Eating the Underworld (24 page)

‘Yes,' she says rather weakly. I can hear her thinking that at least if there's any trouble, she'll be the one with the sharp instrument in her hand.

After the blood draws, I ring Jim's secretary, to see if my blood counts are okay. They're not. She tells me that they're very low and she doesn't think I'll be able to do chemo on Friday. She adds that Jim hasn't seen them yet, but she'll ring me when he does.

I am stricken. Not have my chemo this week? That means I won't be able to finish on my birthday. I feel
like a child denied a long-awaited treat. (But Mummy, you
promised
me my chemo … wah!)

Waiting to hear from Jim, I am as nervous as an athlete waiting for the umpire's decision. I have been in a competition, with each blood test doubling up as the scoring board for ‘me' versus ‘the treatment'. So far, it's been me: 3, treatment: 0. While not exactly thumbing my nose at it, I've been getting cocky. Now it's bouncing about on the other side of the ring, shadow-boxing the air and saying, ‘Hey baby, now we're getting down to it.'

Jim rings after a couple of hours. Yes, my blood counts are very low, but he's decided to give me the chance to get them up. I can have another blood test on Friday morning and if my counts are high enough, I can have my chemotherapy that afternoon. And to top this all off, I don't need to take my dexamethasone in advance; he'll give me extra in the drip if I do have chemo.

Buoyed by the chance to score again, it takes a moment for me to realise that I only have a day and a half to get my white count zooming into ‘sock it to me' zone. How I get this to happen, of course, is another question. I sit down and think about the hypnotic tape I made for myself at the beginning of chemo. Back then, I included a suggestion for keeping my white counts high, but I see now that the image I used wasn't the best. I had focused on the count—that is, the number—as being like a cork floating in water. It was pushed down, but would immediately bob up again. It occurs to me now, that it would make more sense to focus on the bone marrow, where the
white cells are actually manufactured; to imagine it revving up, producing more and more of the white cells I need.

I remake my tape using this new image. I imagine a factory full of enthusiastic workers. It is lit up and bright, bouncy music is pouring from it. The production line rolls at full speed, day and night, tended with increasing zeal by its energised workers. They are producing neutrophils, a particular kind of white cell, that Jim uses as his measuring stick for chemo-readiness. I play my tape twice a day and call up the factory image each time. I have no idea if it's going to work.

I did it! My neutrophil count went from 0.6 to 1.4. I get home from chemo and hospital this morning feeling groggy and very, very tired—but victorious. The fatigue is much more marked than before and when I read, the letters on the page go blurry. But hey, it's four down now and only two to go! While I was in hospital, I was told that my platelets were also very low and that I might need a transfusion. I decide instead to add them to the production line of my bustling hypnotic factory.

A few months into the future, after I've finished all of my chemos, I will pick up the results of all my blood tests over the chemotherapy period and spread them out before me. I am graphing the changes in levels of neutrophils and platelets. And it is fascinating. Before I changed my tape, the neutrophils and platelets were cycling in tandem, rising and dipping together on pretty much parallel lines. After I changed the image on my tape, focusing on the neutrophils, my
neutrophils started to rise. The platelets continued to go down. Two days later when I began to focus on the platelets as well—bingo, they began to rise. And even through the succeeding fifth and sixth chemos, they both remained higher than the level they'd reached for the fourth chemo. It's not a controlled double-blind experiment with hundreds of subjects, but as a single case study, it looks pretty good to me.

It's a couple of days since coming home from chemo, and I'm still very tired, but the blurry vision has gone. My concentration span is now a wraithlike echo of what it used to be. It's hard to settle down to reading a novel, for instance. As usual, I'm amazed by how little I remember of the chemo experience. The strongest image that I'm left with is of Neil, an oncologist who was standing in for Jim, examining my hand and wrist, looking for veins. He turns my hand over delicately, touching the veins with his fingertips tracing the thin blue lines. He looks as if he is examining an ancient map or reading tea-leaves. Then he just slips in the needle.

I'm definitely feeling much more debilitated this time. In tandem, I'm also feeling bored and cranky, like a sick child who doesn't have the resources to entertain herself. I wake in the morning, thinking of lots of things I want to put in my journal but by the time I'm up, the flow of thoughts has deserted me. I feel like a blob.

My eyebrows have almost disappeared and I have about three eyelashes left. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, my face looks so pale and featureless that
I think ‘where have I gone?' It's like becoming a watercolour instead of an oil painting. I never realised how much expression eyebrows and eyelashes give a face until I saw their absence. It's stranger than losing my hair. Then, my face was still my face; maybe even more so. Now, it feels as if my face is disappearing.

My lashes and brows really started diminishing a few weeks ago. Around that time I went to the chirpily titled ‘Look Good, Feel Good' seminar at the hospital. The seminars are run to help women make the most of their hair-by-chemo, complexion-by-drugs new looks. Cosmetic companies donate samples and there's a whole pile of wigs to try on.

It was fun opening our goody-boxes to see what cosmetics we'd been given; like being at a children's party. We each had a sprinkling of different brands. I copped an el cheapo one and was deeply envious of the woman sitting next to me—she'd lucked out with Christian Dior. No-one else was on my particular chemo regime and so I was the only one who was going to lose eyelashes and eyebrows as well as hair. I learned how to pencil in eyebrows, but about the eyelashes, alas …

Eyebrow loss, however, has a curious side-effect. Making my face up each morning proves to be unexpectedly entertaining. As I draw in my eyebrows, I discover I can pick my expression for the day—surprised, thoughtful, grim—whatever my fancy desires. The eyebrows say it all.

Today, in a shop, I have to produce my old driver's licence; the new one hasn't come through yet. I pull it
out and am suffused with the oddest feeling. The woman pictured, with all that hair, looks familiar. Who
is
she? It takes a second for my brain to click in and tell me that it's me. I feel as if there are two of me; as if our paths diverged mysteriously the way parallel universes are supposed to split off, and that one of me, the one with the hair, is going about her usual business in her usual world. The other me, the one without the hair, has been transported into another world, quite separate from the normal, outside world and has remained there for the last five months. People visit, but it's like visiting a prison or a boarding school. They simply alight briefly on the outside, like butterflies, and can have no comprehension of the other reality within.

Fifth chemo time and my blood count is high enough for me to go ahead with it! White cell counts usually get lower, and stay suppressed longer, with each succeeding chemo. But my neutrophils are double what they were at this time last chemo and my platelets have jumped up and are much higher too! I am impressed. I think my body heard when I was talking to it. What a strange thought that is.

This chemo is an eye-opener. This time, at the beginning, one of the nurses notices that I am distinctly uncomfortable. She notices this because I am writhing around like a snake on amphetamines, convinced that
if I can just stretch my legs enough, or get them into the right position, the ache will go away. She decides to dilute the chemo more than usual and runs it through more slowly. Magic! No more burning or achy, restless legs. If only I'd known the first time.

Jim stays a long time chatting on his trip through the wards. He says if he had to draw up a vision of how the ideal chemo patient would go through carbo-Taxol, it would be just as I've done it; he can't think of any improvements. I swell with ridiculous pride, and have to restrain myself from holding out my copy-book for an elephant stamp. The nurses have noticed it too and ask me whether I'll give them a talk about hypnosis.

I'm really tired today, but otherwise okay. I spend a lot of time dozing, which I'm getting exceptionally good at—about the only skill I'm perfecting these days. I'm also feeling the cold in ways I never thought possible. Everyone else is living in Melbourne, a city in the temperate climate zone. I am living in Antarctica. I'm wrapped up in multi-layers of wool, jumpers, turbans and scarves. But the warm air from the heating vent strikes my cheeks like a frigid breeze. I am sure that I am huddled in an igloo. I can't understand all these other souls striding around in what seem to be ridiculously flimsy outfits. One single wool jumper? Are they mad?

I am proofing the galleys for my poetry book. The Anti-Cancer Council is helping with the launch. It reminds me that when this happens, part of my public role will be as cancer survivor. I'm used to all sorts
of public roles—therapist, writer, bread-baking teacher—but cancer survivor is a new one. A part of me feels uneasy about it. I don't want to be put up as a ‘poster-girl' for cancer. And I hate the way the word ‘courageous' is automatically paired with ‘cancer survivor'. It makes me squirm. I've had it relatively easy. Others have had to cope with a lot more than I have.

I vacillate between wanting to step back and also knowing that it's important to step forward; to say to people: ‘Here I am. I've had cancer and I'm fine.' There's such fear and shame about cancer and maybe I can help by being public about it. Anyway, the launch is going ahead. And I'm really excited. The book has been my light at the end of the tunnel for all these months of chemotherapy. The launch is scheduled for September. I'm praying I have some eyelashes by then.

It feels like centuries since I first started chemo. I'm restless and frustrated. It's the social isolation that's got to me. In ordinary times, I'd be fine with this amount of time by myself. I'd be able to entertain myself, create things, go out, and so on. Now I don't have the energy to do that, but I do have the energy to miss it. My world seems to have shrunk to claustrophobic levels. And apart from a few dear friends, people barely visit or ring anymore. The steady ones who stay the course are a very small proportion of the people I thought of as friends. I think the others have ascertained that I'm okay and dropped out; they have their own lives to lead and be immersed in. With a lot of
friends whom I saw irregularly anyway, that's fine, but there are some whose absence really hurts me.

I have a renewed appreciation of the friends who have stuck by me. And I am enormously touched by the friends with whom I hadn't had much contact previously, who made time to come and see me or phone. With the ones whom I felt let down by, it has taken time. I don't think I'll ever be able to trust them in the old way, or be as giving as I used to be with them. I am more clear-eyed. The view is not the view I wanted to see, but it is there and I am finding now that I can live with it.

I'm not angry at them any more, the way I was months ago. I have to recognise the part I have played as well, try to understand it. I feel as if I've just taken a compressed course of Grown-Upness 101. Part of me has the slightly dazed expression of the child who's just accommodating the fact that no, the Tooth Fairy doesn't really exist. I am more cynical, not a characteristic I particularly like, but perhaps a more successful one than being too naively idealistic. I am simply more ready, more able, to see things as they really are.

Because it does feel now as if I am freer to simply take these friends for who they are. I don't want to idealise them but neither do I want to demonise them. It doesn't have to be an either/or situation. I know their flaws. And although I can't imagine that I will want our previous degree of closeness, I can still enjoy a friendship. Not everyone has the capability, or the will, to be there through the difficult times—and perhaps not everyone has to.

On the night I write this I have a very vivid dream. Someone has been stabbed to death in a back room of a housing complex. I am a detective and my colleagues and I have the job of finding the murderer. I am beginning to realise that it may actually be one of us. I tell the others that we should only explore this house in threesomes. That way, if one of the trio is the murderer and attacks one of us, the third member will be there to lend assistance. We go out on patrol, but it still feels scary. Finally, the whole group decides to visit the murder scene together. Although it is dark and frightening, I feel much safer in the company of my friends and colleagues. We enter the room in which the crime has been committed. It is full of shadows and menace. Suddenly, my friends surround me and I realise that they are, in fact, the murderers and have taken me here to get rid of me. I am frozen with horror as the dream ends.