There is no compelling reason why you don’t have cancer. Why any of us doesn’t have cancer. No special reason why our children are not going for chemo. Because we aren’t the chosen ones. We aren’t pure in deed and heart. Our prayers don’t fall on any more special ears than those who have been visited by the ugliness of cancer. Yet, we wake up with bodies that give an impression of bastion healthy and when we retire to bed we forget that we are undeserving. That our bodies are merely water, flesh, and air.
One day, if the chips fall where they may, our bodies might choose to remind us that they might be bearing cancer. It could be an ache that is nothing. A pain that is something. It could be a cough, a sprained knee, a headache. Or it could be a false alarm.
For Beauty, it happened in the shower one Saturday morning in March last year after a 10km run. She was training for the Victoria Falls Marathon. She’s a member of the Urban Swara Running Club, a clan of half-human, half gazelles. As she showered she came across a hardness under her right armpit. It was very small – not any larger than a fifty-cent coin. She stood in the shower tracing it with her fingers, prodded it, and thought, “This wasn’t here yesterday!” She was careful not to invite fear or dread. Maybe it was as a result of weight training she had started recently, she thought. Perhaps it was nothing. After the shower, she consulted the one person we trust with our intimate questions; Google. Google’s diagnosis was death. Google’s diagnosis is always death. If you asked Google to explain your coughs, Google might tell you that not only has one of your lungs failed but you will lose an eye by the end of the week. An eye for a lung.
She thought of little else the whole day. In bed that night she raised her hand and asked her partner if he could feel it. He couldn’t. She guided his fingers. “Can you not feel that?” He said he couldn’t. It’s nothing, he assured her. The whole of Sunday she thought of nothing else. In the office the whole of the following week she would find her hands lingering under her armpit. The more she touched it the bigger it felt.
She finally made an appointment with her gynae for a pap smear then casually mentioned the lump to her. Her gynae pressed it and said, “Probably nothing, but I’m sending you for a mammogram to be sure. If something important comes up from the results I will call you immediately, if nothing comes up I will see you on Saturday.”
The mammogram involves you placing your breast on a plate whereupon another plate presses on it from the top. Very intimate. A screen shows your breast tissues. “I’m no radiologist but I could see a black mass from the screen.” She recalls, “I could see how the technician was studying it closely, intensely. My heart just sunk.”
After she had dressed up she, harangued the technician to tell her what the dark mass meant but he wouldn’t say. Radiologists are sworn to silence by blood in distant caves. He insisted that her doctor would explain it to her. She was scared of receiving a phone call from her gynae that week. Each time her phone rang her heart stopped, blood roared to her ears. By Friday her gynae hadn’t called. “Means it’s great news, right?” She told her partner.
Saturday morning she sat down with her gynae who, turns out, hadn’t read the damn report. She opened it and she read it out loud to her like it was a bedtime story. The report wasn’t substantive so she was sent for further scans. An hour later, the results were out but still didn’t tell them anything. A biopsy was needed. “Don’t worry,” the gynae assured her, “a lot of people do biopsies and it turns out to be nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
They decide to seek a second opinion. You know, see a breast specialist, not a gynae. On Tuesday she and her partner carried the scans to the Breast Clinic at MP Shah Hospital where they met the scariest doctor on earth who looked at her scans and said, ‘Look, I’m going to be very blunt with you, this is the kind of thing that turns out to be breast cancer. We will need an MRI and biopsy to confirm this.’
“I appreciated her bluntness but there is a better way she should have told me that. But then I wonder if that’s what one needs: a straight-shooting doctor or one who feeds your hope. Whatever it was, we said we weren’t going back there.”
On recommendation, she ended up at Jalaram Hospital a few days later with her friend Eunice. “Through this journey, we had the best experience at Jalaram of all the major hospitals we went to. Not only was it affordable but the radiologist was very humane.” The MRI guy, a middle-aged gentleman, explained that a lot of times it doesn’t go past the MRI. He sees many scans come out negative. “He then asked us to pray before I did the MRI. He said he likes to pray for his patients before the scan so the three of us bowed our heads and prayed in the MRI room.”
When the scan came out he sat her down and said, “I’ve seen it…yes, I’ve seen it. I think you need a biopsy.’” She says. “I just felt like someone had punched me. I thought, this is it. I have cancer! I have cancer! This kind man said it didn’t look very good, so it must be very bad. I saw the look on his face. This is bad. Oh my God.” Her friend Eunice said, “We can’t jump to conclusions until we know from the biopsy next week. So let’s be hopeful.”
The weekend was long and grey. In church that Saturday, she prayed harder than she had ever prayed. She told God, “ I have a six-year-old son, Lord, please let this not be cancer. I want to see him grow up. Save me. Save him.” She was deep in thought most of the time that weekend. Her partner being the glass-half-full kind of fellow assured her that maybe there was no bridge to cross in the horizon; and if they came across one, it wouldn’t be one that wouldn’t be crossed. “We will cross all the bridges we come upon.” She called one of her sisters (she has six) and told her what was happening. She made it sound like nothing. Her sister freaked out. She told her, “Maureen, please don’t tell anyone.” Five minutes after they hung up another sister called her, “I hear you are sick?” Then more of her sisters started calling asking, “What is this I’m hearing?”
On Monday morning when she and her partner arrived at Jalaram for the biopsy, two of her sisters were waiting. The biopsy was performed by the gentlest, wizened Indian man you will ever mind. He was patient and caring, explaining and listening. “He would put his hand on my hand reassuringly, addressing me by my name. He treated me like his grandchild. He made me feel human, important, safe.” They stuck a needle in her breast and withdrew tissue and fluids and sent it out to the lab. They said they’d email the results by Friday. “By email!” She squeals. “Can you imagine waiting for an email like that?”
Suffice it to say, the week was tortuous. “ I avoided checking my email.” She says.
On Friday she and her partner went home early to wait for the email which came in shortly after 4 pm. She didn’t see or hear it coming in. It came in without a sound – like the hardness under her armpit. It sat there waiting like a predator. “It’s here,” she told her partner. He was working on his laptop. He said, “Give it to me. I will read it.”
He opened the email and read it. She sat watching his eyes move across the page, trying to see if they would betray any emotion. His face revealed nothing. Meanwhile, her heart was throbbing so loudly she could hear it. Her stomach felt weak. “I was trembling.” She says. “He was taking his time to read so I moved closer to him and peered at the email.” It was long, a trail of words but when you are looking for specific words, you will see it. The words “malignant breast tumor” leaped from the page. “I couldn’t breathe. I just broke down for the first time and I cried. I really cried. I thought, Oh my God, my worst nightmare is here, I’m dying. I’m going to die. I cried. My partner didn’t know what to do with me, the poor guy. He was saying, we will take it a day at a time. It will be fine. We will fight.”
She remembers her son coming back from school, innocently bounding inside the house, tossing his backpack away, his knees dusty, one side of his shirt untucked. “I looked at him and thought, this boy is only six years old and has a whole life ahead of him. Now he will grow up without a mother. I will die and leave him. I wondered which of my sisters my son would go to. What he will remember of me. I wanted to hug him but I was scared to touch him because I would break down and cry again. I watched him washing his hands and thought, “Oh, this poor boy won’t have a mother…” She stops. Tears come. “I’m sorry.”
We are at Pot Belly Restaurant on Matundu Lane, Westlands. At the garden where we sit hangs a massive wind chime that has been offering a lingering tinkly soundtrack to this story. The biggest wind chime I’ve seen in my life. “I will steal this wind chime,” I tell her to lighten the moment, yes, but I also mean it. “They will wake up one day and not find it.”
She dabs her tears and looks up at the old tree. “Why do you need a wind chime?”
“I like wind chimes. They’re soothing. I have one in the village. A small one.” I say. “I will take this one too. It will join the small one.”
“But there is no wind in your village.” She chuckles. “It’s just sunny and hot.”
“We have plenty of wind.”
So now your worst nightmare is upon you. And it has an ugly name; cancer. And it’s in your breast. You take your cancer to bed and you wake up with it. Such a small thing but so life-altering. Sometimes you feel like a dead person walking. You see a bird and wonder if you will ever see another bird again. Or a traffic light changing to green. Or the sound of your son slamming the fridge door. You don’t want to die. You want to know how bad it is. If you have a chance. Has it spread to other organs? Who can help you? Who is the best with this cancer? You cry every single day. You cry when you wake. In the car. In the office bathroom. You take walks alone and cry.
You find yourself waiting outside a door written “Oncologist” and you can’t recognise your life. It’s surreal. You couldn’t have imagined you would be waiting to see an oncologist. You run marathons. You eat healthy. You sleep well. You go to church on Sabbath. Nobody in your family has had breast cancer. Why did this cancer pick you? Is it something you did?
You are surprised at the sheer number of people waiting to see the oncologist. It feels like the whole world has cancer. More test results come out; you are HR2 Positive. Meaning your cancer is hormonal. It’s very close to the lymph nodes so they remove 11 lymph nodes for more tests to make sure it hasn’t spread because if it has it could be catastrophic. Lymphoma is a truck that mows you down. You don’t sleep well, waiting for the results. You cry often. You are constantly afraid. These are the bridges your partner had promised you would cross, but they are long bridges and they are wobbly and they run into a fog. And you don’t want to look down. You read the results seated on a lab bench. It’s not lymphoma. You cry seated there, hugging your handbag on your lap. Your partner tells you that you will deal with this one and anything that comes. He’s a bridge expert. He knows a thing about crossing bridges.
When you go to visit your folks in the village you tell them you need to talk to them. You come from a very prayerful SDA family. You herd them to their bedroom with the wardrobe that’s older than you and a worn carpet running under the bed. The old radio by the bed is mute. They sit looking at you. You are careful not to use the word ‘cancer.” You say, instead, a tumor in your breast. You see your father’s head fall. You see him crumble before you. You caught it early, you say reassuringly. And you are seeing capable doctors. Your father’s head remains fallen. You can’t read your mother. She just looks at you with the same look that has hidden everything hard she has gone through in life. She’s stoic. She says It’s “humans who fall sick.” To mean, it could have happened to anyone. Trees don’t fall sick. OK, they do, but who cares? We will pray for you, your mother says. We will not stop praying for you. The Lord will heal you. When your father finally looks up his forehead and the area around his mouth has aged. He says nothing. Your heart breaks for him. He must harbour the same dread you harbour for your son. He must be thinking, “Lord, I can’t bury my daughter”.
“Chemo is horrible.” That statement should not be expounded on.
When she had a coffee with her partner at Java towards the end of last year she told him that her hair had been falling off. That she had to cut it. She asked, “How would you see me bald?” He said, “Beauty, I’d still see you.” She waited and cut it when he was away on a work trip. She cried seeing her hair in the sink. “I felt naked without my hair. Just naked. Now I look like a cancer patient.” She decided her partner or her son would never see her bald. She wore headgear everywhere, even in bed. “None of them ever saw my bald head.” Her partner bought her a dozen headgears.
On the 23rd of December 2024, she finished her 18th session of radiotherapy.
“Hardest year of my life,” she says. “Hardest thing I ever went through.”
She’s on a drug called Tamoxifen; one small tablet taken daily for ten years. She will be 55 years old when she takes the last one. Her hair is starting to grow back. She has scars on her neck and more scars in her mind because when you are fighting cancer some of your biggest fights occur in your mind.
“What’s the one positive thing about what you went through?” I ask.
“Apart from the usual realisation of the fragility of life?” She pauses. “That I can still beat my partner at table tennis even with less eleven lymph nodes.”
Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Guy must be HORRIBLE at table tennis!
***
What’s the hardest thing you did/ experienced last year? Let me know; [email protected]
Don’t forget to register for the creative writing masterclass in March HERE. Or just grab a copy of any of my books HERE.
Talking of grabbing, about the wind chime. It’s not stealing if you have declared it publicly, is it?