After Cleo

Reunion

Daughters, like cats, are only ever on loan

‘You’re going to forget most of this,’ said my old friend Greg, his face a halo of light, in the operating theatre. It’s easy to develop strange attachments to people when your survival depends on them.

Next time I saw Greg, he was wearing a red shower cap and seemed extremely perky. I assumed I was having an inappropriate dream about him. Would my hormones never leave me in peace?

‘It went well,’ said Greg. ‘We’re confident the cancer’s been removed.’

Oh. So it wasn’t an erotic fantasy. A stab of pain from an unlikely place, on my left side just under the ribs. Plastic snake. A drainage tube, a voice explained. Soon after, I was being wheeled down a grey corridor, mesmerised by the thousands of little holes in the ceiling. Do hospital architects have any idea how much time patients spend studying ceilings? An oxygen mask sucked like a starfish at my face.

‘Your husband’s waiting for you,’ said a nurse.

Sounded romantic, I thought. What could be sexier than six drains, a drip and catheter with matching oxygen mask? Oh, and legs encased in loud, hissing plastic tubes – something to do with reducing the risk of clotting. I was trussed up like Tutankhamun.

It was good to see the darling man, though he looked tired and worried. The only thing worse than being in a mess is upsetting people you love. I sent him home to sleep as soon as was politely possible.

Back to nothingness.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I became aware of a new sound over the hissing support hose. A female voice rolling over unfamiliar phrases. The words were musical and soothing. And loving, like a lullaby. Except none of the words were recognisable. A painkiller high. Obviously.

I opened my eyes to focus on a point near the window where Philip had been. A willowy profile and a head, pretty and feminine, was outlined in the shadows. Lydia?! The hospital drugs were playing tricks. I dropped reluctantly into a pool of semi-consciousness again.

Fighting through the haze of narcotics some time later, I looked over to where I’d seen the hallucination of Lydia. To my amazement, the figure was still there sitting ramrod straight in the chair beside the window, her eyes half closed. The words tumbled off her lips and wrapped around me. Chanting.

Lydia slowly became aware of me looking at her. She paused and smiled at me. Radiant light filled the room. Leaning forward, she placed three cool fingers on my forehead. And disappeared. Hospital drugs are so trippy.

Next thing Greg was standing over me comparing breast reconstruction to gardening. In the way a newly transplanted seedling requires water, he said, a new boob needs blood. The next twenty-four hours were going to be crucial. If my irrigation system did its job properly my transplanted tummy fat would ‘take’ and assimilate into its role as my new right breast.

‘And if it doesn’t work?’ I asked in a weak, breathy voice.

‘Then we’ll all have a good cry, wheel you back to theatre and weed it out.’

That took my mind off cancer cells.

A nauseatingly vivid print bore down from the opposite wall. Abstract; a coastal scene. A man’s face was hidden between the beach and the cliff. If I could’ve climbed out of bed I’d have hurled it out the window. Except the windows didn’t open.

A nurse, May from Malaysia, introduced herself and exchanged the oxygen mask for little tubes, one for each nostril – like the ones Tom Hanks had when he was dying of AIDS in the movie Philadelphia. They were surprisingly comfortable and less claustrophobic than the mask.

‘Isn’t it great your daughter’s here?’ said May, scribbling notes on a chart.

‘Lydia?’ I whispered in the pathetic little voice that didn’t belong to me.

‘Is that her name? She certainly amused us with that chanting. I’m broad-minded though. Healing takes all shapes and forms. I thought it sounded lovely.’

‘She’s here?’

‘Yes, she said she’s just flown in from Sri Lanka to see you. She brought you these,’ May said, pointing at three candles in the shape of lotus flowers on the window ledge.

It hadn’t been a dream after all. Lydia had left a month ago with no mention of returning. She must have flown home to be with me. My eldest daughter cared. Overriding my pain-wracked body and fuzzy brain, a new sensation coursed through me. Joy. Pure joy.

Lydia was actually here, living and breathing in this hospital. Three candles sat on the window ledge to prove it.

‘Wait till you get home before you light them. We can’t have naked flames in here. Oh and she also brought this . . .’ May added, holding up an old lemonade bottle half filled with amber liquid.

‘Holy water,’ she said with an amused twinkle. ‘I’d recommend boiling it before putting it anywhere near your lips.’

‘Where—?’ I croaked.

‘I sent her downstairs for a coffee,’ said May. ‘She looked tired. She’ll be back soon.’

Lydia’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. A white shawl was draped around her shoulders. With her long sleeves and high-buttoned neck, she looked almost Victorian.

This was a very different young woman from Lydia the sex columnist, or the stroppy little girl who’d once confessed to mooning cars from a motorway footbridge. She’d been under the influence of an Unsuitable Friend at the time, but had admitted that shocking innocent motorists wasn’t devoid of thrills.

It was hard to imagine the saintly being at my bedside was related to the vibrant, opinionated little girl who loved climbing door frames and diving fearlessly off cliffs into Lake Taupo.

I scanned her face for familiar landmarks – the chicken pox scar above her right eyebrow, the memory of a dimple in her chin. I was saddened to notice her eye sockets were hollow, the lids almost hooded, reminiscent of Ghandi after one of his hunger strikes. Yet as she moved toward me she was obviously still the same young woman I loved so much. I’d never seen such tenderness in her eyes.

‘You’re too thin,’ I wheedled. It was exactly the sort of thing Mum would have said.

Lydia blinked, possibly to repress annoyance.

‘I love you,’ she said gently.

‘Love you too,’ I responded, feeling wretched for having started on the wrong footing. I should’ve been first to say ‘I love you.’ Or at least, ‘Thank you.’

‘Are you thirsty?’ she asked. I nodded. She passed me a paper cup from the bedside table and prodded a straw into my mouth. Slurping tepid water, I felt weak and helpless. Holding the cup steady, Lydia was the powerful one now, the nurturer.

As I sank back into the pillow, there were a hundred questions I wanted to ask. What had made her change her mind about staying in Sri Lanka? When had she made the booking to come home and who’d paid for it? How come she’d lost so much weight? Had she been sick, or had she deliberately starved herself?

More importantly, how much further did she have to go to prove she was a separate entity who in no way ‘belonged’ to me? I was willing to keep my end of the bargain and let her sail into adulthood on her terms. When would she realise she no longer had to rail against me so stubbornly?

The only sentence I had energy to piece together though was: ‘When did you get here?’ A stupid question, but thoughts kept slipping through my head like jelly.

‘A few hours ago. I came straight from the airport.’

The tubes around my legs hissed. My brain was enveloped in cloud again.

‘Can I chant some more?’ she asked quietly.

I wasn’t that keen. Not if it was making the nurses laugh. I needed them on our side rather than making jokes about us being a family of fruitcakes.

Mum and Dad had raised us Church of England, but I’d ticked ‘No Religion’ on the hospital form. When a pastoral caregiver had stuck her head around the door asking if I’d like to pray with her before they wheeled me off to theatre, I’d waved her off. Her morbid expression implied she’d spent too many hours in front of the mirror practising sympathetic looks.

Too weary to string words together, I nodded for Lydia to go ahead. May smiled and said she’d be back in a few minutes.

My daughter settled into the chair again, closed her eyes and drew a breath. I felt uneasy verging on irritated at first. Her words were utterly foreign. They could’ve meant anything. Nevertheless, there was benevolence in them. And they undoubtedly meant something to her. She believed they had significance, even power. I let the chanting wash over me like waves on a windswept beach . . . and fell asleep.

I could’ve slept for hours, days even, if they’d have let me. But May stirred me every half hour to record vital signs and unravel my dressings to listen for a pulse inside the new boob. As night dragged on she said I had low blood pressure and a fever. It was of no interest to me. All I wanted was sleep. Turning toward the darkened window I saw Lydia’s profile, straight backed and motionless. There was no need to reassure or entertain her. She was meditating.

The night dragged on for weeks. I hungered for sleep. Toward dawn I hallucinated about being a prisoner of war. Soldiers jabbed me with spears every time I drifted off. Yet May was such a dedicated nurse she was more angel than prison guard. Every time I turned to the window Lydia was still there, silent and unmoving, asking for nothing. The constancy of her presence gave me strength. All the doubts I’d had about her caring melted in the dry hospital air.

There’s no real time in hospital. The outside world peels away. Nursing shifts tick over. Rain scatters black diamonds across the window – not enough to put an end to the drought, though. Dark sky fades to grey.

The hospital shook itself awake. Brisk footsteps, clattering pans, and nurses’ chatter brought the day alive. Trolleys bearing patients, food and medical equipment rattled down the corridor outside my room.

A sullen girl from Eastern Europe plonked a breakfast tray in front of me. Cornflakes in a plastic bowl and a tea bag. The smallest task was barely possible now my arms and legs were out of action. Lydia raised the spoon to my lips, then held the cup while I slurped tea.

She looked weary. I urged her to go home and rest. She pressed her cheek against mine. Suddenly, I remembered the question I really wanted to ask. A simple one, but loaded.

‘How long are you here for?’

The tubes on my legs hissed and sighed. If she was planning to leave the next day my heart would shatter.

‘As long as you need me,’ she replied.

My head sank back in the pillow. That was all I’d wanted to hear.

In the days that followed, my room filled with flowers. I felt deeply grateful to family and friends who’d sent them. An outsized card signed by all the women in my yoga group featured, inexplicably, a Siamese kitten.

The circle of women my sister, Mary, had talked about was already forming. They sent cards and emails, which Philip printed out and brought in. Some, he said, had left casseroles on the doorstep at home.

From the capsule of my hospital room, ambitions and deadlines flattened to nothing. A mastectomy is the ultimate reminder that the only thing that really matters is love and kindness.

Regrets? There weren’t many, except I’d taken life too seriously on the assumption there’d be decades spare for frivolity. I’d spent countless hours shut away from the world bent over keyboards producing probably millions of words. Instead of living life, I’d spent too much time writing about it.

Lydia, Mary, friends, the yoga group and readers who’d emailed in – sometimes I could almost feel the circle of women around the bed. Their good wishes and prayers seemed to fill the room. Some of the nurses felt it too.

‘This room has a lovely feel. I could stay here all day,’ said Nurse May before adding that my hair was a mess.

As she fished through my toiletry bag, I realised, with a creeping sense of shame, that I’d forgotten to pack a comb. Nurse Mary offered to buy one for me from the hospital shop. Returning soon after with the new comb, she stroked it tenderly through my hair. Kindness personified. Unable to sit up and barely able to move my arms, self-grooming was out of the question.

Visitors. An elating, daunting prospect. Even though Lydia spent hours at my side, I didn’t count her as a visitor because she didn’t demand conversation or any kind of performance from me. She was more a presence, a lucky charm, providing reassurance and serenity by simply being there. She didn’t mind if I drifted to sleep. Knowing she was there made it easier to sleep.

I longed to see the family, but not if my hissing legs and bottles of blood draped around the bed like macabre Christmas decorations caused alarm. Two figures appeared at the door that evening. Rob and Chantelle. Armed with bottles of mineral water and fresh limes, Rob knew exactly what was needed. He arranged my bed at the most comfortable angle, made sure the nurse call button was within easy reach, ran a watchful eye over the level of fluid in the drip. My mouth was dry as kitty litter and the mineral water spiked with fresh lime was nectar.

Philip’s anxious face appeared regularly. He stroked my forehead, admired the flowers, and asked if there was anything he could do. The best gift he brought was our Bose radio from home. Tuned quietly to a classical music station, it provided bedside companions in the forms of Bach, Beethoven et al. Mozart and flowers. What more could a girl want?

Another indispensible comfort was, oddly enough, a lambskin recommended by a nurse friend who’d been through similar surgery. Cast on my back for days and nights I welcomed its softness, and the way it seemed to let air circulate underneath me.

During a day shift, a young nurse accelerated my drip. Nine litres later my abdomen was bloated with enough fluid to resemble a seven month pregnancy.

Looking down at my distended abdomen bursting out of its corset, it reminded me of how Mum looked in her final days with bowel cancer. I felt nauseous. A ring of concerned nurses appeared.

‘What’s your pain level on a scale of one to ten?’ one of them asked.

My stomach was a sack of broken glass. I felt on the edge of passing out, but didn’t want them thinking I was a whiner. To be conservative I said six.

The nurses looked at each other. One of them said ‘As much as that?’

I was in too much pain to reply.

‘It’s subjective,’ the senior looking nurse said to the others. ‘If she thinks it’s as high as six that’s what it is.’

Nurses will sometimes talk as if you’re not in the room, calling you ‘she’, which gives you an opportunity to eavesdrop and find out how sick you really are.

They decided it was nothing to worry about and gave me an injection. Greg’s corset was exchanged for a softer body stocking. A few hours later, May appeared and wiped me down like a distressed baby who’d fallen out of its pram. She smoothed the sheets and settled me for the night. The woman deserved a sainthood.

Greg, a regular visitor, appeared soon after and announced his gardening efforts had succeeded. The transplant was thriving. I thanked him. He said it was the first time he’d seen me without my hair all over the place. The flatterer.

Encouraged, I ticked boxes for tomorrow’s menu. Mediterranean Pasta with Spinach and Parmesan followed by Crème Caramel for desert. It looked haute cuisine. Hospital food’s the same everywhere, though. The main course turned out to be made of cardboard, the Crème Caramel unapproachable.

Next morning, some drainage tubes were removed and the catheter was tugged out with a sting. I’d rather hoped to hang on to it. A permanent catheter would simplify plane trips and visits to the theatre no end. And now I had to hobble, bent double like a hag in an old fairy story, to the loo.

Not only that, it was now necessary to confront the lonely fear of ‘sitting out’. Perching on a chair next to a bed sounds simple; hardly even an activity. Good for you too, according to the nurses. It opens your lungs and gets your blood moving in directions it never goes when you’re lying down. The sitting out chair was hard. My tailbone hurt. I stared longingly at the bed, willing it to glide over and envelop me. Twenty minutes of sitting out was more than I could achieve. I pressed the buzzer after a few minutes and asked to be helped back to bed.

Then there were the arm exercises the hearty physio insisted I did ten times a day. Standing facing a wall and creeping my fingers up the wall was barely possible.

I hadn’t cried yet. Was something wrong? Philip brought Katharine, looking pale and falsely jolly. She wanted to show me a video on her camera of her school music concert. I agreed just to humour her. But as young soloists launched into the opening bars of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, just missing the top notes, my chest contracted.

The song reminded me of the pain that has always accompanied the challenge of being human, and the saintly beings who give solace through music and their own translucent purity – or (in some cases) hospital-strength medicine. For the first time since the last phone call with Lydia, I wept uncontrollably. Not the desperate barking of the previous episode but with the steady flow of an underground river.

Hospital time was both urgent and meaningless. The difference between going home on Monday or Tuesday could mean tears or elation. The woman two doors down who’d had surgery the same day as me was going home a day earlier. She was officially ‘doing better’ than me. I didn’t envy her. The idea of going home and learning to look after myself, specially with two drainage bottles attached, had no allure.

On some of her visits, Lydia helped me hobble bent double in a tangle of tubes and drainage bottles along the corridor. If I was feeling adventurous we’d catch the lift downstairs. I’d venture into the hospital courtyard and gulp gallons of fresh air. Tainted with cigarette smoke, it was raw and exhilarating.

Days became cycles of routine – the sulky Eastern European woman with her cornflakes, then pills, surgeons’ visits, temperature and blood-pressure taking. It’s surprising how quickly the adjustment’s made. Probably the same thing happens in prisons. Comfort sprang from unusual sources – the tea bag sheathed in its blue envelope; diced tinned fruit I’d never eat at home.

It was almost impossible to sleep with the hissing tubes massaging my legs. There was no point counting the hours of restless wakefulness. Four a.m. was much the same as 4 p.m., except there were no visitors.

Of all the night noises keeping me awake, the one that was most irritating was the sound of snoring across the corridor. How dare anyone indulge in the luxury of uninterrupted sleep?

On the third night, I became engrossed in a programme about English architecture on the tiny TV high on the wall in the right-hand corner of my room. Admiring the Royal Crescent of Bath, my thoughts drifted to something that’s a milestone after any operation. The first bowel motion.

I summoned Nurse May, who helped me creep to the loo, hanging on to her elbow. Draped with drainage bottles and wheeling my drip, I made sedate progress to the bathroom like a 110-year-old woman. Clutching the stainless steel rail, I lowered myself on to the seat. May slid the door discreetly shut and said to press the buzzer if there were any problems. I sat anxiously enthroned while the television presenter continued his erudite description of how the city of Bath became extremely fashionable in the 1700s and how the stone chiselled from nearby hills contributed to architectural masterpieces.

Unfortunately, the commentary wasn’t accompanied by any architectural masterpieces of an intimate nature on my part. Where was May anyway? There were no rustles or throat-clearing sounds from the other side of the door. She must’ve hurried away on some nursey business. I was alone and suddenly frightened.

A wave of dizziness. The harshly lit bathroom, along with the television presenter’s carefully enunciated praise for the architecture of Bath, merged into a sickening blur. With a clatter of bottles and tubes, I spiralled off the seat toward the floor, just managing to press the emergency buzzer on my way down.

The door slid open. A forest of nurses, including May, appeared above me.

‘Get the commode!’ snapped an authoritative voice.

‘She’s anaemic,’ said another. ‘She’s been pale ever since she came out of theatre.’

‘Sleep deprived too,’ said a third.

The old ‘she’ again. Thanks for letting me know, girls.

‘Her oxygen levels are okay, though,’ said May.

I was wheeled back to the room to be lowered painfully into bed. Glumness hovered for a while. The bedside phone screeched. In no mood for the Herculean task of answering, I flipped the receiver off with my hand and lowered my head into position.

It was the breast cancer surgeon, loud and a little breathless. Results were just back from pathology. She was confident the cancer had been removed. The growth was even larger than they’d thought. Another six months and it would’ve been absolutely everywhere, she said.

Absolutely everywhere. Wasn’t there a rock song with a name like that? Thank goodness I’d ignored the GP who’d suggested I take the slow track to breast screening.

Wonderful news. So good I made her repeat it three times. To celebrate I was allowed to summon bedpans for the rest of the night. Pure luxury.

Next morning when I was ushered into the bathroom, I produced a masterpiece worthy of the Royal Crescent of Bath. Pale green, it was the colour of Play-Doh, and probably a result of the pre-surgery scan when they’d pumped me full of radio active dye. Bending uncomfortably to flush it away, I issued a silent apology to the environmental engineers who ran the municipal sewerage ponds. The last thing they wanted was radio active poo.

After breakfast, Nurse May hauled me out of bed and helped me into the shower. She said she’d seen the fear in my eyes in the bathroom the previous night, but I’d turned a corner today. When May said she liked the perfume in my hand cream, I made a mental note to send her some when I got home.

How painful it must’ve been for wounded soldiers, young and frightened with holes shot through their bodies. Almost every one of them must’ve fallen for a nurse. I was half in love with them myself, the competent ones at least. Good nurses are angels, kind and strong. I loved their gentle strength when they lifted me in their arms to rearrange my pillows or help me stagger across the floor.

Soon, however, I was going to have to get by without them. Very soon.