Chemotherapy | Margaret Innes

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.

1 Diagnosis

It began with the ultrasound sonographer saying, ‘I’ll just get the radiologist.’ I had been diagnosed with breast cancer once before, ten years ago. Ever since I have had yearly mammograms and ultrasounds. I had put off last year’s due to Covid-19, thinking it had been a decade, did I really need to worry? My doctor, on the cusp of her last day before she retired, sent me a new referral marked ‘Utmost urgency.’ It was the old procedure, cold jell and the press of the transducer on my skin while I looked at shifting monochrome images on the screen thinking, this is me reduced to those sea-like waves. Before I was released to go home on that day, I had learned from the radiologist that one of those images was almost certainly cancerous, a diagnosis confirmed by the pathology results. Even before my appointment with the surgeon, I was given a barrage of referrals for other tests I had to have. I was on a medical treadmill and there was nothing to do but see it to the end.

Later when the same radiologist was preparing me for surgery, he said to the sonographer ‘This was a good pick.’ Later again, discharged from hospital and discussing the pathology reports with the oncologists, radiation and medical, I learned how good. A just in time good pick of an aggressive tumour about to get into my lymph nodes. The medical oncologist made it clear it would be foolish if I did not have chemotherapy whether I liked it or not. My partner berated me on the way home: ‘Don’t you ever let another test slip by like that again!’

I remember thinking how bright everything looked on that journey home, how vibrant the trees and the sky, how brilliantly white the feathers of the cockatoos. How sweet things immediately within your grasp become when you come face to face with understanding there is only a breath between life and death, that life is a balancing act on a tightrope, and I could easily have slipped another way altogether. I am still not sure I am securely balanced on it.

During my last bout I bought a graphic novel account of breast cancer treatment called Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto. On the front cover is a woman spectacularly taking a fall. That is how it feels. So, I have decided to keep a diary and post it on my blog. Chemo this Friday and I have a pile of information on side effects to prepare me. It is a matter of charting where each step takes me from now on, who I meet there and the outcome, while still thinking there is nothing like fate to trip you up.