Eating the Underworld

by Doris Brett

  But I am not taking any chances. I am more cautious than I used to be. And less optimistic. My dreams for the future are more guarded. Over-riding all this, though, is the fact that I have started writing again. And to my surprise, what I have begun to write are short meditative pieces focused on fairytales, with a guide/protagonist called Rachel, who simply appeared one day on the page.

  Physically, I am still tired. I feel as if my body has slowed down. I first noticed it halfway through chemotherapy; it is a change that has stayed with me.

  There are other changes that go with it. I feel the cold much more sharply; I fall asleep when I sit down to read; my skin and hair are dry; and when a doctor tests them, my reflexes are sluggish. She decides that what I need is the new star on the firmament—testosterone. I am not so sure that this is what I need, but she is convincing. And to top it all off, there are no side-effects, she says. I agree to the implant.

  What she hasn’t told me is that the body converts excess testosterone to oestrogen. Oestrogen, I’ve discovered, is not my body’s favourite substance. While most women feel good on it, if I take anything more than half the minimum dose, I feel ghastly—sluggish, bloated, depleted.

  A couple of weeks after the testosterone implant, I notice this familiar revolting feeling. This is when I do my research—definitely after the horse has bolted—and discover that my body is obviously converting testosterone to oestrogen at a great rate.

  After four weeks of feeling terrible, I call the doctor. She says she can remove the implant. I look doubtfully at the incision on my abdomen. It doesn’t look removable.

  In her office, I mention that I have to fly to Queensland tomorrow to run some workshops. Will the removal interfere with that? No, she assures me and begins to probe the incision. But it seems the implant is hiding. It does not want to be evicted. After a while, she concedes failure and stitches me up. I slope off moodily, contemplating the next few months of being oestrogen-bound.

  I’m on the plane to Queensland, enjoying the thought of a few days of sunshine. I’ve even managed to constrain my packing instincts so that I have only one carry-on bag. What bliss, to be able to just waltz on and off the plane as if I were taking the bus.

  At the hotel, I dump my bag and make ready for a quick change into beach clothes. This is when I discover I am covered in blood. The implant wound on my abdomen has been leaking steadily throughout the plane ride. The black pants I am wearing have provided excellent camouflage.

  I clean myself up, apply band-aids and clean clothes and head out to find a chemist selling heavier-duty bandaging power. I have barely stepped outside the hotel when I feel blood soaking my clothes. Unfortunately, I have also just spotted the best secondhand bookshop in the world.

  The bookshop wins out. After I finally rip myself away from it, the bleeding situation is too dire to proceed to the chemist. Back to the room for further clean-ups and clothing. This pattern, minus the bookshop, repeats itself three more times. I am bleeding too efficiently to let me get to the chemist without looking like an escapee from a horror movie. I am also down to my last usable item of clothing.

  I decide to try applying pressure and ice to the wound. I ring the hotel kitchen for ice. They say I can come and pick some up. ‘I can’t get down there,’ I say, ‘I’m bleeding,’ eliciting images of a gunshot victim. The staff are very sanguine about this and don’t question me further. Is this an example of the laid-back Queensland style? They bring up some ice and I lie down, apply it and think what to do.

  I am the guest of honour at a reception in an hour and a half. I have also managed to forget the names of my hosts, the people who organised this workshop. I daren’t risk another trip by foot to the chemist. With only one change of clothes left, the prospect of having to conduct the workshop clothed in the hotel’s bath towels looms alarmingly large. Perhaps shower curtains for the reception?

  I ring Reception and by dint of some heavy deductive reasoning, we eventually come up with a name that may or may not have something to do with the committee who invited me here. With some trepidation, I dial the number and it’s right! I explain my situation—stuck, bleeding on my bed, clutching an icepack and in urgent need of transport to the chemist.

  I’m in luck. The chairman of the committee is a GP and he has a car. In no time at all, I am engaged in intense discussion with the chemist’s assistant about bandages and their relative merits. She welcomes the challenge and I arrive back at my suite with a variety of heavy-duty health implements.

  The chairman binds me tightly with the elastic bandage, so that pressure is exerted on the wound. There is a strong resemblance to the corset-lacing scene in Gone with the Wind. There have to be less dignified ways to meet the person who is hosting one’s workshop, but I can’t think of them right now.

  Freshly bandaged and in my last remaining outfit, I sail down to the reception. The chairman offers to bind me up again tomorrow if I need it, but I thank him and say no, that would be a double-bind.

  The effects of the implant stay with me for several months. When they eventually wear off and I get back to my ‘normal’ post-chemo tiredness, I am so thrilled, that I feel terrific. Whatever was I complaining about all those months ago? I am a perfect example of the goat principle.

  The goat principle is based on an old story:

  A peasant living in a small village goes to his Rabbi. ‘Rabbi, Rabbi,’ he says, ‘what am I to do? Life is terrible! I live in a small hut with my wife and six children. There’s no room to move—always someone under your feet, it’s noisy, untidy, there’s never any peace. I can’t stand it anymore. It’s driving me mad. What am I to do?’

  ‘Do you have any chickens?’ the Rabbi asks.

  ‘Yes,’ the man says, surprised. ‘But what have chickens to do with this?’

  ‘I want you to take the chickens to live with you inside your hut,’ says the Rabbi. ‘Come back and see me in a week.’

  The man is startled, but this is his Rabbi, so he listens and obeys.

  A week later, the man returns. ‘Rabbi, Rabbi, everything is much worse. Now I not only have my wife and children in the hut, I have chickens everywhere making their messes and getting in everyone’s way. What am I to do?’

  ‘Do you have any geese?’ the Rabbi asks.

  ‘Yes,’ says the peasant, puzzled. ‘I have five geese.’

  ‘Take them into the hut with you also,’ says the Rabbi. ‘Come back and see me in a week.’

  The peasant is horrified, but he obeys.

  The next week, he returns. ‘Rabbi, Rabbi, things are worse than ever. Now I not only have the wife and children and chickens, I have the geese. They make such a loud noise and their droppings are everywhere. I can’t stand it. What am I to do?’

  ‘Do you have a goat?’ asks the Rabbi.

  ‘Yes,’ says the peasant, really puzzled now, ‘I have a goat.’

  ‘Bring the goat into the hut with you and come back and see me in a week.’

  The peasant is aghast. Did he hear the Rabbi properly? But he obeys.

  The next week, he returns. He is ashen-faced. ‘Rabbi, I never knew things could be so bad. Home is a madhouse—the wife, the children, the chickens, the geese, the goat. I can’t go on like this. Rabbi, what shall I do?’

  The Rabbi replies, ‘Go home. Take out of the hut the chickens, the geese and the goat and leave them outside. Come back and see me in a week.’

  The peasant returns the following week. His face is glowing. He is ecstatic. ‘Rabbi, Rabbi, this is paradise! The hut is so big and peaceful now. Only the wife and children. No chickens, no geese, no goats. I’ve never felt better in my life!’

  A couple more months pass. It’s two years now since I finished chemotherapy. The ground beneath my feet has felt solid for some time now. Apart from my three-monthly check-ups, I don’t think much about cancer or mortality. In a month, I’ll be flying to Alice Springs to chair the symposium I was asked to run two years ago. It seems like a lifetime ago.r />
  I am seeing my afternoon patients when I start to feel some abdominal pain. Indigestion, I tell myself and take some antacid. The pains continue, becoming more intense. Perhaps it’s food poisoning? But I can’t remember eating anything suspect.

  By evening I am in intense, unremitting pain. I’m beginning to suspect that it’s neither indigestion nor food poisoning. I start to remember stories I have read on my internet discussion group about bowel obstructions. These are nothing to do with constipation. They occur when parts of the bowel become stuck together or twist so that nothing at all—not fluid, food or air—can pass through. It’s a dangerous condition.

  I take a sleeping tablet to try to get some sleep, but after an hour I am up again. The pain is simply too gripping.

  It’s a long, long night. I ring John, my gyn-oncologist, in the morning and describe what is happening. ‘You’d better come in,’ he says. ‘We’ll need to take an x-ray. If it’s a bowel obstruction, you’ll need to be hospitalised.’

  So here I am, toting my little hospital bag once again. John rests his stethoscope against my abdomen and listens. He shakes his head. ‘That’s not sounding normal.’ The normal bowel is somewhat of a fitness fanatic and keeps itself constantly active with wave-like peristaltic motions. Like the average gym junkie, it also makes characteristic sounds as it goes about its workout. My bowel is not making those sounds.

  The x-ray is organised with great efficiency. I am rather less efficient—straightening myself up for the required snapshot is agony. When it is developed, the photo shows half of my bowel blown up to Michelin Man proportions while the other half is a skimpy, anorexic string. A classic bowel obstruction.

  ‘We’ll have to admit you and put you on a drip,’ says John.

  ‘Painkillers?’ I croak hopefully.

  ‘We’ll give you morphine.’

  A nurse leads me to my bed and returns, to my panting relief, gripping a syringe. Never have I been so excited about getting an injection. John comes back and with amazing deftness, captures one of my dehydrated veins and effortlessly inserts an IV. I am slack-jawed with amazement. Or perhaps it is the morphine.

  The course of action for the moment is to forgo anything by mouth—no food, no water—so as to rest my bowel and hope it untwists itself. The drip is there to keep me hydrated during the fast. If rest doesn’t do the trick, surgery may be necessary. And of course, the big question is: what is causing the obstruction?

  There is generally one of two likelihoods here. It will either be an adhesion, a late after-effect of my abdominal surgery, or it will be a recurrence of the cancer.

  With the morphine doing its magical work, I settle down to take in my surroundings. It is Friday afternoon and I am in a four-bed ward, peopled by three women in varying states of consciousness. I am attached to my old friend, the intravenous drip, and look to be here for the duration. My handbag is squashed into the drawer near my bed. In one of its interior pockets are tomorrow’s hard-to-get Melbourne Writers’ Festival tickets. I sent off for them two months ago. Also theatre tickets for Saturday night, booked an equally long time ago. Strange how we think we know what we’re going to be doing.

  I write out a list of patients for Martin to cancel; John has told me I’m not going to make it out by Monday. Then I get out my hypnosis tape and settle down in an attempt to commune with my bowels. I sink into trance and imagine them relaxing, untwisting. In my vision, they move slowly and sinuously like deep-sea creatures.

  An hour later, I feel a rumbling sensation in my abdomen, accompanied by the kind of noises that usually make me cringe in company and apologise for my internal symphony. This time I want to tape it, make a thousand copies. It’s my bowels, and they’re returning to the world! John is equally excited when he returns on his afternoon rounds. We have one of those Kodak moments, staring fondly at my abdomen as my bowels trill in an exceptionally melodic way.

  I, of course, imagine that now that progress is established, I can be up and at it again. I happily think of my theatre tickets waiting inside my bag. John, however, disillusions me. Don’t plan on getting out of hospital in the next few days, he tells me. I’m to stay on the drip and nil orally for a couple more days. Even though the situation is resolving, the next few days are crucial. After an obstruction, bowels are notoriously flighty and can get themselves into a twist again faster than the average hanky-fluttering Victorian heroine.

  So I stay. Life on the ward is chatty. The woman opposite me is in for some routine gynaecological surgery. She’s enjoying the rest and is in high spirits. Across from her is an older woman, also in for relatively minor surgery. They share a disdain for hospital food, making snide comments about breakfast, lunch and tea, as they heartily crunch into them. This goes down wonderfully well with me, starving in my corner on nil orally and ready to consider buttered shoe leather, if only I could remember where I put my shoes.

  On my left is an empty bed, soon to be filled with a lot of hustle and bustle. When we meet her, the occupant seems bright and intelligent, with a smart sense of humour. She’s come down from the country for some non-urgent surgery. Her family surrounds her—a pleasant-looking husband and the four best-behaved children I have ever seen. The older daughter, about fourteen I imagine, fusses quietly over the younger three. Not that there’s anything to fuss over. The younger three are as impeccably behaved as the older one. The four of them look as if they have just stepped out of the Stepford Gazette. The rest of us gaze with awe on these paragons of juvenile perfection.

  While his wife is in surgery, the husband takes the three younger ones downstairs. The oldest girl sits on her mother’s bed doing homework. I look over at it and notice that she is working on a poem. She asks if I’d like to read it and we start chatting. She’s obviously an extremely bright child. She’s being schooled at home by her mother, she says. They all are. Her parents don’t believe in the public system. ‘Do you miss the interaction with other school kids?’ I ask her. ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘learning at home just makes our family closer. That’s what’s important.’

  We chat for a while. ‘What do you want to do when you’re grown up?’ I ask. She’s not sure. She thinks she’d like to be a writer. Does she plan to study English at university? She recoils as if I had spat in her face. Clearly her mother is an anti-Leavis-ite, I think. But no. There are reasons that the English department hasn’t even thought of.

  ‘Satan is at university,’ she tells me. I gulp slightly. And then there is no stopping her as she expounds for twenty minutes on the root cause of all the world’s problems. ‘All you have to do is cast Satan aside, keep your thoughts pure and nothing can ever go wrong,’ she says. I file this away for future reference. She adds that this is not always easy. Satan is cunning and temptation is everywhere. Damn, I think, there’s always a catch.

  I arrive home, weak, but relieved. The fact that the obstruction resolved itself means that the cause is much more likely to be adhesions than a recurrence. John has organised a CT scan for me in a couple of days, to make quite sure.

  For the last two days, I’ve been allowed to eat (be still, my heart) jelly and chicken broth. I’m supposed to slowly work up to more solid food. It’s a regime that combines all the worst parts of being an infant without any of the fun, responsibility-free parts. In a few days, I have to deliver the oral part of a postgraduate dissertation and the week after that, I’ll be in Alice Springs, chairing symposiums and running workshops.

  CT Scan

  Mid-air, on your back, taking the slow-motion

  track straight to the magician’s maw.

  The assistant takes your wrist, a flick

  of iodine fizzes through you,

  the machines all pause and then resume.

  The Mysterious Floating Lady Act fills up the

  room.

  Inch by inch you are moving forward

  on the white bed toward the black

  opposite of moons

  where it waits to receive you.r />
  You will rest soon,

  translucent in a stranger’s hand.

  What do you do in a place like this?

  Where the walls talk, tell you

  Be still, don’t breathe.

  This is death you’re imitating

  in the lying room

  but you are still moving through, lit

  like the last great invisible candle

  like all the lost flares at sea

  calling Look for me. Look for me.

  It is not too late. There is still time

  to meditate on what

  can be done with light

  when it blooms inside the body,

  that bright, impossible unfolding,

  and how it might begin …

  arms spread like wings,

  the body’s filigreed, intricate suns

  swelling, lifting like solar wind

  so that you hover here,

  effortless, brilliant, ready

  for the most difficult trick of all—

  you will refuse to disappear.

  AS THE PLANE TAKES OFF from Adelaide, it is hard to believe that exactly fourteen days ago I was in a hospital bed, pumped full of morphine and attached to a drip. I’ve recovered seamlessly, apart from developing a strong aversion to jelly. I am in the window seat, enjoying looking down at the passing landscape. After a while, I start to doze.

  I awake about an hour from Alice Springs. I open my eyes sleepily, look out of the window and am jolted through with what feels like an electric touch to the heart. We are flying over the great, red desert of Central Australia and I have fallen in love.

  I have never reacted to a landscape in this way in my life. I have flown over and appreciated many beautiful and striking vistas, but never has anything moved me like this. I push, mesmerised, into the cold glass of the window pane. I want to see as far as I possibly can. I want to swallow it all in.