The Lucky One

by Krystal Barter

  Mum stayed with Nan for three weeks before returning to Melbourne and to Dad and to their (now somewhat relegated) wedding plans. Grandad would ring Mum with regular updates but, more often than not, Nan would be unable to talk because the chemotherapy would render her unable to lift her head off the pillow enough to speak on the phone. Chemotherapy was a vastly different prospect back in 1970s New Zealand and each bout would leave Nan bedridden for up to ten days at a time. Grandad said that every time he had to drive her to the hospital for her next round of treatment, Nan would cry all the way in the car just knowing what pain and sickness lay ahead of her. Mum, of course, felt terribly guilty at being in Australia and being in love while Nan was suffering so much on the other side of the Tasman. She felt that, as a daughter, she should have been there to support Nan when she needed it most. And the fact she was having such a wonderful time with my dad didn’t help.

  However, by the time Mum and Dad and all of Dad’s family travelled to New Zealand for the wedding, Nan’s health was starting to improve. Slowly but surely, her body began to regain strength. It was as if Mum’s wedding lifted her and gave her a reason to fight on. So much so that Nan had somehow managed to drag herself out of bed and to the dining room table, where she’d put together her salient contribution to her only daughter’s wedding: the flowers. Now, Mum was pretty laissez-faire about the whole wedding thing. Remember, this was in an era before wedding planners and bridal magazines and Kim Kardashian’s wedding extravaganza. In fact, the only thing that Mum really cared about (and I mean really, really cared about), aside from the groom, of course, was the flowers at the wedding. And Mum wanted fresh. So when she arrived back in her family home in Matamata to find Nan had lovingly made bouquet after bouquet after bouquet of stiff, artificial flowers, her heart sank.

  ‘I hated them!’ Mum laughed as she recounted this to me in yet another changeroom of yet another bridal boutique one day. ‘Your nan had tied each bunch with a garish satin ribbon and then wrapped every bouquet individually in tissue paper to protect it. And I absolutely loathed the lot of them! But all I said to Nan was: “They’re beautiful. Thank you.” Because how could I possibly say anything else? After everything the poor woman had been through to make them for me?’

  ‘That wasn’t what worried me the most, though,’ Mum added, still laughing. ‘No; what worried me more was the cake. Because your nan had ordered that, too. And if the flowers turned out this bad, then what on earth was the cake going to look like?’

  What was obvious to both of us was how much joy Nan got from being involved in Mum’s wedding. This was something I wanted to do for my mum, now, with my own wedding. (Especially given that, after our wedding, Chris and I would finally be leaving the family nest and moving into a place of our own. Mum was doing her best to be supportive and to suppress her disappointment at our leaving—buoyed, no doubt, by the fact that we had bought the house next door to her and were moving in there!)

  But, what I didn’t expect was for Mum’s involvement in our wedding to be such a treat for me, too. With the wedding date fast approaching, and with my dress no closer to being found, Mum surprised me with a weekend shopping trip to Melbourne to visit the boutique of renowned Australian bridal designer Mariana Hardwick.

  Anyone who has been to Mariana Hardwick’s flagship store knows what I’m talking about when I say it’s divine. Housed in the heritage-listed Hardwick building in Melbourne’s throbbing Brunswick, somehow this innocuous store (which combines Hardwick’s couture bridal house and the actual atelier where her lavish gowns are sewn on site) is a haven of cream and gold serenity among the cafes and hipster bars of achingly cool Brunswick. Climbing the grand oak staircase, with its elaborate MH crest emblazoned at the pinnacle, I was Scarlett O’Hara off to choose a gown to marry Rhett in. I felt fated to find my dream dress here.

  Unfortunately, fate didn’t get the memo. Or, at least, not entirely. Technically, I did find my dream dress at Mariana’s that day. I fell in love with a stunning satin gown that had a strapless fitted bodice, complete with beading and hand-dyed lace, and that flared into a flattering A-line skirt. Classic yet modern, pretty yet sexy. That the dress of my dreams didn’t come in pink wasn’t a problem, either, because the lovely girls at Mariana’s had been collecting pink material samples for me for weeks in the hope of finding one that was just the right shade. Only each and every single one of them was awful.

  ‘What about this one?’ asked the sales assistant called Candy (I kid you not). She held a heinous Barbie-pink swatch against my décolletage.

  ‘Er, it’s sweet but …’ I looked at Mum imploringly for help.

  ‘It’s not you, darling,’ Mum said decisively and Candy put the swatch onto the (rapidly growing) ‘no’ pile on the counter.

  ‘Or this?’ she tried, holding up a sickly sweet one.

  ‘Uh-uh.’ I shook my head and grimaced apologetically. ‘Sorry.’ I wanted to be a pink bride, not a musk stick.

  Too peach; too rich; too saccharine; was that magenta? These colour swatches were giving me a sugar headache. I thanked Candy but explained we couldn’t order a Mariana Hardwick design, as much as I wanted one, if we couldn’t find the material to have it designed in and so we started to leave. Then just as Mum and I were descending, disappointedly, down the grand staircase, Candy came bounding after us with a brown paper package in her hand.

  ‘Wait, Krystal!’ she called out. ‘This sample just came by courier. It’s another pink swatch—maybe this one’s the one? Do you want to open it?’

  Reluctantly, dubiously, I did. And there, inside the package, was the most beautiful strip of material I had ever laid eyes on. Soft but somehow striking, this scrap of pink satin with its ragged edges looked like a petal torn straight from a rose. You could almost smell its old-world fragrance.

  ‘I love it!’ I said to Candy. ‘You’ve found the perfect pink!’

  And so Mariana Hardwick’s seamstresses worked their magic and my dream pink wedding dress was stitched into reality.

  Less than four months out from the Big Day, I was beginning to feel like my life had turned a corner. I was 23 years old and as-yet cancer-free. I had kicked the drugs, I was off all booze and I had survived an unwanted pregnancy only to discover I adored being a mum. I was soon to marry the love of my life while our gorgeous toddler, Riley, stood by our side. So to find my perfect (pink!) wedding dress really was the icing on the cake. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  So you can imagine my surprise, then, when one lazy Sunday afternoon in November—the sort of lazy afternoon when the jacaranda trees in Sydney are just starting to explode into a dreamy purple haze and the first strains of summer are wafting over backyard fences along with the smell of burnt sausages—Mum phoned me in tears.

  ‘Krystal?’

  ‘Mum?’ I said, sitting up fast from where I was sprawled on the couch on the back patio.

  ‘Mum? What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Is it cancer?’ This was a ridiculous question, given that Mum was phoning me from Eden, on the New South Wales far south coast, where she and Dad had gone away for the weekend and where, I was pretty sure, the township was known for its fish (it was historically a whaling village) and its chips (it now exports woodchips) but not so much for its malignant tumours. And yet, with our family’s track record, I was always on cancer alert.

  Mum sobbed even harder.

  ‘Mum? What’s happened? Are you okay?’ I was becoming frantic now but I could hear her taking some deep breaths and steadying herself on the other end of the line.

  ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ she assured me.

  And then she paused before adding: ‘But, yes; it looks like cancer.’

  I was stunned.

  It took a few agonising minutes, and much ‘tag-teaming’ as Mum and Dad passed the phone back and forth between themselves, taking it in turns to talk as Mum succumbed to fresh tears; but I eventually got the story out of them. Mum had been for her first screening test on Friday as part of
a high-risk program for ovarian cancer, they told me. Dr Kathy Tucker (my genetic specialist for hereditary cancer but also Mum’s specialist) had been phoning Mum at three-monthly intervals for years now, advising her to remove her ovaries because the risk of ovarian cancer associated with our BRCA1 gene mutation was just too high for someone my mum’s age. But each time Kathy phoned, Mum had a new excuse—work, grandchild, my wedding to plan—why it wasn’t a good time for a prophylactic oophorectomy. Now, though, it looked like she didn’t have a choice.

  When Mum went in for her test (a test she said was a bit uncomfortable, a bit embarrassing but not, as she now regretted, worth postponing for so long), she chatted idly about her weekend away to the doctor wielding the probe. Next, she was sent to see Dr Kathy Tucker to receive her results. Then, as Mum and Dad sat in the waiting room, flicking through out-of-date magazines and planning what time they should head off down the coast in the morning to beat the weekend traffic, Kathy walked out of her surgery and addressed them—the only patients present—with urgency: ‘Julie-Ann, there’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with your results.’

  Something’s wrong?

  Kathy explained that she needed to confirm some more details and would be back again shortly but, in the meantime, she gave my parents strict instructions not to leave the surgery.

  Something’s wrong? Something’s wrong? I can’t imagine what Mum felt as she heard those words uttered yet again. How many times would our family be shocked with the news that there was ‘something wrong’ with our results? How many times would we have to remain in the waiting room for further tests or more bad news or another dire diagnosis? Dad began to fidget; he can’t keep still when he’s nervous.

  After what must have seemed like an age, Kathy emerged again and called Mum and Dad into her consulting room. There she told them that the ultrasound had revealed some very suspicious-looking abnormalities in the region in and around Mum’s ovaries. Suspicious enough to warrant an appointment with a surgeon first thing Monday morning. Suspicious enough that it must surely mean cancer.

  ‘But I’m going away for the weekend,’ Mum had blurted, clearly unable to process what she’d just been told. ‘And then it’s only sixteen weeks till Krystal’s wedding! I’ve already told you I don’t have time to have my ovaries removed!’

  Kathy leaned across the table and gripped Mum’s hand. ‘Julie-Ann, this is important. I need you to see the surgeon on Monday morning and to take whatever course of action he recommends. In light of what we’ve found today, I don’t expect you’ll be able to keep your ovaries.’

  And with that, Mum and Dad were released back into the waiting room, back to the tattered magazines, back to their tattered weekend plans and back to their tattered, shattered lives.

  Mum told me all this over the phone from Eden because she said she couldn’t bear to see my face if she told me in person. For the same reason I passed the phone wordlessly to my nan, who was staying with us in Manly, so that she could hear the news from Mum in just the same way. When Mum and Dad got home that night, our household was eerily calm as we braced for the storm that was ahead of us. Then on Monday morning Mum did as instructed and went to see the surgeon.

  His opening line was brutal but at least it was unambiguous. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, peering at her ultrasound images, ‘Julie-Ann, this doesn’t look great.’

  ‘How bad are we talking?’ Mum said. ‘Will there be chemo?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ was his reply. ‘If it’s as bad as it looks there will be no chemo.’

  The surgeon explained that he wanted to operate. Tomorrow. (Which, as the first Tuesday in November, was Melbourne Cup day in Australia.) Everything was happening at a terrifying pace. Just last Friday Mum was going in to have her first ovarian scan as a high-risk patient. By Tuesday she would undergo surgery, possibly life-changing cancer surgery. It was breakneck and breathtaking and, despite everything our family had already been through, incredibly shocking. Mum, understandably, was absolutely terrified. Even now, she wells up when she remembers this time in her life.

  On the day of the surgery our family went through that strange process whereby everyday life refuses to take a back seat even though there are much (much) greater things going down. The minutia was worse than usual, in fact, because we’d had so little time to prepare. Toothbrushes had to be packed into hospital bags; washing had to be brought in off the clothes line; cars still had to be filled with petrol even though we were driving to hospital for what was shaping up to be cancer surgery. As my parents sat nervously waiting for Mum to be wheeled off to the anaesthetist, Dad rattled through his ‘to do’ list. ‘I’ve phoned your boss, I’ve phoned my mother; your mum and the kids are driving over in Andrew’s car to be here when you wake up. I’ve cancelled the vet, I’m going to go and move our car in an hour so our parking ticket doesn’t expire …’ And on it went.

  I can’t imagine poor Mum heard a word of it, though, as she contemplated what lay ahead of her. The surgeon had warned her that if she woke up from the surgery with a large cut to her abdomen that this would be a bad sign as it meant the tumour was extensive and much more likely to be malignant. A small incision, however, would mean that the surgery was keyhole and therefore whatever tumour was detected hadn’t spread far.

  The very first thing Mum did when she woke up from the anaesthetic that day was to slide a shaking hand up the length of her belly to survey the damage. It was horrific. As her palm felt higher and higher up her distended stomach, the bandages wound on and on. She was sliced all the way from her vagina to past her belly button. Well over 15 centimetres in total. It’s over. It’s all over, she repeated to herself and tears streamed down her cheeks. In that moment she knew she had ovarian cancer.

  As the orderlies wheeled Mum back to her room to meet with her surgeon (and to have her worst fears confirmed), she cried the whole way. Soundlessly, there was no dramatic sobbing; just a silent, constant flow of tears. Tears of fatigue and defeat. Cancer finally had her beat.

  When they reached Mum’s ward, the orderlies negotiated the maze of identical white corridors with proficiency, the only sound the faint rattle of the trolley wheels on the linoleum floor. But as they got closer to her room Mum heard another noise; the noise of shrieking, wailing women. Women screaming at the top of their lungs with—what? Sorrow? Joy? Had someone died? Mum couldn’t make it out. Then a boy called out ‘Yessss!’ and Mum heard something that sounded like the sound of flat hands slapping the concrete walls all along the corridor. ‘It’s not cancer! It’s not cancer!’ somebody was shouting. There was laughter and confusion and the sound of people running up and down the corridor, slapping the walls in ecstasy, their feet skidding on the plastic floor. ‘It’s not cancer! It’s not cancer!’ they whooped again and again and again, their shouts bouncing off the hospital walls. Who was this crazy family?

  Us.

  When Mum got close enough she realised it was our crazy family, going berserk because her surgery had just revealed the most beautiful news in the world: it wasn’t cancer.

  Mum’s surgeon had delivered her results to us just moments before Mum arrived. Somehow, he said, against all the odds, the tumour on her right ovary was benign. In addition to the tumour, Mum was suffering severe endometriosis; so severe that when they opened her up in theatre the horrid stuff had came bubbling up and out of her wound and this was why her initial ultrasound looked so grim. Mum had had the tumour removed, as well as the masses of endometriosis, plus some damaged sections of her bowel. Hence the extensive bandages. But what none of us could believe—including the surgeon who was so astounded he’d asked for Mum’s biopsy to be tested twice—was that there was no cancer present.

  The surgeon told us that they’d cheered in theatre when the result of the biopsies came back. But that was nothing compared to the cheering our family was doing now. We were all so certain that this dreaded cancer had come for one of us again that we didn’t dare think that Mum’s
surgery would show her ovaries to be cancer free. The best any of us had hoped for was that they’d caught the cancer early enough for the tumour to be contained and maybe even possibly removed. We were thinking in terms of: How much chemo would Mum have to have? And, what would her life expectancy be now that she had secondary cancer? Not: How long till Mum can come home and get back to planning my wedding? It was one of the best days of all our lives.

  Mum, however, was trying desperately to quieten us all down. In her usual style (and just like her own mother), Mum was more concerned about everyone else around her and right now she was worried we might be disturbing the other patients on the ward. ‘Shhh!’ she hissed at us, trying uselessly to wipe the smile from her face. ‘What if there are other patients around who haven’t had good news today?’

  But we couldn’t help ourselves. Mum didn’t have cancer, that’s all we cared about right now, and who could blame us for wanting to tell the world?

  Several weeks later, Mum was at home again and recuperating well. As Dad and I sat chatting over a cup of tea one evening, he turned to me and said: ‘You know, when I went to move the car on the day of your mum’s surgery, the strangest thing happened …’ He placed his mug down on the table and fiddled with it, looking slightly embarrassed about what he was about to tell me. ‘When I opened the driver’s side door to get out and head back to the hospital, I found two $2 coins on the ground and they were stacked perfectly on top of one another.’ This, Dad claimed, was the instant he knew Mum didn’t have cancer.