were gesticulating as he talked on his mobile phone. He had sent a group text message to dozens of people: ‘I’ve been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour and will have surgery soon. I expect to do well and will keep you informed. Cheers, Chris.’ The message had prompted concerned phone calls and texts, which he was now fielding.

  His black hair was as rich as ever; he had good colour in his face. He seemed fine! Not unwell at all. Gail nestled into his neck, feeling his resonant voice reverberate through his throat. She ran her hands through his hair and looked at him in disbelief. He was the same. Surely there had been some mistake.

  When more family and friends began to arrive and crowded around the bed, Gail stood back and watched. Carmel, ever attentive to people around her and family needs, put her hand on Gail’s shoulder. ‘Let’s go and get a coffee.’ They climbed the stairs in RPA’s vast atrium that was flooded with daylight, towards the hospital’s Jacaranda Café. They chose a table outside amidst a wash of purple flowers. Carmel went to the counter to order and Gail sat alone for a minute. She felt the black cloak weigh her down and bent her head, covered her face with her hands and broke down.

  Carmel came and sat beside her.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ Gail said. ‘I can’t. I can’t do this.’

  Carmel rubbed her back. She did not need to ask what my mother meant. But years later I did.

  ‘To watch him die,’ my mother told me. ‘I could not watch him die.’

  The next day Chris came home. Our house was being flooded with flowers and cards and there were constant phone calls and emails. The perfume of oriental lilies enveloped the place. There were so many fruit baskets that we had fruit flies. Guillaume Brahimi visited with a box from Guillaume at Bennelong, his wonderful Opera House restaurant. Guillaume had become a dear frien
d of Chris’s since being recruited onto the board of the Sydney Cancer Centre Foundation. Big and burly with a sweet temperament and playful smile, Guillaume was clearly as fond of Chris as Chris was of him. After Dad’s diagnosis I would hear him say at the end of phone conversations with Gui, ‘I love you too, mate.’

  ‘All you ’ave to do is drop these into boiling water,’ Guillaume said, standing at our kitchen bench and holding up duck and jus in a sealed plastic bag. ‘And here is some of my Paris mash, which just needs reheating.’ Then he presented us with a chocolate tart as big as a bicycle wheel and two bottles of wine — a 1986 Échezeaux from Burgundy and an ’82 Château Haut-Brion from Bordeaux. Guillaume has said that sitting down together and breaking bread as a family is a nourishing tonic, especially in a time of crisis. He was right. Eating that buttery mashed potato and succulent duck (it was the best meal I’ve ever cooked), we basked in each other’s company and took more pleasure than ever in the immediate moment.

  Friends held down the fort, shopping, cooking, running errands, relieving Gail to some extent of the ‘burdensome sea anchor of domestic duties’, as Chris once said. The heavy knocker on the front door echoed through the hallway repeatedly, ushering in more family and friends, who stayed and surrounded us.

  Chris responded so well to the steroids that it was hard to believe how sick he had been. He and Gail went back to RPA for MRI and PET scans. Again, Gail choked up as she watched Chris’s body slide unresisting into the huge metallic mouth of the machine. She left for the chemist to pick up medication to stop stomach ulceration and bleeding from the oral steroids Chris was taking. As she walked up Missenden Road, she spotted Michael Besser coming towards her. This is it, she thought. He’s going to tell me it will all be all right. That there’s no reason to cry. That it’s not as bad as we thought.