Eating the Underworld

by Doris Brett

  In the morning, I look back on my dream with mixed feelings. The on track part sounds good. But the steep upwards angle of the last stretch of track reminds me unpleasantly of the numbers that continue to rise. And it doesn’t take Einstein to see the hurt woman and the psychologist as two aspects of my grappling with this experience. The other thing—and this is what I feel most uneasy about—is the fact that all of the rest of my group travelled safely and comfortably over the water. I was separated out from them, to take the lengthy, difficult underground route. In a group with a ninety-five percent cure rate, most of them will take the safe, short journey to their goal. Am I going to be one of that tiny minority who doesn’t?

  This morning, the results are due to come in. The hour’s wait to hear them is agony. Amantha and I opt for retail therapy as a way of distracting us from the phone. We get to the mall, but discover that it’s no protection from the driving anxiety. We end up finding a phone booth and ringing, even though we know it will be too early. It is. The results aren’t in yet and we head back home, stretched tight with tension. At home, we wait another, interminable half hour and ring once more. The results are in. The Ca125 has gone up again.

  Once again, it has not doubled, but it has still risen. Greg rings me. ‘It’s time to do something,’ he says. ‘I’ll arrange a CT scan for you and organise a laparoscopy for next week.’ He sounds authoritative, in take-charge mode. It feels so good to hear this decisiveness. I realise that it’s what I’ve wanted. Someone to say, ‘Enough of this. No more waiting. This is what we’re going to do.’

  It’s comforting too, to have a doctor who knows and cares about me. To whom I don’t have to introduce myself. Because of the book we are writing, Greg has been on the point of referring me to someone else. I shiver at the thought of going through this time of vulnerability and fear with a stranger.

  Greg doesn’t expect the CT scan to show up anything. It will only pick up tumours above a certain size. When ovarian cancer returns, it is usually as grain-sized pellets scattered throughout the abdomen and pelvis like a pot full of cooked rice that’s been thrown, splat, against a wall. The surgeon can’t remove it all. Chemotherapy is the recommended option.

  I’m scared and angry, in a way that I wasn’t the first time. After all my feeling of being blessed and lucky back then, it’s like a bad joke to find that I’m one of the five percent who recur. It’s not fair, I think—an upset, bewildered child, stamping on the floor—to have been given a reprieve and then have it taken away. I’m the only one of my friends who has had cancer. I envy them their unthinking health. I want mine!

  The night before the CT scan, I have a short but vivid dream. I am very upset. I have been pushed out of my upstairs study and forced to work downstairs at an old-fashioned school desk in the corridor. It isn’t very comfortable. I open the lid of the desk and discover, to my dismay, four old banana skins. I am sure that I had cleared them out some time ago. Someone must have put them back in. I take them out, throw them away and clean the desk up again.

  The dream seems ominous. The obvious parallels are my surgery of two years ago, where I was ‘opened up’ to have some tumour cleared out. Is it telling me that the tumour has come back and needs to be cleared away once more?

  I arrive for the CT scan to discover a large jugful of chilled, foul-tasting raspberry cordial waiting for me. Mixed into it is a substance which will help highlight my internal features to the scanning eye of the CT machine.

  I drink glass after glass as quickly as I can. I start shivering uncontrollably. I assume it is fear and marvel at how dramatic its physical manifestation is—until Martin informs me that anyone who downed so much chilled liquid so quickly would also start shivering.

  There are just two glasses to go. They’ve run out of the raspberry cordial. If I thought the cordial tasted foul, I am about to discover what foul really tastes like. I sit, waiting to be called in. Eventually, the call comes and I am part of the hospital process again—anonymous, dressed in a thin paper gown, lying on a table with someone trying to find my veins.

  Apart from the vein-finding experience, which occurs midway through the scan, the procedure is painless. The worst pain comes at the end—the process is over, you are still on the couch and the radiologists are conferring. For a very long time. As you lie there, you are sure that the longer they take, the more likely it is that they’ve seen something suspicious.

  After I’m dressed, the radiologist calls me in to see him. Greg, bless him, has told him to be open with me about what he sees. There are two things they are concerned about, the radiologist says. They’re very worried about a mass on the liver.

  The liver, the liver, I think frantically. A mass on the liver is really bad. Then I remember that when Greg operated on me, he saw an haemangioma on my liver—a benign clumping of blood cells that would show up as a mass. I tell the radiologist and we smile with relief. I have almost forgotten that he said there are two things he is worried about. The second thing is a four centimetre mass in my right pelvis.

  Greg is more optimistic. ‘It’s exactly where I operated,’ he says. It might just be scar tissue. Or it might not. He sends me for an emergency ultrasound to see if that adds to our information.

  The cold gel of the ultrasound experience reminds me of that first time. It doesn’t seem right to be back doing it again. I’d become so cocksure, thinking of myself as cured. I know enough now to warn the ultrasound technician about the haemangioma. She sees that on the screen. She can also see the mysterious other mass. No new information though. That’s going to have to wait until surgery.

  I’m booked in for the laparoscopy next Thursday. Greg says it will probably be a day procedure, perhaps an overnighter, depending on how it goes. Is there any chance that he will be doing a laparotomy, the much larger operation where the abdomen is opened right up? I ask. No, he says. There’s no point. If it’s not a recurrence, then it’s just subjecting you to major surgery that you don’t need. If it is a recurrence, then surgery’s not likely to help much and it will just make you weaker for the chemotherapy.

  Four A.M.

  Is when you wake

  into that strange country,

  realising only now

  how it has been with you

  all of the time, truly

  sailing below you, quietly,

  the way a ship slides

  over its own reflection.

  And how all of the days

  have been counted backwards

  from that place

  where moving away

  is only moving towards them.

  And how in the night

  there is suddenly a moment

  when you wake, weightless

  just as you did as a child

  in that strange instant

  at the top of a swing

  where you lived motionless

  just for that second

  belonging to neither earth

  nor sky and you wondered

  whether you would come down

  and why.

  Taking the X-Rays to Hospital

  You have come out of an ordinary morning,

  taken your beating blood with you,

  picked up your heart

  from the photography shop

  where the camera stole it

  while it was otherwise engaged,

  floating on a long bed in a blank room.

  The grey film slides in its paper,

  slick as a big baby

  the delivering doctor will soon

  hold up to light.

  Black spaces, white spaces,

  how much for a life to slip into?

  You park outside. Fridays

  the car-park is full

  of nesting engines, radiant,

  swelling the slow, thick air.

  Only a few steps to go

  and the brown envelope,

  which has been resting so quietly

  suddenly comes to life.
/>   ‘Where are we going?’, it says,

  high, plaintive—

  the voice of an oddly familiar child.

  It is shaking now, rattling its cage of fingers.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  It wants to know. It wants to know

  everything. What happened in the room

  with the white walls, where the men hid

  and the camera moved

  and spoke and knew its name.

  It wants to go back

  it wants to reclaim the body

  the flash lit and took from it forever.

  It wants to—

  It wants to go home.

  You are at the pass now,

  five more steps

  to where the hospital doors

  hiss and slide.

  The envelope is still sobbing and crying,

  and what else can you do

  but step inside.

  Being Admitted

  When you enter, there is the sudden shift

  as if glass had melted

  and you could just move through it.

  On the other side everything looks the same.

  McHale’s Navy plays to the TV screen,

  over and over the boats line up and fail,

  light has taken twenty years to get here.

  People curve on couches,

  wander in halls. The loudspeaker’s

  blowing out souls, each one a name

  in a perfect floating bubble.

  They waver like tentative bows, like curtain

  calls. Outside the door is a single tree,

  already strange—you see now

  you are inside the TV—

  there’s someone’s lounge

  on the right side of reality,

  children are playing, the table’s set for tea,

  a dog snores gently by the lapping fireside

  and even if you wave they will never see.

  You are going further away now,

  it is your name they are calling

  up the stairs, four flights closer to heaven

  where the pavement fades

  like a patient face in a train exiting stations.

  Light hits the nurse by my side,

  he does not blink even though his hair

  is on fire, he goes on laying out clothes.

  And I am suddenly reminded

  of the airport where the brown hillsides

  of San Francisco line up nose to nose

  and the planes flash light

  that is lifting us higher and higher.

  Where the Captain’s a friendly uncle

  sending us postcards from the other side

  of eternity wishing us happy days

  and reminding us please to stay

  seated and how in the end

  no-one ever explained what strange

  hand has lifted the earth away.

  ‘ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU won’t need to do a laparotomy?’ I ask Greg. I am remembering my dream of lifting the desk lid and clearing out banana skins. That sounds like a laparotomy to me. Greg shakes his head firmly. He is positive I won’t need a laparotomy. I toy with the idea of saying, ‘I had a dream about an old school desk and some banana skins and I think you should change your operating technique,’ but decide against it.

  That night, in the context of days of intense anxiety and fear, I have the most vivid and wonderful dream of my life.

  I am in a farmhouse in Kansas, in the heartland of America. The farmhouse is old and the paint is crumbling, but it is simple and real and filled with unpretentious love. I am talking to some visitors to the farm. ‘I came here two years ago to recuperate from my first illness,’ I tell them, ‘and I am here for my second convalescence.’

  When I first came, the farmer and his wife were strangers, but we have grown to love each other. Someone tells me that the mail has arrived. I go around the long verandah, wondering vaguely if there will be any mail for me, but also realising that people won’t know where I am, to send it to me. There is a drizzly rain falling and I don’t have any mail, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in this wonderful place. Everything is just as it is supposed to be. It is the home of my heart. My true home. I am absolutely in the right place.

  I wake from the dream with a feeling of deep serenity. I’m aware that the Kansas setting is Dorothy’s Kansas, from the Wizard of Oz and that somehow it is important that this place is in the heart of the country, in its geographical centre. I feel better than I’ve felt for months. I don’t believe the dream is saying that I am not having a recurrence. On the contrary, I am at the farm for recuperation from a second bout of illness. But I wake with the strongest sense that whatever happens to me is supposed to happen. This sense of ‘rightness’ is absolute and profound. I feel cradled by the dream.

  The images of the farmhouse remain intensely vivid even after I have thoroughly woken. A friend and I are going to see a Russell Drysdale exhibition. I am floating in the aftermath of the dream and enjoying being with Eve, but am totally disconcerted by the painted depiction of Australian country scenes. I keep turning away, wanting to block out the paintings. The canvas images are getting in the way of my dream-scene and I don’t want to lose it.

  It is an extraordinary dream, not just for its gifts of stillness and peace. It will reach out into the future and touch me in the strangest and most marvellous way.

  It is the day before the laparoscopy is scheduled. I ring Greg’s rooms to find out whether I need to do any bowel prepping. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Because it’s only a laparoscopy and not major abdominal surgery, you don’t need it.’ I feel uneasy. I keep remembering my dream of the desk and banana skins. What if Greg finds that he does need to perform a laparotomy and my bowel hasn’t been cleaned out? I know that surgery with unprepped bowels can be dangerous, increasing the risk of infection and wound breakdown.

  I decide on a DIY approach. I will bowel-prep myself. The CT scan has been very helpful here. The gallons of liquid that I drank gave me galloping diarrhoea. I take myself off food for the remaining day before surgery.

  Time to make myself an hypnotic tape again for surgery. It’s a difficult one to make, given my sense of uncertainty as to which surgical procedure will actually be taking place and what the findings will be. As before, I think wistfully of how nice it would be to have someone do it for me. I want to regress and be taken care of, not have to do it myself. It’s hard to work out the right combination of suggestions and I go through five versions before I’m satisfied. At this point, I realise that it’s just as well I’m doing it for myself. If I’d been getting someone else to make the tape, I wouldn’t have had to worry about facing surgery. They would have strangled me in frustration somewhere around the third attempt.

  It is a strange feeling to be journeying to hospital again. I have flashbacks of my first trip, which ended with such a sense of luck and blessings. This one feels much more ominous. The hospital looks at once both familiar and new. It has been refurbished, the couches rearranged, moving towards office-block chic. I am reminded of those old spy spoofs, like Get Smart, where the bland exterior offices conceal a far more sinister interior—the real business of the building.

  I’m in my hospital room again. As usual, feeling out of place in civilian clothes, but silly to be donning a nightie in daylight when I’m feeling perfectly well. Eventually, I opt for silly and get into bed and wait. When the nurse comes in to check on me, I ask whether a bowel prep has been organised. No, she says, it hasn’t been requested. I ask whether she can ring the operating theatre and check with Greg. She looks at me quizzically. Clearly she thinks I am some sort of enema freak, but she complies. The answer comes back, no. Oh well, I tried, I think.

  I’m due in surgery at one. The idea is that the short, easy operations are listed first, with the longer more complex ones kept for later. I’m scheduled to be in and out of surgery in twenty minutes. That’s the plan, anyway.

  The pla
n, however, has other ideas. Greg begins with the laparoscopy. He makes the first small incision and inserts the slender tube containing the fibre optics which allow him to view the interior of my abdomen. Everything looks fine. He makes a second small incision on the other side of my abdomen and repeats the procedure. Everything looks fine. Then he makes the last incision. And suddenly the view is not fine. He can see a four centimetre mass of tumour on my bowel at exactly the place where my ovary would have been.

  So, it is laparotomy time. He not only has to perform major abdominal surgery, he has to perform bowel surgery on what he thinks is an unprepped bowel. He is not a happy surgeon. Luckily though, my amateur bowel-prepping has worked and my bowel is, to his profound relief, in a state that Mr. Sheen would be proud of.

  Four hours later, in the recovery room, I surface to groggy semi-consciousness. Greg is telling me what he found in surgery. I am preoccupied with trying, unsuccessfully, to make my eyes stay open. Why is he telling me all this? I think rather irritably. Can’t he see I’m still asleep? I feel vaguely indignant, like a person who’s had their Sunday morning lie-in interrupted by an overzealous caller. I gather threads of information from Greg’s speech—he found a tumour and removed it. Then I fall straight back into sleep.

  I wake to the familiarity of a morphine drip. Martin is sitting next to my bed. He fills me in on what’s happened. Apart from the tumour that Greg removed, there seemed to be no other spread. As usual, of course, we have to wait for pathology to confirm this. Greg’s taken out a section of my bowel. Martin reports to me that luckily Greg didn’t need to do a colostomy. This last bit definitely wakes me up. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could surface with a colostomy.