The door closes.
When I wake up the room is dark, and I realize I have slept the afternoon away. Regret floods in quickly. More time wasted. It is hard not to jealously protect the days when days may be all I have left. Not years, I know that much. But weeks, months? How long is a piece of string? A wrinkle in time? A ripple in the ocean?
The house is quiet. Too quiet. I think they have all gone out and left me and I am confused. But then I hear soft murmurings of noise drifting in through the French doors, and smell something that gets my stomach rumbling.
The back lawn is lit up with the light of a thousand fairy lights. They are strung from tree to tree, along the deck, and even around the clothesline. The barbecue is fired up and the smell of sausages is heavy in the air. The picnic table has been set and has candles in jars along the center. I can see that Kate has picked some of her prized roses from the front garden and they are arranged prettily in a jar in the middle. It is a magical sight that takes my breath away and I emit a soft “Oh!” that makes the assembled people turn. There are more bodies in the shadows than there should be, and I wonder who else is here.
“Ava,” Mum says, looking up. “There you are. Are you feeling any better?”
I nod, walking down the steps to join them on the lawn. “What’s all this in aid of?”
She turns to see what I mean. “Oh, the lights? They’re for you. We wanted to do something to cheer you up a little. Difficult, I know, in the circumstances. But we must try nevertheless.” She gives me a watery smile, her face slipping with the grief lying just beneath the surface.
My dad, Kate, and Amanda’s parents are here, as well as Kate’s older brother Craig, his wife, Stephanie, and their four kids. Growing up, Craig was like an older brother to Amanda and me too, in that he both looked out for us and tormented us at the same time.
It’s a small gathering of people that I consider family, and it’s just what I needed.
“You guys are the best.” I smile.
“We know,” Amanda says through a mouthful of sausage. “What?” she says when we all look at her. “It’s quality control—I have to try them first.”
We sit around the table together and we eat—sausages and home-made salads and bread rolls—and it’s a pleasant night. I sit quietly, mostly, content to observe and listen to the many stories and conversations going on around me. The kids run around the lawn shrieking and playing tag and I remember similar occasions when I was growing up when I did the same. Barefoot on the grass, bellies full, the stars overhead. Soft music plays from the stereo inside, and the scent of the sea is particularly strong tonight. I feel at one with nature, connected to both the earth and the heavens, but then I guess I do have a foot currently in both camps. My dad sits beside me and I nestle in against his chest, his arm around me. My mother fetches a blanket for my knees; it’s more of a gesture because it’s not overly cold. She is looking after her daughter as best as she can.
“Do you remember when you got that scar?”
My dad’s gentle voice brings me out of my reverie.
He is looking at my hand, which is cupping a wineglass and resting on the table. I look at the scar he is talking about and realize I haven’t noticed or thought about it for a long time. Even though of course I do remember how I got it, I stay silent, hoping he’ll tell the story. He doesn’t disappoint.
“You were so tiny,” he says. “Only five or six. But you insisted on coming fishing with me, wouldn’t be persuaded against it. Your mother said if I let any harm come to you she’d kill me herself, with her bare hands. Luckily for me she wasn’t serious, eh?”
“I wanted to bait the hook myself,” I prompt him.
“Yes, you did. You certainly weren’t squeamish like some other little girls. You stuck your hand in the bucket of fish guts and chose the biggest piece you could find, then you stuck that hook in so hard—”
“It went out the other side and into my thumb,” I finish, smiling.
“I’ve never heard someone scream so loud.” He chuckles. “Jesus, you gave me a fright. I thought for sure you’d lost a body part from the amount of blood. I started planning on a new life somewhere your mother wouldn’t be able to find me.”
He reaches over to rub the long white scar gently.
“Two stitches,” he says. “And you didn’t flinch. Not once. You were so brave.”
“I had you to hold my hand.” I smile up at him.
“You always will.” His voice chokes up with emotion. He doesn’t say much about what’s happening, my dad. But you can see it in his eyes, that he’s hurting.
“You’re still so brave,” he carries on. “Ava, your mother showed me the things people have been saying after your magazine article. Very nice things. There’s a lot of people keeping you in their thoughts, you know. Maybe, if enough people do…” He trails off.
I lean back to frown at him. “Don’t tell me Mum’s got you believing in miracles too.”
“Of course not,” he says. “Although for her it’s not so much about believing as it is hoping.”
“It’s false hope. She’ll only get more hurt in the long run.”
“You can’t blame her for wanting things to be different.”
“No.” He’s right. Of course I can’t.
“Anyway, I was thinking. This wedding idea of yours. I know I thought it was a bit odd to start with. But the more I think about it the more I’ve come around to the idea. And I think you should let the magazine document the journey. It’ll be like a legacy, of sorts.”
“Yeah, I just don’t know, Dad. Won’t it be a bit morbid? All those people reading, watching, waiting for me to die?”
“I think it’s the opposite. They’ll be watching you live out your life, on your terms. Ultimately it’s your decision, of course. But people have taken a shine to you. Which is only natural, because you’re just wonderful.”
I stifle a smile. “You might be a touch biased, Dad.”
“So what if I am? Anyway, you get your looks and your zappy”—he clicks his fingers—“personality from me, although don’t tell your mother I said that. She likes to take all the credit.”
We exchange an inside smile at the joke.
“Just think about it,” he says, echoing Kate’s earlier words.
“OK.” I nod. “I’ll think about it. For you.”
“Good girl. Now come here.” He pulls me in close and kisses the top of my head, just like he did when the doctor sewed up my finger. If only this was as easy a fix.
Chapter Fifteen
All credit to Nadia, because writing is much harder than I thought. I sit down one day to write my first “advice” column, although the word makes me cringe because, really, who am I to give advice to anyone? I’m not an expert on anything, unless you consider the TV show Friends a specialist subject. I have a bit of an addiction to reruns of that particular show, and even though I’ve seen every episode at least three times, I’m still not sick of it. I could easily rattle off the story arc of every character through seasons one to ten, but, unfortunately for me, that’s not the kind of thing they’re after. I sit and stare at the laptop screen for a while, then I stare out the window instead for a change of scenery, hoping for inspiration. None comes. In the end, after I call my mother and complain that I can’t do it and they’ll just have to accept that, she advises me to write the kinds of things I’d like to have known about before I was diagnosed. Or observations of life since. What’s important to me now as opposed to then, for example. Her advice made it easier, because there was really only one, major thing that I wished I could go back and tell my pre-cancer self. And that was this:
Be a better advocate for your own health.
I was twenty-four when I first found the lump. It wasn’t like I was actively searching for it, because at that age breast cancer was the last thing on my mind. I was young, after all, in the prime of my life. I worried about things like the fine art of balancing my paycheck between my bills and a so
cial life, or whether my thighs looked big in my jeans or there was enough makeup in the world to cover my latest breakout. I certainly wasn’t giving any thought to dying.
I was in the shower, enjoying the exotic scent of my new coconut body scrub, when I thought I felt something. Nothing obvious, just something. I prodded and rubbed the area on my right breast, just to the side, almost under my armpit, for a few minutes before I decided I was imagining things, because sometimes I could feel it and sometimes I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be anything serious, I reasoned, if I could only find it half the time.
So I dismissed it until a few weeks later, when I felt it again. I went along to my GP, only my normal GP wasn’t there and I was ushered in to see a twelve-year-old-looking woman with a waist-length braid who looked like she’d be more at home under a skipping rope. “It’ll be nothing. A cyst, most likely,” she said, in what she imagined was a reassuring way but actually came across as massively condescending.
“But what if it’s not?”
“Then there are a myriad of other possibilities. It is highly unlikely, at your age, to be malignant.”
“Are you sure you’re, you know, qualified?”
She’d smiled like she’d heard that a hundred times that day already and asked me to lie down on the bed.
She couldn’t feel it. I put my finger over it and she tried again. She frowned.
“If anything it feels like a slight thickening, rather than a lump. I think it’s hormone-related. Where are you on your cycle?”
“I don’t know, somewhere in the middle?”
“Come back and see me in a month, once you’ve had a period. If you can still feel it, that is.”
A month later not only could I still feel it, but it felt bigger. Harder.
My usual GP was back from her holiday, resplendent with a golden tan and an air of seaside-induced breeziness. I’ll never forget the way her smile slipped, and how her eyebrows almost met above her nose when she frowned.
“Oh, yes, I can feel it,” she’d said. “Let’s book you in for an ultrasound.”
She saw the look of abject terror on my face.
“Just to be on the safe side.” She smiled. “I’m sure it’s nothing more than a completely benign cyst.”
It wasn’t.
The lady who did the scan gave nothing away, although I searched her face for clues. I was still feeling fraudulent, like I was making a drama over nothing and sucking up appointment time that some poor woman somewhere with a real problem could have been using.
My breast had never seen as much action as it got over the next few weeks. I got used to flopping it out on slabs while it was squashed and photographed and scanned and poked and prodded and drawn on and had needles stuck in so the guy who did my lumpectomy would know where to cut.
“It’s OK,” the oncologist said. “We’ve caught it early. I’m fairly confident I can remove it all doing a lumpectomy.”
After the operation his face told a different story. He didn’t get clear margins. He’d need to go in again. I signed the form that gave him permission to do a full mastectomy if needed, while inwardly I made deals with a God I had no faith in for this not to be the case.
Afterward, good news, this time. Better. No mastectomy required, just tissue removal. The margins were clear. He’d got it all. My lymph nodes came back clear; it hadn’t spread.
I had chemotherapy and radiation treatment. The skin on my breast turned red like sunburn and blistered. It hurt. It hurt like hell. My hair fell out. I moved back in with my parents, gained twenty kilos, and looked like a bloated caricature of myself. The nausea was ever present and I threw up until my teeth started to rot. The worst thing was, when I looked in the mirror I saw cancer, not me.
“But you’re too young,” people would say, puzzled. “Isn’t that an older woman’s disease?”
Cancer is an indiscriminate bastard.
I started on a course of Tamoxifen, a drug that decreased my chances of developing secondary cancer. It wasn’t easy; the drug made me develop early menopausal symptoms and the hot flashes were horrendous. But every time I took another pill I told myself I was doing this so that I could live. Everything was going to be OK.
Until it wasn’t.
Notes from Ava
(Women’s Weekly, September 25)
YOU are the best advocate you could ever possibly have when it comes to your own health.
That doctor, sitting in the chair opposite you, they’re human too. And as well-meaning as they generally are, they’re often harried; overwhelmed by an overburdened health system and its demands on their time. Medicine is a business just like any other, with a bottom line and goals and targets that must be reached. That doctor in front of you might have had a rough night, little sleep, caring for a newborn at home or an elderly dementia parent, recently moved into the annex. They might be distracted, worrying about when they’re going to have time to type up the last three patients’ notes, and yours, before it all becomes a domino effect and the rest of the day goes down the gurgler. They might be thinking about what they’ll have for dinner, or wondering why Brenda the receptionist gave the other staff members Christmas cards but not them. Have they done something to upset her?
Fifteen minutes, tops. That’s all the time you have to convince the doctor sitting in front of you that something is potentially wrong. You know this, because you know your own body, certainly far better than they, who have only just now made its acquaintance, do.
Most of the time, of course, they will be correct with their diagnosis. They have to be; it is, after all, what they go through seven years plus of training for. But sometimes, just sometimes, they’re not. And it’s not out of malice. They don’t personally want to see you hurt or dying. But they’re human, like you, and humans make mistakes. Cancer symptoms can mimic symptoms of other health issues. After all, how many of us are tired most of the time? And does anyone really have perfect bowel movements every day?
Don’t be fobbed off if you are unhappy with the outcome. Seek a second opinion, a third if necessary. If that offends them, they are not the right doctor for you. (Or anyone, for that matter.) Push to see a specialist; pay for the tests yourself if it comes to it. Don’t be afraid to have a voice. Not all people who get ill fall into a generalized age group, or a particular gender. You’re not “too young” to have cancer. No one is.
You will never regret standing up for yourself.
But you will regret it if you don’t.
Chapter Sixteen
What the hell is that smell?”
Amanda’s nose crinkles up with disgust as she steps out of the back seat of my mother’s car. Even though I was in the slightly roomier front passenger seat, my legs are cramping, and as I stretch them I tell myself it’s from the car journey, not the cancer.
My mother gets out of the driver’s side and inhales deeply.
“Ah,” she says, “that, my dear, is the smell of the country. A combination of cow shit and silage hay.”
“It’s disgusting.” Amanda turns to me. “You can’t seriously consider having your wedding here. Not with that smell.”
“I don’t know,” I say, looking around. “I think it’s charming. Anyway, I’m sure you’d get used to it.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” she mutters.
A car crunches on the gravel driveway as it pulls in behind us. Nadia gingerly climbs out of the back seat, keeping one hand firmly on the door and looking around as if she has just been transported into another dimension.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” she asks.
Despite the fact that she herself formed the same first impression, Amanda rolls her eyes at me. She doesn’t like Nadia; I know this because she told me in no uncertain terms after our first meeting. With Amanda you get one chance to make her like you. Screw it up and that’s it.
“Looks like it.” I point to a sign on the wooden gate in front of us. MARMALADE FARM.
She gives a stiff lit
tle smile. “How quaint.”
I’m surprised when two other cars pull into the car park and lift one hand to shield my eyes from the sun so I can see them clearer. One I recognize but can’t place, until Kelly clambers out and I realize it was at Kate’s house when they did the first interview.
“Hi, Ava,” Sophie calls out warmly as she exits the passenger side.
“Hi,” I squeak back, caught off guard. “What are you guys doing here?”
She looks at Nadia, who frowns at me. “What do you mean?” she asks. “Have you forgotten we’re doing a series of articles on your search for the perfect wedding?”
“No, of course not,” I say. “I just didn’t realize we were doing the whole shebang again.” I gesture to Kelly and Sophie. Then a thought occurs to me. If they’re here to do makeup again, then that must mean…
“Hi, Ava.” At the sound of his voice I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment before I open them and turn around. “James, hi.” He looks even better than I remembered.
“I thought last time was a one-off job?” I say, trying hard not to betray how glad I am that this was not, in fact, the case.
“It was supposed to be, yes.” His manner is slightly stiff, as if he is here against his will.
“Oh?”
He frowns as if he’s irritated by having to explain. “The magazine’s normal photographer is still sick so Marilyn begged me to help out again today. I’ve made it clear it’s the last time, though. This isn’t my normal line of work.” He adds the last sentence disdainfully, and I wonder what exactly he means in particular. Weddings? Women’s magazines? Dying women in wedding dresses?
“Oh.” And there I was, hoping he’d wanted to see me again. My mother hears the flat tone in my voice and gives me a sharp look. Meanwhile Amanda is giving me bug eyes.
“James, can I have a word,” Nadia calls. “I just want to compare notes so we’re both on the same page as to the direction of the article.”
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