Eating the Underworld

by Doris Brett

  The doctor studies the radiologist’s report carefully.

  ‘It’s an ovarian cyst,’ she says. It’s not totally clear what kind it is, but the doctor wants to get it checked out further. ‘So I’m going to refer Amantha to Greg Henderson,’ she says. And the floor drops away from under me.

  Greg, my gyn-oncologist. Amantha is being referred to a cancer specialist.

  ‘Is the cyst dangerous?’ I ask, struggling to catch my breath.

  ‘Probably not,’ she says cautiously. ‘But in view of your history, I just want to be sure.’

  In view of my history.

  In a small percentage of women, ovarian cancer is hereditary. It’s something I can’t bear thinking about. Can’t bear the possibility of. Can’t bear even the thought of anything happening to Amantha.

  As we leave the doctor’s office, Amantha is terrified. ‘Have I got cancer?’ she asks. ‘Have I got cancer?’

  I have to stay calm for Amantha. ‘The doctor’s just being super cautious,’ I say. ‘It’ll turn out to be nothing.’ Amantha relaxes a little. Inwardly, I am jelly.

  And so a week later, we find ourselves at Greg’s. Watching Amantha disappear into his office is like entering a nightmare. It feels like hours before Greg reappears to beckon me in.

  ‘It looks okay to me,’ he says. He thinks it’s a benign, garden-variety cyst. You can’t be totally sure without a biopsy, he explains, but he doesn’t want to do anything so invasive at this point. We’ll adopt a ‘watch and wait’ procedure. He wants Amantha to go back and have a second ultrasound in a couple of months. Hopefully the cyst will have disappeared by then. If it hasn’t or has grown bigger, then surgical investigation is on the cards.

  Amantha is still frightened as we leave Greg’s office. Inside, so am I.

  The two months crawl by. The second ultrasound is scheduled for the day before my poetry book is launched. I can’t even think about the launch. I sit on my chair in the clinic’s waiting room willing the door to open. Finally it does. Amantha comes out smiling. Greg, thank heavens, thank goodness, thank everything, was right.

  In the Constellation of the Crab is launched today. I think up my speech on the way in, still intoxicated with relief about Amantha. There are lots of people and a wonderful feeling all around. The Anti-Cancer Council did a great job. I come home exhausted, but buoyant. The book has been so important for me. It’s been my way of creating something transcendent out of this experience; something that records it, as an explorer would, but also rises above it, sees the other possibilities in it, the link to a wider universe.

  I think back to the experience of being wheeled to the operating theatre just nine months ago: I am groggy, scared and cold under the thin hospital blanket. The hospital ceiling flows past me. I am upside down in the world. And then suddenly ‘On the Way to the Operating Theatre’, the poem I wrote about this same experience two years earlier, fills my mind. The comforting warmth that floods through me is unexpected. It is like a greeting, a companion, a voice saying, ‘Someone has been here before; you are not alone.’ It was me, of course, who had been there before, but the voice is saying much more than that. It is throwing me a line, a connection, to a vehicle far larger and more mysterious than a jolting hospital trolley. Suddenly I am on a journey. My companions are Odysseus, Orpheus and the thousand others in myth, fairytale and history who have been prepared to lose sight of the shore. Who better to travel with? And who knows what is there to be found?

  Greg is ready to resume writing our book on ovarian cancer. I meet him to talk about how to plan it. It’s a strange feeling. I’ve suddenly switched from being a patient to being a writing colleague again. It’s unsettling. It’s like coming in from a war zone and being suddenly transported into normal life with no debriefing. For the last few months, I have been Doris the cancer patient, now I’m not. That’s not a loss. I never liked being Doris the cancer patient. The problem is that now I am suddenly Doris who?

  The question mark is my question mark. Everyone else thinks I am just Doris again. I seem to be the only one who doesn’t know who I am. But no, it is not that. It is the reverse. It’s not that everyone else knows who I am, it’s that I am the only one who knows who I am not.

  Greg and I talk again about my switching doctors. We were on the verge of doing this when the recurrence struck. Greg has someone in mind for me. It’s important to do it and I want to, but I also feel a little sad and apprehensive. How will I get on with this new person? What will he be like? It’s been so comforting having someone who knows me. I feel like the new kid in school again.

  John, my new gyn-oncologist, is in a different hospital on the other side of town. He’s a calm, thoughtful man whom I like instantly. He considers my questions and answers them fully, giving the sense that he has all the time in the world. As the standard gyn-oncologist’s schedule reads like the average work week compressed into a day, the all-the-time-in-the-world impression is prize-worthy. I like his responses too. There’s a quiet optimism about them; although, he notes, of course, that the road ahead is full of uncertainties. I feel enormously relieved as I leave his office.

  Life post-cancer is strange. In a way, it’s stranger than life during cancer. Then at least, you know what you’re doing. Cancer fills your life like a school schedule—doctor’s appointments, blood test appointments, treatments, scans, regimes to follow. Your progress is updated frequently. There are regular exams and feedback follows. You know where you are.

  Post-cancer, there are no road maps. I’m still feeling tired. Much more tired than I had imagined I would be. And my whole body seems to have slowed down. Keeping at my normal weight requires more effort than it used to, as if even my metabolism is sluggish. Everyone imagines that cancer leaves you transparently thin. The women on my email list laugh hollowly at this assertion. They write, bemoaning the non-dispersable pounds that have piled on during and post chemotherapy. They diet and exercise and still remain frustratingly chubby-cheeked, while everyone tells them how well they look. Translation: you don’t look like the death’s head I expected. Their doctors cheerily tell them not to slim down; that fat is good. Translation: at the end, when the cancer has spread and obstructed your bowel and you can’t eat, that fat will keep you alive a little longer. This does not make them feel good. Some women write that their oncologists have told them that their difficulty in losing weight is quite common after this chemotherapy. The tiredness everyone seems to take for granted.

  My hair is beginning to look like one of those army buzz cuts; very trendy at the moment. I’m still wearing hats a lot, but when I remove them, everyone assumes I have been to one of those super-expensive, beyond chic hairdressing salons. The sight of a shaved head is still relatively rare in the Melbourne I frequent, but I am told there are suburbs in Sydney where I would already be passé. I also have a lot of very fine blonde fuzz on my face, which probably wouldn’t be trendy anywhere. This, I believe, is a passing phase as my hair follicles everywhere receive their get-out-of-jail card.

  Apart from the sense of physical weakness, I’m shaky emotionally as well. As I read about ovarian cancer, I continue to come across those sentences that say, ‘Once ovarian cancer has recurred, it is deemed to be incurable.’ And my heart jolts. Is that what I am? Incurable? No, of course I can’t be. And I read myself my personal Pollyanna tract, the one that goes: ‘It was just a left-over teensy weensy single seed and it’s gone now and you’ve had chemo, so it’s never coming back again.’ Some days I believe it, some days I don’t and some days I manage to believe both things at once.

  I am sitting at my desk today, working through a pile of paperwork, when the phone rings. It’s from the Australian Society of Hypnosis. They’re having their national conference at Alice Springs and Uluru; will I chair a symposium there? Yes, I say immediately. I have never been to the Northern Territory, although I’ve occasionally thought of doing so.

  We work out arrangements, what the symposium will be about, what I’ll h
ave to do. It’s in two years’ time, in September, when the Territory is supposed to be at its best. I put the phone down. The Red Centre. What will it be like? I feel a sense of excitement. And then suddenly I think: two years. Will I still be here? And then I think, what the hell. If I’m not, they’ll just have to find someone else to chair the symposium.

  It’s an odd flip, one that I’ve repeated before. One minute I am the parachutist—jittery, peering terrified over the edge of the hatch. The next minute I’ve jumped, trusted to Fate; the parachute will either open or it won’t.

  But the dislocation of that moment keeps revisiting me. I’ve made a plan for two years’ time and I don’t know whether I’ll be alive or not. It is totally disorienting; a gap in what was supposed to be a smoothly continuous future and I can’t join it together. And just as the tongue seeks out the crevice left by an excised tooth, so my mind keeps returning to it, trying to put it back. But it is as if I’ve lost a piece of the puzzle; a piece that I never even noticed before. Sometimes I feel that I am down on my knees, hunting for it, muttering to myself over and over, ‘Where is it …? What happened to …?’

  Anniversary

  It is summer again. The city has taken

  up angels, lost frogs, the full moon.

  Nobody wants to end here. Six miles

  to the east the hospital sits brooding,

  hatching its beds,

  stretching its neck up to heaven.

  You rose there too last February,

  the Lazarus month. Remember

  how it was then, to live in the mirror,

  below sleep, below reflection, the delicate

  violence of resurrection.

  Losing your hair as the year bled

  leaves, streaming and drifting.

  And the dream one night: you and all the bald

  headed women alive by the sea

  buying your boots for the tide

  in finest leather—indigo, purple, emerald green.

  The sea is sweet there, the rocks, precarious.

  Getting dressed each day

  you could see how they’d laced up your skin

  as if it were a shoe to keep your foot in—

  what were they frightened

  would slip away?

  And what was the deal you made?

  The gas flowers, your corsage,

  Your date, the surgeon’s face

  masked and fancy-gowned—

  Prince of the masquerade.

  Your feet quite bare, and isn’t it queer,

  where has the last slipper disappeared?

  ALL THE TIME I WAS GOING through chemotherapy, Afterwards was the country I dreamed about. It was the place I’d seen countless times on TV; it had different locations, different vistas, but the scene was always the same. The athlete surfaces at the end of the winning lap of the pool; breaks through the ribbon on the marathon track; completes the perfect, daring dive; comes dripping, panting, sweating, back to the cheers of the crowd; the cooling drink; the caring hands; the hugs; the flowers; the walk on down from the podium into happy ever after. I knew exactly what it would be like.

  Such a shame the rest of the universe didn’t.

  It is seven months since I finished chemotherapy. The avalanche of hopes thwarted, dreams blocked, paths dead-ended—and all the other clichés that trip so tritely off the page and so crushingly into real life—has continued. It has done more than continue. It has overtaken the Energiser Bunny. It feels unrelenting, unstoppable and overwhelming.

  Halfway through the year, in a kind of dazzle of disbelief at the sheer flood of bad luck, I wonder whether I am just imagining it. Have I become so fragile, so sensitive that even a tiny tap feels like a knock-down blow? Is my delicate mindset exaggerating the frequency with which plans turn sour?

  I sit down and write a list, complete with dates, of the important things that have gone awry over this last six months. It is a long list. I show it to a friend. ‘It’s not normal, is it?’ I say. ‘It’s not normal to have so many things go wrong and keep on going wrong?’ She looks at the list and blanches. The avalanche continues.

  Am I causing this? I wonder. Am I somehow sabotaging events and people around me? I look at the list again. I decide that if I was able to cause this degree of controlled disaster, I would already be dictator of the world. They literally are events that are out of my hands. That, in a way, is the most horrifying part of it all. An internal saboteur, I can accept; a world which seems to delight in thwarting me at every turn, I don’t understand.

  I spend the year hauling myself up, collapsing in a teary heap, hauling myself up, collapsing, and so on. It is taking every ounce of energy and strength that I have. The six-year-old statistician at the back of my mind is dismayed. This is not the way the universe is supposed to work. I’ve ploughed my way through cancer, I’m due for a break. I’ve had my tough time, now I’m supposed to have my good time. I’m not supposed to be met with this torrent of blockages and disappointments. I am confused, angry, sad and despairing—usually all at once. This is the time no-one tells you about. I have walked into the wrong story.

  In the right story, I was supposed to fight my way through the setback of cancer recurrence. To put in the hard work of it, the slog of it. To dare it, defy it, transcend it—to simply get through it. Then I was supposed to go home. Really go home. The home of the Monopoly board, where you get $200 just for the achievement of getting there; the home where good is rewarded and effort recognised; the home that soldiers dream of and that never really exists.

  Life is shaking me by the neck and making me give up the last vestige of my favourite illusion. It’s the one I drank in with fairytales and refused to give up. It’s the one that most of us, even as adults, have held onto in some secret part of ourselves. It’s the one about life being fair.

  And I am so angry about this. I feel like the toddler who has been denied some promised reward, shrieking, ‘It’s not fair! It’s not fair!’ It’s not fair that I went through all this, did the right thing and got thumped on the head. It’s not fair! I’ve been cheated!

  And I also feel guilty. Here am I wailing about fairness, when many of my early friends from my internet group are already dead. How dare I, the survivor, have a tantrum about life being unfair?

  But I am. And I continue to. Alternated with guilt. Alternated with deep, deep sadness as I begin to count the costs of the war, the losses strewn over the battlefield, the devastation. This is the mourning I thought I wasn’t going to have.

  It’s tricky, mourning as a survivor. Your losses are minor compared to those who didn’t survive. How self-centred, to focus on your damage when there is far greater wreckage all around. And there is a strange intertwining of luck and loss. How ungrateful to be mourning losses when you should be rejoicing that you’re alive? The strictures go on and on and the guilt that they produce makes mourning a difficult negotiation. Because there are real losses. And they need to be acknowledged and honoured, not denied.

  Throughout the months of chemotherapy, I have been a highwire walker, my beam, a slender plank, suspended, quivering, above a chasm. I have adopted the principles of air walking—don’t look down, one foot in front of the other, concentrate on where you’re going. How else can you make such a crossing?

  I have stepped off the beam now onto the relative safety of the small, high-up platform. I can afford to look down. And the view is terrifying. I thought the platform would be a place of rest and comfort. It is indeed safer than the beam. But on the beam, I focused only on the solid plank in front of me. Here I can see what I have been crossing. It is spread out beneath me. I don’t know whether I can get down or whether there is still more to cross over.

  When Martin and I were out driving once, we encountered a towering monolith smack in the middle of nowhere—an electricity generation plant. The engineer in Martin was immediately aroused. There is no engineer to arouse in me. My only flicker of interest in engineering occurred when I discov
ered that within the engineering faculty at Melbourne University was the enchantingly named Department of Power. I wondered briefly about whether there was a Professor of Power and what he would look like and then my millisecond flirtation with the world of engineering faded and died. So I am not as wildly enthusiastic as Martin at the prospect of exploring this building. Nevertheless, I get out of the car and follow him up.

  And up. We are in a small elevator which is creaking slowly upwards to the full, formidable height of the building. Finally it stops. The door opens and we step out onto a landing. And freeze. In front of us is a floor. But it is a floor made of rigid steel mesh. It is tough, strong and presumably perfectly safe. But I will not step foot on it. You can see right through it. I am up, twelve storeys high and I can see, with absolute shivering clarity, the depth of the fall; the sheer, terrible drop of breath-wrenching nothingness, right underneath my feet.

  The mesh is spread from one wall to another, like a lace floor. Its loops are three centimetres wide, a foot could never go through them, but all I can see is the gap—the black mouth of the fall, winking between each interlocked, tensile thread. A part of me is telling myself that it is safe; that the mesh is strong and will hold me. Every other part of me is recoiling and screaming: No! No! Danger! Don’t go! I feel, insanely, that if I step out onto the mesh—no matter how slowly I go, how much care I take—some part of me will slip right through it.

  I can see now that I have been walking this wire floor my whole life. We all have. It has been disguised though, to make it seem solid, safe. The gap cannot be seen, nor the fall. It has taken cancer to make it visible. And now that I know what I am walking on, nothing feels the same anymore.

  I am mourning for my old self who didn’t know this; who assumed that the future stretched out as far as she wanted it to; for the self who was fit and strong and could work an intense, ten-hour day and dance for three hours after it. I am mourning for the illusions stripped away, the idealism, the betrayals, the hurts.