For weeks after the diagnosis I was still having episodes of shock as deep as flashbacks, every single day. Every day at some point I went into a dazzled fugue of confusion and horror, while the same words whirled around me like three birds. I have cancer.
Then the welter. Cancer? What? What do you mean, cancer? How could — No. That can’t be.
Meanwhile I had been through a colonoscopy, and then an interior tattooing to guide the surgeon’s hand, I’d met with the surgeon who made breezy mention of maybe ‘whipping out the uterus’ in order to ‘have a look’ — been driven to hospital before dawn and woken up disembowelled. I woke up pegged out like a goatskin with six tubes leading into or out of me, and five holes in my sweet and private belly. I had not let that breezy surgeon get his knife into me, naturally: found a second, younger, doctor who did not say, ‘Don’t worry, I can do these in my sleep.’ I asked myself, which is going to cut me — in my sleep. The older white guy from an establishment family with photos of his kids in ski suits framed behind the desk? Or the young Asian Australian woman who’s had to work twice as hard to establish the same career. I had persevered when the referring doctor’s receptionists tried to shame me out of ‘wasting time’ with a second opinion and when one of them told me, it seems crazy to delay surgery at this point, I told her, round the knot in my throat, what seems crazy to me is: committing to this major surgery without getting a second opinion.
This adventure turned out hilarious as well as just devastating. It felt overwhelming, colonizing, and grim. I did not lose myself. I told the gastroenterologist she ought to call herself “a colonoscopologist, cos it just has such great mouthfeel. It’s fun to say.” “It is!” she said, though her smile was wry.
“And when you reach that point, which surely must arrive at some point in every day, where you find yourself climbing out the bathroom window at the back of the building going No more! I cannot stick anything else inside anyone else’s bottom! — why, then — you’re a colonescapologist.” In the hinterground of all these panda escapades the daily panic ran on and on. Ten minutes a day, utter annihilating shock: in which I woke up right back at the start like a terrible dream, unable to receive and to process the news. Meanwhile I had already been given an enema at six one morning, my first, and the nurse explained to me, very kindly as I lay naked on her table, “You must roll on your side and draw your knees up to your chest” and at the prospect of imminent anal penetration and the rapey feeling of being pierced against my will, thus losing this only form of virginity or intactitude or control remaining to me I started to shudder and shake and sob before I knew what I was doing, and I had to take hold of myself, as she was approaching with the implement. I told myself you need to really deeply relax and you only have a few seconds to do that — or this is gonna hurt.
I somehow found the calm inside myself and took hold. I took a deep slow breath in and very slowly let it out and I did not turn away my mind, but paid attention where attention must be paid, breathing out slowly, letting it in. The nurse was gentle. I had told her my history, which came bubbling out in sheer terror as the moment of intrusion approached. Her name was Lisa and the other nurse was Lisa too and my gastroenterologist was called Leisa and they stood around me cheerfully as I began to cry and they all wore the same expression, it was a kind of puzzled helpfulness, and I wondered out loud, what is the collective noun for Lisas? My valour was in tatters but I flew it wide and high.
After the ensuing procedure I woke up in a hospital, sporting my first and only tattoo. I’ve never pierced my ears and feel strongly protective of the body’s entirety. Three years are leaving that chaotic punker city I was finally a Berliner, sleekest of them all, submitting to this marking that was so far inside me no one ever would see it beyond the surgeon who would guide her blade by that mark, and then cut it out. “Make no mistake,” she said. “This is a very major operation. It’s going to take you some three months to recover.”
10 days later, discharged from the hospital and sleeping in a friend’s bed while he slept on his foldout couch I was even still descending into the same panicked fugue at some point every afternoon. What, cancer? Who, me? Whaddaya mean… cancer. I had been into hospital, with the friend who drove all the way across town to pick me up at 5 in the morning, and sat with me until they checked me in, and then the surgeon greeted me at the theatre doors and they asked me would I get up and walk in, and I’d woken up in a beeping bed with five different tubes at various orifices some of them new coming out and going in, unable to move, too afraid to cough, with part of my bowel and one entire artery cut away forever. I finally had the caesarian scar I’d never found through childbirth of the baby who never came covered over close to my pubic bone, my belly was seeded with holes, one two three four five of them, one had a drainage tube spooling out to hang over the bed and the nurses came in to empty it. I learned all of their names, one of them the first night tried to drag me from my bed after I vomited violently right across the bed and I lay shivering with terror and pleading, please, it’s mostly water, I have eaten nothing in five days, can you just… mop me up a little and let me sleep, please don’t make me get up, I’ve just had surgery. This nurse said, “You’re going to have to pull your weight, my girl,” and I phoned my girlfriend and made her stay with me on the line by way of witness so nurse could not tug the painful umbilical line filled with yellowish and reddish fluid which after her too rough ministrations began to hang and the bandage holding it in filled up with blood, like a sac, and the stitch the surgeon had made to keep the drainage tube in place was nearly out. Even at this point, I was still reeling with the unreal, and though this news and its attendant traumas had progressed so very sharply that I had now left hospital and was creeping around my friend’s house learning to manage painkillers, a technology nearly entirely unfamiliar in my life — still at some point in every exhausted afternoon, panic descended with its highly focused sense of confusion and my mind flapped its big wings. Oh my god, I have — what? How can this be? In my own sweet and healthy body.
On the last day in the hospital a kinder nurse arrived and told me, we are going to take that drain out now. She explained it does not end just under the skin, oh, no! of course, it goes clear down across my body to the bowel. I began to shake. And then — somehow, and I’ll never know how, at the end of everything, I found a strength that in my life I had never known. I who am unable to gouge a splinter of glass from my mother’s horned sole said, I will watch. And I decided to film it. And though I had to ask her to stop so I would not black out, after a few moments I could go on again, and let me tell you there is nothing on earth like the sensation of a thick tube being dragged out of one’s own body, it is a foreign object and feels so wrong and at the same time it resembles the feeling of a part of the self being dragged away, inch after inch, vomitous and painful. I watched and I listened and I asked her questions, and then it was gone.
The collective noun for a Lisa is, it turns out, a decency. The decency of Lisas ensured that while I was under, which I had been so frightened for, there were only females in the room. Between the tattooing and the surgery I went back to painting class one last time. I made a self-portrait, in honour of my diagnosis. I told people. I published a story about it. People began to flock around the C-word, relieved and marveling. (There, but for her, go I!) I was carrying it for them and we could feel it. Every time somebody said, You got this, you are strong, what I wished they would say instead was, What do you need? I am thinking of you. Do you have someone to hug? How can I help?