Eating the Underworld (20 page)

I got my blood tests back today. My white cells are high enough so that I can have my chemo on Wednesday! I didn't think I'd be able to do it; I feel ridiculously excited. I'm so impressed by my body. I want to give it elephant stamps and stars and medals. As well as my white cells, it's managed to get my iron levels back up, without the help of iron tablets. I've been eating small amounts of red meat regularly, but my doctors were sure that wouldn't be enough to get my iron levels back to normal before I started chemotherapy. I'm convinced the hypnosis has something to do with it.

My hair is definitely falling out more than usual. If I run my hands through it, I come away with a significant number of strands. Other than that though, it looks normal. Should I cut yet, or shouldn't I? I don't want to lose a single day of looking normal that I don't have to. I feel this with a real sense of panic. I am trying to hold off something; King Canute, trying to hold back the sea. My hair has become the marker. How will I know when it's really time?

I've done it! Last night, my hair started coming out in handfuls when I touched it. I knew immediately that I had to cut. Holding on to it seemed so wrong; it was like trying to hold on to a corpse.

Martin got out the sharp scissors and gave me a crew-cut. There was a strange mixture of terror and exhilaration. I felt like a banana being peeled. But when I dared look properly, to my astonishment, I found that I looked quite elegant. Amantha was surprised too. She liked it. She told me that she had been scared that she would be frightened by the sight of me without hair. Martin also thinks it looks good.

It's my second chemo today. I've dressed for the occasion in ‘co-ordinates-by-chemo'—my new hat and a matching shawl I made. They look very swish and I get lots of admiring comments as I enter the ward. I change into my nightie and whip out my
pièce de résistance:
a soft, flannel hat to match. I feel unutterably stylish.

I get into bed and the nurses wheel over the intravenous drip stand. As usual, vein-finding time is full of suspense. Will the nurses be able to find one? Will it shut down if they do? Will the drip work? Will it know, in that inimitable way of inanimate objects, that Martin isn't there to fix it? Once success is achieved and the intravenous line is inserted and running, I breathe several sighs of relief.

The mix of drugs produce the usual symphony of sensations. The strange, restless ache in my legs lasts longer this time, but I don't get any urgent cravings for soldiers. I clunk into sleep as solidly as last time and wake in an instant to the morning.

I notice, as I write in my journal, that I'm making more spelling mistakes than usual. The women in my internet group talk about chemobrain, the kind of fuzziness that, in absent-minded professors of philosophy, is considered endearingly eccentric. Less so in chemotherapy patients. Is this how it begins?

But the big news is that I wake this morning to find a snowstorm of hair all over my pillow. Three weeks to the day, after my first chemo. Just as Jim predicted. Luckily, thanks to my new buzz cut, the strands on the pillow are only centimetres long. To wake up and find clumps of my normal, shoulder length hair all over my pillow-case would have been much worse. I thought I'd prepared myself, but it's still intensely unpleasant to see that my hair no longer adheres to my scalp. It feels strange and unnatural, as if a part of me has decayed and been cast off.

In spite of all this, there is also something incredibly
impressive about the sheer sweep and power of the chemo's contact. Like shaking hands with an alien, only to be blown back by the discovery that it is thrumming with some intense, high-voltage energy.

It struck me today, rather belatedly I admit, that I've never thought of the chemotherapy as poison. The doctors and nurses regularly refer to it as that. So do my patients, when they first arrive to see me. But even at the beginning when I was skittishly stepping into the territory of hair-loss, side-effects and the unknown, something in me refused to label it as poison.

It wasn't a matter of diminishing the chemotherapy in my mind, whittling it down to Mickey Mouse size or pretending it was sugary sweet. Chemotherapy is strong stuff. But the experience of cancer is strong stuff too. It's a demanding experience; an initiation, a passage, a transformative rite more powerful than most we are likely to face in our lives.

Such times traditionally demand ‘strong medicine', whether it is the ordeal of fasting in the wilderness, performing feats of endurance or entering another state of consciousness. Powerful substances, to be eaten or imbibed, are often a part of these rituals. They are challenging, dangerous even, but they also provide a key. They offer us a way of unlocking the gateway through which our new lives shimmer.

Oddly enough, some years later as I am writing this manuscript, I press the ‘Edit: find in page' key. The word I have typed in is ‘mother'; I'm looking for a section I've written about her. The cursor flashes immediately to the word ‘chemotherapy'. Startled, I
look again. And yes, there it is, smack in the middle of the word—che
mother
apy. How odd, I think. And then immediately, how right. It has been a mother; a tough, strict, powerful mother; the kind you know not to mess around with. But a mother. And like all good mothers, it was there when I fell over and it came to help me.

I am showing a friend the photo for my poetry book today. I have dug it out of the old cardboard box, brimming with photos, that acts as my photo-filing cabinet. As I stand up, my foot catches on the box corner, tipping it over. Photos pour everywhere.

‘Look at you!' my friend exclaims. She is holding up an old sepia-coloured photo of myself and Lily, when young. There is nearly four years' difference between us, but in addition to that, Lily is also tall and big for her age. I stand next to her, looking apprehensive. She towers above me, twice my size, and I remember again the experience of living with her—like living on the foothills of an active volcano.

Looking back, it seems easy to assume that my sister's behaviour was motivated by jealousy—that she had never forgiven me for unseating her from her ‘only child' status. As a child, however, I had no way of understanding this, nor the depth and intensity of her feelings toward me. It was always a mystery. I saw her as centre-stage in the family: a strong-willed,
charismatic and forceful presence. She could be immensely charming, but her temper was explosive and frequently aroused.

We were a contrast in personalities. I was shy, introspective and eager to please. I was also a precocious child, reading and writing before I started kindergarten and effortlessly topping my classes; none of which can have endeared me to my sister.

For me, the hardest aspects of my relationship with my sister were not the fights; they were easy to understand. She was angry, she hit me; nothing to explain. It was the everyday behaviours that came out of nowhere, outside the context of an argument or fight, that were the most difficult to absorb.

The first time I remember consciously recognising the truth about our relationship is when I was very young.

It is 1956. I have been in a state of excitement and yearning for weeks. A huge toy fair is coming to town, near where we live. I desperately want to go, but my parents are unable to take me and I'm too young to go by myself. Sorrowfully, I resign myself to ‘maybe next year'.

It's the weekend and Hannah, my little friend from next door, is over to play. I have to go off to the toilet. When I come back, Hannah is nowhere to be seen. I'm puzzled, but assume she got called back home. I notice Lily isn't in the house either. It never occurs to me to connect the two disappearances. Lily and Hannah don't have any particular relationship.

A few hours later, the mystery is solved. Hannah
returns, looking rather sheepish, and tells me that Lily took her to the toy fair. For weeks, it turns out, Lily has been saving her money so that she can take one of my friends to the fair.

I still remember the feeling of finding out. My six-year-old self is struck dumb, literally. I have no words. Within the shock is a feeling I struggle to understand. It is not anger, not the frustration of a child who has had a treat taken away. It is something much more frightening. It is a recognition. A gaping, horrifying hole in my universe that has suddenly opened up. It is too frightening to look at for long. So I don't.

I continue to idolise her. It was a strange
pas de deux
that we were executing back then. Every now and then, the pain would get too much and I would withdraw from her. And then she would woo me back with that alluring seductiveness that is so much a part of her. She would become Lily the enchantress. Her charm is mesmeric, drawing you in, inviting you to be part of the magic circle, part of her. And I would be won over, again and again.

Occasionally, my younger self is reminded that sibling relationships are not always like this. I see my friends' brothers and sisters, families in the park, families in the streets. When I see younger siblings pestering older ones, I am aghast at their temerity. When I see older siblings taking care of younger ones, I am lost in wonder. I imagine what it would be like to have a sister who loved me, took care of me even. The possibility fills me with amazement. Could it ever happen? Maybe? Maybe? And I keep hoping.

And it is the hope that keeps me going and also the hope that nearly destroys me.

As a psychologist I have learned about the complexities of human relationships; the puzzle of the human heart, cleaving to that which is most dangerous to it. I see it in patients, paralysed by such relationships and the terrible toll they take.

A few years ago, a friend asked me, in view of what was happening, why I never felt upset at my parents for not intervening. The question stopped me in my tracks. It had never occurred to me. I reached back to my childhood experience to try to explain. Living with Lily felt to me like living with a force of Nature—as unstoppable as wind or tide; a force beyond anyone's ability to contain.

So I don't feel angry at my parents; instead, the situation reverses. I feel protective of them. I see my mother worrying and anguished about Lily and I want to make it better. And I become good. I take on what is traditionally the role of the eldest child. I am responsible, dependable, nurturing. And my voice gets quieter and quieter.

It took me many years, as an adult, to be curious about my parents' lack of response to my sister's behaviour. The only time I remember my mother reacting to this stands as a cameo in my mind.

It is evening and my mother is supervising Lily's and my bedtime preparations. I am five and we are still living in our cottage in Carlton. As I wriggle into my pyjamas, my mother pauses. She points to my thigh. ‘It's a bruise,' I venture, in response to my mother's
astonished look. And when she asks how I got it, I indicate Lily.

My mother looks at her, but doesn't admonish her. Instead, she examines the bruise again and then begins to tell us both, in an exaggerated fashion, how dangerous it is. I imagine, from the vantage point of years, that this is the only way she can find of saying to Lily, ‘You mustn't do that, it's wrong,' but I don't know that then.

As a method of discipline, it failed fairly predictably. It highlights for me, however, the difficulty my mother, who loved us both so deeply, had in setting limits on behaviour. It was only when I became a parent myself that I began to truly wonder about it.

In the research and clinical arena, the area of sibling relationships has traditionally played second fiddle to those between parent and child. It is only now beginning to be recognised by psychologists and psychiatrists that there has been a widespread blindness to the impact of sibling relationships. There is a kind of folk-wisdom that it's ‘natural' for siblings to fight and it will do them no harm.

From a professional perspective, it is clear, however, that ‘fighting' covers a wide continuum. It may be the harmless, everyday squabbling so common among sisters and brothers, but it can also be more severe. In the wider arena, the latest research shows that emotional, physical or sexual sibling abuse does indeed do harm, in the same way that any other experience of abuse does.