The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

14 Blitz Cancer 2009

Grandma ended up in a boathouse, I in a garage. That was what fate had in store for us two old women. But at least she had company, oh yes. Even though my laptop knows about everything and is very warm, I still haven’t managed to teach it the art of laughing. But of course, I’m quite happy to be free of other people’s snoring, farting and chit-chat, so for me it is absolutely fantastic living here in the garage. And here come the drugs. Here come the wonderful drugs. Oh dear, all those things they’ve invented for us.

‘Right, then, shall we start with the Sorbitol?’ says the girl in the short-sleeved uniform, pouring the sugary goo onto the spoon. To lubricate my bowels.

The taste reminds me of Grandma Georgía. She was really into sweet liqueurs. Then came my mother’s generation: they loved port. My generation just went for vodka. Then came other groups with shots of their own. Poor Lóa says she drinks beer only on those few occasions when she bares her beaver. That’s probably beer fat I see shimmering before me.

‘Right. And then there’s the Femara, isn’t that next?’

‘Oh, I don’t remember.’

‘Yes, two of those with a drop of water… that’s it, yes.’

‘Can I touch it?’

‘Touch what?’

‘Your arm. It looks so soft…’

‘Ha-ha. Yeah? Sure. It’s just way too chubby, ha-ha.’

Now I’m the dribbling witch groping Hansel and Gretel’s arms. Come now, Lóa, dear, and let this dried-up old fish of a woman feel your soft maiden flesh. With her last real tooth. Oh how soft and soft it is.

‘I’m sure it tastes really good,’ I say. The kind of thing I say.

‘I hope you’re not going to eat me!’

‘Just you wait and see.’

These are obviously the long-term side effects: the drugs seep into me like toxins into the soil. But poison must be fought with poison, the doctors say, to establish a lifelong ceasefire in the intestines. Apart from that, I’ve no interest in this toma de medicamentos. I do it only for Lóa’s sake. She enjoys poisoning me with this stuff, she does.

It was in 1991 that I got the diagnosis that I wouldn’t survive the spring. I’d been gasping with emphysema for seven years and fuelling it unremittingly with nicotine, which almost triggered a full-scale demonstration in the health care system. But then the cancer suddenly decided to invade the hollow of my chest like a German army. ‘It’s blitz cancer,’ I explained to the doctors as soon as they admitted me.

They would give me the spring, but then I would be pushing daisies under the green of summer. I wouldn’t be seeing the new century and was only sixty-two years old. I just couldn’t get my head around it, as young people say. But with treatment after treatment, injections, speculations, drugs and more drugs, it was as if a Russian winter settled over me, forcing the German army to retreat. For a while. It always came back, the bastard, and still does.

In hospital I also caught some abominable virus, and it was only by a miracle that I scraped out of there alive. I haven’t set foot in a hospital ever since. I don’t have the health for it.

For eighteen years now I’ve been carrying my Cancer Boy under my belt, though he is neither born nor dead yet. Canker Björnsson is an eighteen-year-old lad with stubble and acne, who could take his driving test if he wanted to. He will obviously only come crawling out when he is a fully qualified doctor, just to pronounce me dead. Some people think I’m the Icelander who has lived with this disease the longest. But the president hasn’t yet invited me to Bessastadir to pin a medal to the ruins of my departed breast.

World War II therefore still rages in my body; it’s an eternal struggle. The Germans marched into my liver and kidneys just before Christmas last year with their ruthless malignance and still occupy the area, although the Allies pushed them into retreat from the stomach and colon the previous spring. (The battle for the breasts ended long ago, and one of them is now a member of the Breast Assembly in a better world.) The Russians, however, continue their assault on the breast cavity and are rapidly heading towards my heart, where sooner or later the red flag will be planted. And that’ll be the end of me; peace will reign in this part of the world until Stalin shows up with his scalpel to dissect my body in two.

Then I’ll be burned. I’m dead set on that.

So eighteen years have passed since I was given three months to live. I survived it and continue to do so. When I’m bored being Linda Pétursdóttir, I sometimes appear under my own name on dating sites: ‘Single-breasted woman with cancer in her lungs, kidneys, liver and elsewhere seeks healthy male. Port-wine stains not a problem.’