Ep.11: Be like Maureen

David drops me at the hospital at 7.15 am and I wander in alone to find the ward.   I’ve hardly slept for thinking about today but still, I want to do this bit alone.  Sometimes I need to know I’ve got that kind of strength and today I need to test myself out.  Sometimes you just don’t want to lean on anything or anyone.  I’ve had to catch myself several times over the past few weeks and pause to question whether I’m right to do things on my own or invite others along for the ride. I’m so independent, so used to just solving stuff on my own. What was it a friend at University called me? “Miss Competent”. Competent to a fault they saw it but I’ve never seen it as a fault, it’s just part of me.  But these past few weeks have caused me to weigh up that almost pathological independence, not because I can’t go it alone but because sometimes people need to go the journey with you, for their sake as much as your own.  My gut reaction whenever anyone offers any kind of help or support is to knock it back, but since my diagnosis I’ve noticed that sometimes you need to say 'yes' to offers of help, not because you need it but because it gives the friend a purpose.   That sounds crass and ungrateful now I write it down and it’s not meant to be but I remember years ago David telling me that he didn’t need anyone and I understood what he meant.  I don’t need anyone to help me through this, I could get through it alone, but maybe that’s not the best way to travel.

David had offered to travel with me through today but I genuinely didn’t need him here.  And anyway there’s an important Celtic game this evening and I know in my bones that it’s better for him to be watching football and doing some cancer de-compression than it is for him to be here and worrying.  He feels guilty all the same.  I told him ‘when I need you with me I’ll tell you but today I don’t need you’.  I’m fine.

And I am fine so I stroll into the ward feeling strangely at home and easy.  Yesterday’s radioactive injection into my breast is swilling around my body and today they’re going to use it to find my sentinel lymph node and remove it under general anaesthetic so they can see if my cancer has spread.  The purpose of this visit and procedure makes me sick with fear.  I’m so scared that my cancer has spread that even the thought makes me gag.  I wait in the day room.  Two more patients join me and we gradually compare notes, both are on the list to have a mastectomy that day. One of them, an elderly woman who’s come across from Skye, says she couldn’t really be bothered with it all, she doesn’t want to be lop-sided.  She’d asked what would happen if she didn’t bother and she was told, quite simply, she would die.  The other woman has travelled from Ullapool.  She’s chatty and full of life, laughs at her bags full of yesterday’s trip to the charity shops and openly shares that she’s opted to delay thinking about reconstruction because she wants to lose weight first and wouldn’t want the new breast to be the wrong size.  I briefly wonder if I’m the wrong size then debate whether any of the contents of my many recent journeys to the charity shops have ended up in her suitcases. 

One by one we are called out for various pre-op tests and procedures before drifting back to our waiting-not-to-die day room.  This strange thread that connects us snags at me.  The programme maker in me is intrigued by how our random, separate, individual lives have all brought us here to this place, here and now on a mastectomy conveyor belt.  Total strangers united through breast cancer and the Surgeon who will shortly operate on each of us.  Ullapool woman makes a comment about how young and handsome he is and I stifle a giggle, wondering what he’d make of being described like that.   I can’t think of anything less sexy than having your breasts poked and prodded for evidence of cancer and am impressed that her mind even has capacity to mull over his appeal.  My left breast now has a large black arrow in felt tip marker to remind the surgical team which one they're working with, I'm given an injection into my stomach to thin my blood and a young, nervous auxillary tries to help me roll on surgical socks and tie my gown.  I feel weirdly calm and controlled.  Another nurse takes my pulse and blood pressure then frowns, ‘are you very active?’ she asks, ‘yes, fairly’ I tell her.  My resting heart rate is only 59 she tells me which she thinks is low.  I don’t tell her that I think it’s quite high for me because I think it would look a bit weird that I know what my resting heart rate is, that I’m one of those people who are active enough to know and follow its course across the weeks and months.  But it is high and it has been since I got my diagnosis.   In spite of this I’m chuffed that the nurse thinks I’m fit for this, I’m up to the task in hand, it gives me a nudge of confidence.

This one!

I’m first on the list so I’m wheeled through to a portacabin operating theatre where the surgical team do checks and cross-checks.  The anaesthetist is quick and efficient.  I like her fuss-free approach and with relief I hardly notice as she puts the cannula in my hand.  For once I don’t get even a threat of blacking out.  We chat comfortably then I disappear.

When I wake it feels warm and comfortable, just like drifting back from a deep sleep. No sickness, no discomfort, just fine.  All done. I’m wheeled into a ward where 5 other women are intermittently resting and chatting.  There’s Sandra beside me who’s in her 80s.  A gust would blow her away she’s so frail.  She tells me her husband is also in the hospital but she doesn’t want to visit as it will unsettle him.  Opposite Sandra there’s Susanne, 68 with vibrant dyed red hair, she’s been in for 2 weeks having had surgery on her legs following a fall exactly 2 years to the day since a previous fall.  She’s spent her life fostering kids and proudly talks of her foster son who’s now an orthopaedic surgeon in Dundee.  The other side of Susanne is a young nurse from Nairn who’s sad to be missing her 7 year old son’s birthday today.  She says it’s so odd to be a patient.  And opposite me, on a chair by the window while her bed is prepared for another patient yet to join us, there’s Maureen.  85 years old with the bold, confident bark of a former boarding school girl she immediately turns to me and at high volume asks ‘are you in for your fanny too?’.  The whole ward laughs, ‘can I say the word fanny?’ she continues to roar and I love her for it.  ‘No’ I tell her softly, ‘other end, and I prefer flaa or foof to fanny’.   Then Maureen holds court while we all peck at our lunch.  Over the next couple of hours we share our stories and once again I’m struck by the strangeness of lives coming together to overlap, briefly, in the here and now.  Sandra who’s lived her whole life in Inverness, Maureen who’s world seems to have revolved around horses since she was a child and mine which they try to guess at for several minutes but fail.

I text David with the news that I’m fine, he should go to his football match, and sense the relief in his brief reply.  He never says much but I’ve got good a reading between the gaps, interpreting what isn’t said as much as what is.  My surgeon appears, tells me they removed 2 lymph nodes since they were sitting together, then checks my notes and says I can go home.  I ask if he could tell anything from looking at them and he shakes his head, we’ll have to wait for the pathology results in a week’s time.  More time in no man’s land, more time in the waiting room.  I call my friend Deirdre to come and fetch me then go home.

Yes, really!

The rest of the day I feel giddy with the success of having survived today’s surgery.  I suspect the painkillers have kicked me into an unnatural high and I share pictures of my emerald green pee and ghostly blue/white skin (a by-product of today’s biopsy) with intrigued friends.  I’m buzzy and buzzing but don’t really know why and even have the energy to make dinner for my friend Doug.  Every time I think I should feel a certain way I’m wrong footed and I seem to wrong foot those around me.  I don’t quite know how I’m supposed to react or feel or behave but I sense I’m not quite doing the dance expected of me but then maybe another of the paradoxical joys of cancer is all bets are off.  You can behave however you want to behave and you’ll be forgiven for it.  So I can be forgiven for laughing with delight at my pea green pee and telling everyone who’ll listen about the marvellous Maureen because there are no rules to coping with cancer.  ‘I want to be like Maureen’ I shout, ‘I want to be 85 and posh and not give a fuck’!  And I do, I want to survive another 35 years to be just like Maureen, I want to beat this cancer.