The Lucky One

by Krystal Barter

  ‘No way!’ I laughed as he pounded on the window. ‘There’s no way you’re getting me out there in that!’

  I shrieked as he plastered his dripping face against the glass. ‘C’mon, Krystal! C’mon! It’s not that bad, just get out for a minute,’ he begged me, the rain pouring down like only a Sydney storm can. ‘Just get out for one second? Please?’

  I laughed and shook my head vigorously. ‘Got my Subway, got the radio, I’m going nowhere, baby!’ I waved my sandwich in front of his pathetic eyes, then mimed unwrapping it in slow-motion as he watched in dismay from out in the rain. Eventually, he gave up and trudged back around to his side of the car, clambering in and drenching the driver’s seat at the same time. His sandwich flopped limply inside its soggy wrapper.

  ‘Oh, baby! You’re soaked!’ I laughed again, grabbing an old beach towel off the back seat and starting to tussle his hair dry. ‘What were you thinking, going out in that storm?’

  Chris shrugged, defeated, and started the engine to go home. ‘Well, that didn’t go so well,’ was his only response.

  By the time we were back at my parents’ house, the rain had eased off. Chris was still damp but the heat and the clearer weather meant we could have the windows wound down on the ride home and the salty Manly breeze had dried him quite a bit. We headed inside and to our front room ‘retreat’, where Chris grabbed my hand and pulled me down onto the bed.

  ‘What the—’ I began saying but Chris was having no interruptions this time.

  ‘Krystal Anne Barter,’ he said solemnly, ‘I was planning to do this at Harbord Headland today.’ Then he dropped onto one knee at the foot of our bed. My stomach dropped with him.

  ‘Krystal,’ he said again, clearing his throat nervously. ‘Krystal—’ He paused.

  ‘Yes?’ I prompted. He was taking his time now that we’d finally got this far.

  ‘Krystal—you know that we’re having a baby soon and that I’m one hundred per cent committed to you, and to our baby.’

  I held my breath and waited for him to continue.

  ‘Well, like I said, you know we’re having a baby together,’ he repeated, then stopped, and I wondered if I was going to have to help him. ‘And that we’re going to be together forever.’ I still hadn’t let that breath out.

  ‘Well, if you’re willing, then consider this the start of our new life together.’ With that, he reached into his sodden pocket and pulled out a small, dark blue box, which he opened to reveal my dazzling pink ring.

  ‘Chris!’ I shrieked. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I jumped up and threw my arms around him, knocking the box (and the ring) onto the floor. ‘Yes! Yes! Oh, I love you, Chris!’

  ‘I love you, too, babe,’ he said as he recovered the blue box from where I’d knocked it under the bed and slipped my engagement ring onto my finger.

  My engagement ring! We were getting married! I was astonished. Laughing. Crying. Hugging him. Happier than I’d ever felt in my life.

  ‘But I can’t believe you wouldn’t get out of the car for this!’ he said accusingly.

  ‘I can’t believe you ate soggy Subway for this!’

  ‘That’s love, babe, that’s love.’ And then my fiancé ( fiancé!) kissed me.

  CHAPTER 8

  On 26 December 2004, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred off the west coast of Sumatra, causing a series of devastating tsunamis that killed more than 200 000 people, across more than twelve countries, throughout the Indian Ocean basin. It was one of the deadliest megadisasters in recorded history. And I should have been there.

  The ‘Boxing Day tsunami’ hit Phuket particularly hard. The tourist mecca was battered by a 9.2-metre wall of water, killing more than 5000 people in the region, many of them tourists. As we sat on the couch at Mum and Dad’s—me, seven months pregnant and sweltering in the heat—Chris and I watched the news in disbelief. There was Phuket, and then Ko Phi Phi Don, and then we saw scenes of the resort we’d picked for our holiday. Bloated and dismembered bodies floated up on the screen. Dead. Drowned. Decimated. At the very resort where Chris and I had been booked to stay at that week.

  We had wanted to stay on the island from the Leonardo Di Caprio movie The Beach, which we learned was filmed mostly on Ko Phi Phi Lei, which forms part of the Phi Phi Islands. But it was so tiny there was no accommodation on the island so we booked into a resort on nearby Ko Phi Phi Don, that is, until we found out I was pregnant; then we cancelled our holiday. Chris’s mum and stepdad were supposed to be there with us, too. The four of us had planned to have Christmas together in Phuket, before splitting up to do our own thing for New Year, and then on to Chang Mai after that. Only, when we were forced to cancel they’d downgraded their plans and just popped across to Bali instead (which is where they were, safe from harm, thank goodness, when the tsunami hit). I remember talking to Mum about our trip and asking her if it was alright if Chris and I missed Christmas at home that year because I’d never skipped spending that day with the family before. Mum, of course, had said it was fine. So Chris and I were looking forward to Christmas Day on Phuket Beach, before heading off to the Phi Phi Islands and then into the mountains to Chang Mai to explore.

  Now, though, we were sitting safe and untouched back on our couch in Sydney while all these poor, poor people washed up in wave after wave after wave of death. It was horrifying.

  I’m not an overly spiritual or religious person (my good Catholic education fell down a little there). But I do believe things happen for a reason. I think that everyone has a path in life but that there are many different versions of this path available to us, so every time we make a decision, we’re choosing a path and choosing our fate. When Chris and I chose not to travel to Thailand that Christmas, it was one of the luckiest decisions we ever made.

  I seem to have faced a freakish number of life-changing decisions already in my short existence (I am, as I write this, only 29 years old). At each of these points—at each pivotal moment when my life came to a cross-road—I chose the right path, and it was always thanks to someone who was close to me. It was Chris who saved me from drugs when I chose to ditch them in favour of our relationship. It was Mum who saved me from that car accident back in high school. And now it was little Riley James, our beautiful, healthy baby boy, who was born at 4.28 a.m. on 12 March 2005, who saved Chris and I from the Boxing Day tsunami, and probably saved our lives.

  Riley was born at Royal North Shore Hospital after a relatively smooth eight-hour labour. I’m told it was a quiet birth by usual standards. But I did have a small haemorrhage and I lost quite a lot of blood in the process. Still, every drop was worth it the instant I met Riley and held him in my arms for the first time.

  Even though we knew already we were having a boy, Chris and I still hadn’t settled on a name by the time he was born. We’d agreed on ‘James’ as the middle name (after my brother, Andrew James, and Chris’s father, Alan James) but we were tossing up between ‘Riley’ and ‘Jye’ for the first name until the last minute. But the instant Riley was born—all scrunched up and red-faced and quite simply perfect—Chris took one look at him and said: ‘That’s Riley.’ And so Riley he was. And our friend, Paul, who had introduced Chris and me just over a year ago, kindly agreed to be Riley’s godfather.

  Life with Riley was remarkably easy. He was a gorgeously happy baby who slept well, breastfed well and was generally pretty cruisey as long as his mummy or daddy was close by. He slept through the night from the time he was about four months old, causing my friends to joke about what an ‘earth-mother’ I must be to have produced such a contented baby. (Laughable, really, when you consider how I felt about motherhood just a few months earlier.) Yet now Riley was my entire world. I adored him and I adored being a mother. I used to dress the poor kid in sailor stripes from head to toe (matching hat, jumpsuit, socks and shoes), until he looked like some sort of nautical-themed clown. I’d push him in the stroller and be lost in such a new-motherhood-fog (that’s two parts adoration to one part sleep-deprivation
) that I’d run the stroller into doorways or into unsuspecting pedestrians. Mine was a love so deep no Huggies advert could ever have prepared me. Overnight, I had transformed into this incredibly maternal, incredibly protective mother lion who lived each day simply to look after her family. So for the first few months of Riley’s life the three of us lived in a blissful bubble, safe from the world in our teeny-tiny front room at my parents’ house. And throughout it all we never forgot that the only reason Chris and I were there at all was because of Riley.

  Riley was our guardian angel from the day he arrived. Before that, even. It was to be a while yet before I had the opportunity to try and save my own life via a double mastectomy. Until then? I was more than happy to be surrounded by wonderful family who would do it for me: first Chris and Mum, and now little Riley. Only, for a newborn baby, Riley really stepped up to the plate. You see, he wasn’t content with just saving his parents’ lives when he was in utero by causing us to miss the tsunami. No, the second time Riley saved my life was when he was eighteen months old.

  ‘Chris?’

  ‘Mmmmf?’

  ‘I’m going to do it.’

  ‘Mmmmf.’

  ‘I’m going to do it, Chris; I’ve decided.’

  ‘That’s great, babe,’ Chris drawled into his pillow. ‘Do what?’

  I rolled over and propped my hands behind my head so I could see Riley’s bassinet from where I lay in bed. He was asleep with his thumb pressed into his mouth and his fat, ruddy cheeks were illuminated by the early morning sunshine. I never loved him so much as when he was sleeping.

  ‘I’m going to get genetic testing.’ The room was still, with that delicious new-day feeling, before real life intruded and rudely woke everybody up.

  ‘You’re gunna wha—? Are you serious!’ Chris said and he sat bolt upright in bed. He looked at me in surprise and at the same time I tried to shush him, but it was too late and Riley stirred and began to whimper. Good morning, real life.

  ‘Really? You’re gunna go and get tested? Babe, that’s great!’ Chris grabbed me now and swept me up in an enormous bear-hug. In his bassinet, Riley began to cry.

  ‘You’re totally making the right decision, Krystal,’ Chris said. ‘You know I’m behind you one hundred per cent. When are we gunna go? Do you wanna go today? You know it’s gunna be okay. We’ll work it out together. It’s about bloody time!’

  Chris’s monologue was always going to end here. For years now, ever since my first failed attempt at taking the BRCA genetic test when I was eighteen, Chris and Mum had been waiting in quiet support for me to decide to go back and take the test for real. They were very patient. Chris, in particular, very rarely raised the issue with me, preferring instead to wait for me to want to talk about it, in the hope that one day I would arrive at my own, independent decision to take the test again. He realised it wasn’t something I could be pushed into. And there was a lot to consider. For instance, what would it mean for me if I tested positive for a genetic fault? How would I react? What would it mean for our marriage and my life as a mother? Was there anything I could do to stop from getting cancer anyway? Or, was I just sentencing myself to a life of agony while I waited for cancer to strike?

  Or, what if I didn’t test positive? I would be overjoyed, of course, but what would that mean for my mum and my nan, who’d had to suffer so much because of cancer? And what would it mean for our relationships? Would I experience some sort of strange survivor guilt?

  Plus, there was the fact that Mum and Nan had both tested positive for the BRCA1 gene fault, which meant it was unlikely that my results would come back inconclusive. Doctors were confident they would arrive at a conclusive result. And while it might sound obvious (I mean, why else am I doing the test if it’s not to get a conclusive result?), it was an eventuality I had to prepare myself for. I couldn’t just go along to have the test taken on the assumption it might not tell us anything.

  Then, there was the minefield of insurance to negotiate. My parents had organised life insurance for me back when Mum tested positive for BRCA1. (They locked in my insurance and healthcare prior to my gene test because they had heard lots of stories about insurance being difficult to obtain if you are BRCA mutation positive). But if I did test gene positive could my health insurance company renege? Might they alter my coverage in future? I couldn’t imagine any insurer would want to touch me if they knew I carried a genetic fault. All these questions swirled around in my head, mostly unanswered. This was new scientific ground we were breaking with genetic testing and, back in 2005, there weren’t many people who had trod this path before me and so I had no one to turn to with my barrage of fears and worries and my long list of questions.

  Of course, top of the list loomed the biggie, the one which was up to my own DNA to answer: Was I, or wasn’t I, BRCA1 positive?

  On paper my odds looked pretty good. While one in nine Australian women will develop breast cancer by the time they’re 85 years old, only 10 per cent of these cases will be classified as belonging to a high risk family, with 40 per cent of these families harbouring cancer genetic mutations (15 per cent for ovarian cancer). As my mother was a confirmed carrier of a BRCA1 gene mutation, I had a 50 per cent chance of inheriting that gene fault from her. How bad were my odds? It’s not like there were thousands of women walking around out there with the breast cancer gene fault. If you surveyed people wandering down Pitt Street in Sydney, you’d have to be pretty unlucky to bump into many that were BRCA1 mutation positive. It wasn’t like brown hair or being right-handed or having a propensity for being okay at ball sports. This thing wasn’t common, not by a long shot. And yet, no matter how many times I convinced myself of this, I only had to picture my family tree and my heart sank. There, on every branch, on every leaf in some places, hung the skull-and-cross-bones symbol of death. Breast cancer. It was like ringbark or borers or root rot; it was the elm disease of our family tree. There were a hell of a lot more women (and men) in our family suffering and dying from breast and ovarian cancer than there seemed to be among the general population, and I knew that couldn’t be just a coincidence. We had to be carrying some sort of gene mutation and it terrified me to think I would find out for sure.

  What’s more, it was only four years since I tried to take the BRCA test and fled the doctor’s surgery in a flood of tears. Yet here I was, choosing to go back again. Was I really that much more mature now and any better equipped to cope? Would I crumble at the last minute and react the same way again? I would be mortified if, when faced with that needle, I became hysterical again and had to back down. Would I go through with it? Could I go through with it? Why should things be any different this time around?

  The answer, quite simply, was Riley.

  As I scooped him up out of his cot that morning and soothed his crying and waited for his big crocodile tears to stop and make way for his even bigger, gurgling laugh, I thought, for the millionth time lately, that I had to get tested for Riley’s sake. While I was breastfeeding Riley I’d suffered mastitis about ten times. Each instance was incredibly painful and my sensitive swollen nipples felt as though they had red-hot pokers applied to them every time Riley wrapped his little mouth around them. Then, there were the throbbing lumps in my breast tissue as my milk hardened and got blocked in my milk ducts. Oh, the agony! The only thing worse than the pain was the heart-stopping fear I felt each time I touched one of my tender breasts and found a new lump there. Was it congealed milk or was it cancer? Were we talking mastitis or mastectomy? My sleep-deprived mind would race. Sitting in the near-darkness of those 5 a.m. feeds, blue light seeping into the cold horizon, I would imagine, terrified, that this was it. This was the dawning of the day I had been expecting all along, this would be the day I discovered I had cancer.

  The fear I had felt so acutely as a teenager had never gone away, I’d simply pushed it to the back of my mind. But throughout the last few years when I’d met Chris and fallen in love and gotten engaged, I had never once forgotten that, bene
ath it all, I was a woman who was most likely doomed.

  Then, as soon as I had Riley my life took on a completely different direction and, with it, a new gravitas. Now, I had a real reason to live, and a real reason to stay healthy, not to mention a responsibility to this amazing little person to stick around and look after him for as long as I possibly could. And if a genetic test could give me the information I needed to do this? Well, maybe it was about time I got tested, after all. Suddenly, the decision about whether or not to undergo genetic testing was no longer mine alone; it affected people beyond me, and those people were the ones I loved the most. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking into Riley’s eyes one day and telling him that Mummy had breast cancer and, worse, that I might once have been able to do something to prevent it but I chose not to educate myself. I couldn’t bear to hear him say to me: ‘But, Mum, you could have found out about this. I don’t understand why you didn’t just take that blood test. You could have known.’

  Which is why I decided it was time to stop burying my head in the sand and pretending this cancer threat didn’t really exist. Instead of viewing genetic testing as my misfortune, I needed to start seeing it as my gift: a gift of knowledge that might allow me to save my own life and so be there to see more of Riley’s. My story could have been so different if I didn’t accidentally get pregnant with Riley when I was 21. I might still be ignoring the bleeding obvious that was my family history and putting off that genetic test every time I went to see my GP. I could still be living each day as though I was guaranteed to have thousands more just like it; and so why waste a gorgeous morning like this doing something as depressing as getting a blood test when I could be at the beach or going for lunch or getting my nails done or watching paint dry or just about anything you can think of other than facing up to my genetic destiny?