The Lucky One

by Krystal Barter

  ‘I hate you, Mum!’ I screamed through the keyhole of the bathroom door.

  There was no response from inside, just the steady sound of running water. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, it hammered onto the tiles. She was washing my fury down the plughole.

  ‘I said I hate you!’ I upped the volume, and then kicked the door for good measure. Still nothing. She had probably pulled her shower cap over her ears and shoved her head directly under the shower spray so the sound of the water drumming against the plastic was amplified enough to drown out my voice. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done it before.

  ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ I tried again. ‘If I want to go to Lisa’s house, you can’t stop me!’

  And yet there I was (fully clothed and able to walk outside at will) standing at the bathroom door arguing about it, while Mum (naked and unable to go anywhere fast) showered inside. Somehow it made sense in my teenage mind. I aimed another kick at the door, right in the bifold where it was weakest, when the phone in the kitchen started to ring.

  ‘Leave it! It’s for me!’ Mum yelled loudly and the water in the shower stopped abruptly.

  She could hear the phone? She was ignoring me! I was incensed.

  ‘Muuuum!’ I squealed in frustration, punctuating it by stamping my foot. Then I debated with myself, briefly, whether or not to race her for the ringing phone.

  ‘I said leave it!’ she called out again and I paused. If I waited just a few more seconds, Mum would emerge from the bathroom, dripping wet, and I could step towards the kitchen, neatly blocking her path, and then scoop the phone out of the cradle right in front of her face. Maximum. Aggravation. Achieved. The phone kept ringing.

  Of course, then I’d get stuck speaking to one of her friends (who loved a chat) and I wasn’t sure it was worth the pain.

  ‘Leave it!’ she yelled once more. The bathroom door snapped open and Mum dashed across the floorboards to where the phone was still crying out from the wall beside the kitchen doorway. ‘Hi, it’s me,’ she said into the receiver, curling the cord absently around her finger as she spoke. She was expecting one of her friends to be on the line.

  ‘Oh!’ She untangled her finger. ‘Yes, this is Julie speaking.’ A change of tone now: more professional, less Mum.

  I hung around in the hallway, not especially curious to see who was on the phone but not done with our argument, either. Suddenly Mum buckled, slumping to the floor like she’d been taken out by a sniper.

  ‘No!’ she screamed in horror. ‘No! No! Oh, my god! No!’

  I froze in the hallway, stricken. Behind me, somewhere, I heard a door fly open and my nan must have emerged from the bedroom that she always stayed in while she holidayed with us from her home in New Zealand.

  ‘No!’ Mum screamed again and she was crying now, too, as she sat in a crumpled heap in the kitchen doorway, her head against the doorframe, one leg straight out in front of her, the other bent up underneath. Her hair was still dripping from the shower.

  What the hell was going on?

  Nan pushed past me and stumbled towards the kitchen, where she dropped to her knees and held Mum’s wet head against her chest, rocking her back and forth while Mum continued to sob and sob. It would have looked comical in any other situation: my mum, who’s so tall, being cradled by my nan; the two of them sprawled on the floorboards in a tangle of phone cord and bath towel, a flash of white flesh from Mum’s exposed thigh. But in my memory the image is simply macabre. As I was about to find out, it was one cancer victim nursing another down the same path.

  I can still remember the smell of Mum’s shampoo that day. It was apple, which is galling when I think about it. Why should apple—fresh, sweet apple—be the smell that I associate with cancer? It should be something rotten or putrid or decaying. Still, the smell of synthetic apple will always take me back to that day when we learned Mum had cancer, just like so many others in our family. We pumped them out, alright: cancer victim after cancer victim, our family produced them with factory-like precision. For as far back as we have information, breast cancer has cursed our family (with the occasional case of ovarian or other cancers, too). At last count, 25 women in my immediate family have suffered breast cancer to some extent, and what’s more, the age of diagnosis is getting younger in each new generation. Ours is a story of hereditary cancer so frighteningly ferocious that no single generation of my family is safe. It’s a curse that won’t stop.

  So it’s hardly surprising that Nan claims she knew straight away that Mum’s phone call that day was one of a breast cancer diagnosis. After all, what other bad news would there be in our family? The rest of us, though, had no idea what was happening at the time. I don’t know how long I stood sentry in the hallway that day; a hallway I’d skipped through a thousand times as a child and where I’d dragged my feet on the way out the door to school and where I’d chased my younger brother, Andrew, even though we weren’t supposed to run in the house. Now, all those memories had been replaced and the hallway of our family home became the place where I saw Mum’s life—all our lives—change forever. And right after I told Mum I hated her.

  On the floor, however, Mum was still screaming and tears streamed down her face. Strangely enough for a family like ours, this was all so horribly unexpected. You see, at the time when Mum received her diagnosis we didn’t know anything about BRCA1 (or breast cancer susceptibility gene 1), which is the genetic fault plaguing our family. BRCA1 is part of a class of genes known as tumour suppressors and mutations in this gene (and the BRCA2 gene) have been linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. But back then genetic testing wasn’t readily available and the test for our particular gene didn’t even exist. All we knew was that a week earlier Mum had gone in for a routine lumpectomy, a common procedure used to remove a small lump on one of her breasts. It was no big deal, especially not to a teenage girl living in her alternate universe of parties and boys and sneaking out for cigarettes. Mum had been through nine or ten lumpectomies for various lumps and bumps in her breasts over the past decade, so we were hardly keeping a family vigil by the phone to hear the results of this latest test. We simply expected someone from the surgery to notify us with another standard, ‘No; nothing to worry about,’ and then we could all forget about it until the next time Mum found something in one of her apparently lumpy breasts.

  And Mum certainly never believed she was going to get cancer. She just never did. She thought, ‘We can’t be that unlucky, can we?’ It would be like winning some deranged lottery twice (or 25 times in our case). How many families have to endure that amount of suffering? It simply wasn’t going to happen to Mum and to the women of her generation in our family. At least, that’s what she thought back then.

  Mum’s breast cancer was detected in its very early stages so it was a best-case scenario as far as breast cancer diagnoses go. But the fact it was ‘early cancer’ didn’t matter much to us. Here was another incidence of cancer, another woman in our family who would have to face the pain and emotional turmoil of losing her breasts and all the complications that come with that, another woman whose life could be cut terribly short by this same damn disease. Even now, after she has successfully beat breast cancer once and for all, Mum’s had an ovarian cancer scare, plus she has spots on her kidneys and her skull that have to be constantly monitored and we do so, always, with some trepidation. Sadly, since her initial breast cancer diagnosis, Mum’s developed a habit of saying: ‘I just have a feeling I’m not going to live a full life.’ Quite a turnaround for the woman who never seriously thought she’d get cancer.

  Immediately following the fateful phone call that day, my nan retreated to her bedroom for an entire three days. She wouldn’t come out, she couldn’t eat and she was constantly in tears. We’d leave trays of food outside her door for her and they’d sit there untouched until we came and collected them again. It was a devastating time for all of us but particularly for Nan, because she blamed herself that Mum—her only daughter—was going to suf
fer like she had, and like her mother before her.

  Nan lived her whole life on dairy farms in Matamata, on the north island of New Zealand. The area is now mostly known as Hobbiton, thanks to filmmaker Peter Jackson, and this is a source of immeasurable pride to my nan. To say Nan’s life has been one of rural domesticity is nothing short of understatement. It was all cows and cooking casseroles for her family’s dinner and Nan wanted nothing more. Cows and casseroles, cows and casseroles, and then, wham!, suddenly one day it was cows and casseroles and cancer.

  When Nan’s mother, my great-grandmother Annie Bergman, was 68 years old, she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Both breasts; no hope. In fact, by the end the cancer had spread throughout much of her body. And so Annie was admitted to hospital and simply never left, and it was up to my nan to help nurse her through the final months of her illness and try to make her days as comfortable as possible. Only then the unthinkable happened. As her mother lay dying from this terribly aggressive form of the disease, Nan became sick and received her own shocking diagnosis: Nan had breast cancer, too. (In fact, this was the second time: Nan was first diagnosed with breast cancer when she was just 44 years old.)

  So now my nan had to get out of bed each morning, no longer simply racked with grief but also paralysed with fear, as she watched her mother die from the same disease that was growing in her own chest. Plus, my poor nan was suffering awfully due to chemotherapy and at one stage it looked like it could be the chemo, and not cancer, that might just kill her. Then, as if this wasn’t enough, it was around this time my nan found out that her husband had been having an affair for the past eleven years. Grandad had been secretly seeing a woman who was the same age as my mum, and so half the age of my devastated nan. It was to be years before Nan and Grandad reached a point where they decided to try and retrieve their marriage, and just as they did my grandad suffered a massive stroke and died. He was only 53 and he died before Nan had the chance to forgive him.

  And yet throughout the whole time Annie was dying, when Nan herself was suffering from cancer and enduring chemo and heartbroken and deceived, Nan lied to her mother, telling her she was only sick with the flu. She didn’t want Annie to be on her deathbed knowing that she had passed this terrible cancer curse on to her daughter. Just like Nan had now passed it on to Mum.

  But before Mum’s cancer, before Nan’s cancer and even before Annie’s, the disease was already rife in the Codlin family. Annie’s mother, my great-great-grandmother Ada (Tottie) Codlin (later Bergman), was the youngest of ten children born with Jewish heritage and raised in rural New Zealand. A staggering ten out of ten of those children passed on the cancer gene to their children. The ‘Codlin curse’, as it was known locally, was the stuff of legends but for all the wrong reasons. Even now Nan says not a week goes by when she doesn’t get a call from someone in the family. ‘Did you hear Pam’s been diagnosed? Left breast; like her sister …’ One of Nan’s uncle’s had three daughters, two out of three got cancer (one breast, one ovarian) and they died a year apart. We lost count long ago of the number of cancer cases in our extended family, but soon gene-mapping will be able to provide us with the sobering tally to date and it’s well into double digits by now.

  Which is unbelievable, really. Especially given that medical experts liken finding our particular gene fault to spotting a single spelling mistake within the Yellow Pages phone directory. It’s that incredibly small. And yet a gene fault in BRCA1 pops up again and again with deadly regularity. As with many hereditary gene faults (of which BRCA1 and the closely related BRCA2 are the most common), it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. Regardless of gender, if you come from a family that’s ‘cursed’ like ours, then you face a 50 per cent chance that you will inherit the mutation at the time you’re conceived. While rare, the men in our family can pass on the fault and are at personal risk of developing breast and prostate cancer, but it’s the women who mostly develop breast cancer (and occasionally ovarian cancer) as a result.

  When Mum was diagnosed with cancer back in 1995 we didn’t know about our genetic mutation—yet it didn’t take a genius to work out that, generation after generation, we were dropping like flies. My nan was certainly finding the whole thing hauntingly familiar. For her, it was like some ghastly ground-hog day when my mum received her diagnosis. Having nursed her own mother to death from the disease, and then suffering breast cancer in both breasts herself, it was no wonder Nan broke down and retreated to her bedroom when the lump in Mum’s right breast was found to be malignant.

  Me? My reaction was more complicated than that. I was shocked. And when the shock wore off, I was devastated. I was terribly, horribly frightened for Mum. Would she have to have chemotherapy? Would she lose her hair? Lose her breasts? Was she scared? Was she in pain? I worried about her until I nearly made myself sick. Most often, I was afraid of the physical suffering she might have to go through: the surgeries, the drugs, the radiation, the dreaded mastectomies. But my darkest fear and the one I never dared put into words, not to myself as I lay in bed at night and cried for Mum, and certainly not to anyone else, was: ‘Would she make it?’ Because she had to make it; she was my mum. My mum. And I couldn’t live without her.

  On the outside, though, it was a vastly different story. My tough-girl exterior went into overdrive. Here I was, a 14-year-old kid, who had only just started to grow breasts at the same time as Mum was discovering cancer in hers, and I was woefully ill-equipped to cope. I was in just my second year of high school (and a new school, at that) and yet I was witnessing the strong women in my family—my mum and my nan—fall apart in front of my eyes. What was I meant to do?

  Deny it, that’s what.

  I’m ashamed to admit it but my first response, as far as anyone else could tell, was to pretend as though Mum’s cancer simply didn’t exist. It was as if I woke up and decided: ‘You know what? I refuse to think about this; I’m going to socialise and have fun and be a normal teenage girl. This isn’t my problem.’

  In reality, the fear factor had well and truly set in. Fear for Mum, fear for our family, plain old fear of death. Because whenever I was alone, and trying desperately not to think that Mum could die, my mind would then distract itself by doing the most dreadful calculations: ‘If Annie was 68 when she died of cancer, and Nan was 44 when she was diagnosed, and now Mum is 36 … Then how old am I going to be when I get cancer? Twenty-five? Twenty?’ There was no ‘if’ in my thinking; it was only ever a case of ‘when’—and that’s the sort of maths problem no kid should ever have to solve. It’s a terrifying thing to have to stare at your image in the mirror each morning as you get into your school uniform and wonder: How soon is this cancer coming for me?

  CHAPTER 2

  As Mum tells it, on the eve of my thirteenth birthday I morphed, overnight, into Linda Blair from the horror film The Exorcist. Green projectile vomit and all. It was like I went to bed a normal human being and woke up as the devil’s spawn. (Mum was about to come up against her own terrifying medical demons, although she didn’t know that then.) It’s hard to say what flicked my switch—the ‘bitch switch’, as my family called it. Puberty? Or hormones? Or I just felt like it so why don’t you shut up/get out of my room/get out of my face/I hate you?

  Mum says that at this point in my life I didn’t resemble anyone or anything she’d ever seen before, and certainly not the sweet daughter she thought she’d raised. And this came as an especially rude shock to my parents because I’d been so perfect in primary school. Just twelve months earlier I’d been elected sports captain of Kendall House at Harbord Public School (which was just five minutes from our home in North Manly). I was one of the leading debaters in my age group in New South Wales, and I was selected for gifted and talented programs in the performing arts. I could sing, I could dance and I was near the top of my class academically but, most of all, in what was now a distant and very rosy memory for my parents, I was always impeccably behaved. I know; sickening, right? I even matched my sock
s to my hair-scrunchie each day. And I was a sweet kid, too. One you couldn’t help but indulge.

  Take my obsession with pop princess Kylie Minogue. From about eight years old, I began saving all my pocket money to go down to the local music store and purchase Kylie’s latest single. I had boxes of the yellow cassettes. And I would sit in my room for hours and hours, hairbrush-microphone in hand, blissfully singing along to every memorised word. Such was my obsession that my parents suffered through a severe bout of gastro just to take me to a Kylie concert for my ninth birthday; with plastic buckets tucked under their arms—now that’s what I call parental love. Of course, I was shocked to hear of Kylie’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2005. Here was this beautiful, healthy pop star fighting the same cancer as my mum, and at the same age that my mum was diagnosed: 36 years old. If Kylie was an inspiration to me before, she was truly a star in my eyes now. (I still buy all her music and am a massive fan.)

  But it might be said that a rebellion was always on the cards and that diligence like mine was unsustainable. Even in my former, more golden years, I’d had the good grace to temper my glowing behaviour by being a bit of a drama queen (you didn’t, for instance, want to be around if I stubbed my toe or sustained a paper cut). It seems that, even at being endearingly flawed, I was an overachiever of the highest order. Until I started high school, that is. Then I was just a plain old pain in the arse.

  To begin with my crimes were fairly vanilla. Exhibit A: I liked to wag school and go shopping at Chatswood Westfield instead. Or, exhibit B: I used my pocket money to buy alcohol for the Year 7 school dance. Then there were exhibits C, D and E: I began to smoke; I locked my teacher out of the classroom (more than once); and I regularly bought cigarettes at the corner store using a (forged) note from my mother asking me to purchase them on her behalf. Individually, none of these things was worth calling Department of Community Services over. But, by the time I was racking up offences Y and Z (drinking and smoking marijuana), this new routine of mine was starting to wear thin with my parents and my school, and quite possibly the other kids in the playground.