Margaret Innes

New Worlds: Reading, Writing and the Imagination

Category Archives: Women writers


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5 Oncologists can be persuasive.

When I saw my surgeon for my follow up appointment after surgery, he was obviously pleased with how the operation had gone. The incisions were healing well, the margins around the tumour were all very clear. He smiled at me. ‘You won’t need chemo,’ he said. The moral of this story is, don’t take your oncological advice from your surgeon. However skilled they are, this is not their area of expertise. The oncologists I saw had a very different opinion.

I took that false confidence into my first meeting with the radiation oncologist. Radiation I knew to expect; three weeks of it instead of four because the margins were clear. We began, as usual, with education and detail. The registrar took all my facts again, I received another thick sheaf of paper to add to what I had begun to call my portable filing cabinet, a thankfully discreet bag from Bosom Buddies. Then the oncologist herself appeared, a young woman with long fair hair.

Everyone brings a demeanour with them when they walk into a room; they’re at ease, they’re ill at ease, they’re nervous, they’re self-possessed. Her first glance at me was serious. She took a seat and began to explain to me they had received the pathology results for the tumour. It had not reached my lymph nodes but had been active, its growth pattern one that would have seen it move out into the rest of my body. They had removed it but what else might be left behind that they couldn’t see or test for?  ‘It’s fifty-fifty whether you need chemotherapy or not. You’ll need to speak to the medical oncologist,’ she said. Her words were measured but her demeanour suggested she saw this as troubling.

I went home thinking again of the front cover of Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen and its drawing of a woman spectacularly taking a fall.

The medical oncologist was the same one I had consulted last time. I remembered her as a no-nonsense woman who was a stylish dresser. This being the time of Covid, we had a zoom session. Between her and her registrar, they laid out the situation. The tumour was unusual, an unexpected combination of pathologies. They could not tell if there were still microscopic cancer cells present. There might be, there might not be, there was no test to tell. If there were, they could reappear some years down the track as what is called metastasised distant breast cancer. ‘If they do, we don’t have a cure for that,’ said the oncologist. It would four sessions on the second tier of chemotherapy drugs. Horrible but by no means the worst possibility.

They spoke of it as being my decision, laid out the facts and the possibilities objectively but I could read the room; they saw the possibilities as troubling. I was reminded of both the sonologist and the radiologist I spoke of in my first blog. Without tests, they knew accurately what they were looking at pretty much as soon as they saw it. That kind of knowledge can only be gained by experience. To my certain knowledge, my medical oncologist is a very experienced doctor.

It is an odd thing, a precautionary gamble. Distant breast cancer might still happen even with chemo, it might not happen even if I do not have chemo. The percentages of those chances are low but they are possible. I write thinking of a line of William Blake’s poetry, ‘What is the price of experience?’ He goes on to write, ‘It is bought with the price/ Of all that a man hath.’  I couldn’t help but think that all the years of experience the medical professionals I consulted had collected between them meant they knew almost intuitively what they were looking at. I brought my own judgement to the decision. I said I would go ahead with chemotherapy, as another step along the way.


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A Diary of Close Encounters of the Medical Kind

2 Fellow Travellers

Once diagnosed with breast cancer, I started to think how many people I had known in my life who had had cancer, most especially those who had died. Among those lost, an old, old and dear male friend from university days, another, a woman I had known since I was sixteen, lately the former husband of a close friend. They would always come to watch the Boxing Day cricket test on television with us and recover from the day before. The close friend still does. There are others I have only heard about. People I knew only as acquaintances or those reported in the media, loved actors and musicians, writers and artists, sportspeople. Their memory brings into my mind a line from The Wasteland: I had not thought Death had undone so many.

Others I know have been treated successfully. Too many women of my age who have had breast cancer but all of whom have gone back to the usual business of their lives, work and family, study and one day if ever they can, travel. For two of my friends, the treatment has been fierce, and for one, an on-going part of her life. My friend whose treatment is on-going was originally diagnosed with melanoma, a reoccurring issue for her during her adult life though one that’s been at bay for five years now. Her doctors have a watching brief: her treatment includes regular scans, exercise, counselling. After I’d come home with my sheaf of referrals, I spoke to this friend about what each of them might mean. ‘PET scans are a breeze,’ she said. ‘You can snooze if you want. MRI’s are a pain. They are so noisy.’ Every person I know who has had an MRI scan says this same thing. When I went for mine, the technician handed me a set of headphones and asked if I wanted classical music or easy listening. I asked for classical but I might as well have had Death Metal at full volume once the sound of the MRI cut in, like jack hammers in my ears.

The second friend of mine whose treatment was fierce had twelve sessions of brutal chemotherapy for deeply serious cancer. She came through it all though when I saw her next perhaps she had lost half her body weight. I am scheduled only for three and to my second friend and her twelve, as the Kid says, I dips me lid. I think how much a part of life cancer and its treatments can become, how it can invade not just your body but your waking hours, whatever you would ordinarily do with your time. It’s a menacing doppelganger shadowing you wherever you are and if you let it, it will try to consume your body and your life. It’s a fight with death but as my two friends showed us all, fight hard and we can win ourselves some extra time.


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Ladies in Black or What’s your subject?

 

The Ladies in Black in the film of the same name take their places behind the counters of Goode’s Department store in the summer of 1959 when Australia is already changing under the arrival of Europeans displaced by war and a loosening of the white Australia policy. It’s a coming of age drama, where the richness European migration is adding to the nation is contrasted against a telling critique of male-female relations at the time. Throughout the film Sydney looks wonderful, soaked in the summer sun, a harbour minus the Opera House, dominated by the Bridge.

Among the ladies is Lisa, employed for the season in her ugly black dress, having just finished her Leaving Certificate and being in that hiatus between school and some other life. At home in all its suburban dullness, Lisa is Lesley, constrained by her parents and chanting one of William Blake’s Songs of Experience, Tyger, Tyger to herself in bed. Becoming Lisa elsewhere, and especially under the wing of Magda, once a Slovenian refugee and now presiding over Goode’s enchanted realm of Model Gowns, she’s an emerging butterfly, learning who she is, what she can do, what she could wear if she had the means.

When I went to see Ladies in Black, I expected to be entertained. I didn’t expect to be moved but watching Angourie Rice play Lisa/Lesley, I was moved, for the sense of hope and possibility she brought to the role. Noni Hazlehurst, perfect as Miss Cartwright, Lisa’s supervisor, with tears in her eyes tells Lisa she’s a clever girl, the most wonderful thing in all creation. With its light touch, Ladies in Black convinces that it is possible for Lisa to do extraordinary things.

But is that touch too light? Some critics have thought so. The film pretty much stays with the book, The Women in Black (Text) by Madeleine St John, first published in 1993. Stefan, Magda’s husband, a Hungarian, says to Lisa when she comes to lunch with them one day that she should read Jane Austen’s Emma, Austen (he says) being as great a novelist as Tolstoy. And like Emma, both the novel and the film handle the bleakness of the personal lives and the marriages of the women who work at Goodes with a deceptive lightness of touch.

It’s not only about the narrowness of life in Australia at the time and its often stifling, shallow rigidity. It’s Patty William’s husband running in terror, unable to cope emotionally after unintentionally falling into good sex with his wife. There’s the tedium of Fay and her friend, Myra’s dates talking cricket to each other while they ignore both women, other than for Fay’s date to put his hand on her thigh. And Lisa’s father off to spend hours at the pub, leaving his wife and daughter behind to get his dinner. There’s no companionship here, no conversation or good humour between equals such as we see between Magda and Stefan and their friend, Rudi.

There is a darkness behind the book and its lightness. Trapped in a marriage as bleak and loveless as any in the film, subjected to shock treatment and medicated, Madeleine St John’s mother, Sylvette committed suicide when Madeleine was twelve in 1954. Her father, Edward St John’s actions in response only added to his two daughters’ trauma, a trauma which stayed with Madeleine all her life. As Lucy Sussex puts it in her review of Helen Trinca’s biography of Madeleine (also Text):

“The mores of the time dictated that a difficult woman, one who did not comply, was to be medicated into passivity. The alternatives – divorce or a reconceiving of gender relations – were simply unthinkable. Small wonder the next generation of women – the Madeleines and the Germaines – grew up furious, if not actual furies.”  https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/keeping-the-darkness-at-bay/

How does a writer choose what to write about? With the darkest of tragedies in the bedrock of Madeleine St John’s emotional life, she wrote, with perfectly balanced literary skill, a book that dealt with her subject – the loneliness and harshness of empty marriages, how destructive they are – with wit, sharp humour and hope. The deftness of Madeleine’s work rests on the unseen darkness in her sensibility, much like subtle shadows in a painting give greater contrast to the representation of light. The very thing that is out of the picture, the reality not invoked in the text, the bleakness of her mother’s life and death, and Madeleine’s own grief, is its actual strength. Unspoken, it provides the underlying emotional chemistry which makes her writing, with all its apparent lightness, come alive.