4 Weeks: Cancer Diary

At the Queen Victoria market there’s a vintage stall with all manner of photography paraphernalia, albums and images for sale, binoculars, books and every type of camera. In two wide, shallow containers on legs, hundreds of old slides lie scrambled together in a kind of voyeur’s lucky dip. Among them, a few handheld slide viewers are supplied. It’s addictive. Pick one up and pop it in, and after spying just a single mystery image you’re likely to be hooked. First, a landscape, slashes of white birds across a rocky ridge. Next, someone’s wedding cake, blue piped icing and a satin bow. Children with summer legs swinging on a fence, a white cat under a tractor. It becomes compulsive, the need to see what’s on the next one, and the one after that. All the mistakes and misfires of film. All the mundane images of other people’s lives.

We stand there, me, my two high school best friends and ten-year-old daughter, and feast on the slides in mostly silence. Occasionally one of us murmurs and passes the frame to our neighbour. Occasionally we laugh, “Oh, that’s a good one.” A sign reads NO PHOTOGRAPHS, but I take some anyway. Rhys squinting into the eye piece, Z and Leanne hunting through the trough for something else, something special.

It wasn’t the Melbourne trip I’d planned. Rhys had accepted a job in New York and Leanne and I were meant to visit to bid him good luck, take in the restaurants and long walks as a trio. A week or so before I was meant to depart, leave the kids and Tim behind and experience a freedom I hadn’t felt since before B born, I was unceremoniously delivered into a small room for a series of breast biopsies.

The day hadn’t started that way. An ultrasound. Precautionary, to check whether the lump I felt was mastitis or a cyst. Realistically I’d known it wasn’t either of those things. My consciousness of what was happening shifted over a matter of weeks. Awaiting the ultrasound appointment I lay awake at night, blinking into the inevitability. I knew as soon as the technician slowed down, the faintest tremor in her voice as she asked me with false brightness about my children, her careful repetition over the area, tapping swiftly at the keyboard too many times.

I was detained for a mammogram and then sent home for a few hours before the biopsies. Mum came to relieve Tim of B so he could go to work, and we confessed to her for the first time what was happening. She and I exchanged stern looks but remained buoyant for the baby. Hop little bunny, hop hop hop. I returned to the hospital, endured the process, downed my Panadol, stuck my icepack in my bra and went to pick up Z from school. Despite the results being marked urgent, a cavernous two day wait followed. My GP, not known for her bedside manner, was uncharacteristically gentle.

Of course, it was cancer. Left breast, one lymph node.

With the news, Tim and I were instantly pitted against each other in our trauma styles. He’s a private person, a serious person, and was inwardly horrified at my need for my friends and jokes the moment we found out. The house filled. I created a buffer of my people around me like a moat and sunk into the lounge awaiting, or dreading, Z’s return from the emergency playdate we’d arranged.

We told her outside, my hands gripping her wrists in a subconscious mitigation of the outburst I anticipated. It was every bit as horrific as you imagine it to be. If there were words we’d been avoiding saying aloud she shouted them now, breaking down in bubbles of snot and hot, anguished tears of anger and fear. It’s not fair. My mum is going to die. I don’t want you to go. Please don’t go. 

Agonisingly, you can’t tell a whip-smart-almost-eleven-year-old you’re not going to die of cancer. They know very well you might. They know everything with a searing clarity that adults are too cagey to confront. She went out the back to hold her bunny. My friend’s son sat quietly by her side, his arm on her shoulders, a shining example of the quality of friendships we’ve built with our circle.

On learning that I won’t have an appointment until after the scheduled trip, I decide to go ahead to Melbourne, but with the change of needing an emotional support daughter with me. Z gets the call up. We stay with Rhys and Leanne in a three-bedroom apartment on the 63^rd floor, an expansive lightshow of Melbourne laid at our feet, traffic snaking, interiors glowing. Despite being the sickest I’ve ever been, I feel, well, physically fine. Hypochondria aside – what is that pain in my shoulder? It must be Stage 4 - in fleeting moments, we forget about it completely.

Stood in line for the brand-new Pop Mart store we’re verging on giddy, silly with the absurd consumerism. Crossing a bridge over the Yarra with Southbank glinting in our eyes we take pictures against the flare of the winter sun and everything seems perfect, still and crisp. Rhys and I share a plate of Sydney Rock oysters. Leanne and Z wander off to spy on sweets through glass cabinets.

They surprise me with tickets to a show – Eddie Perfect’s Beetlejuice. It’s raucously funny, a great distraction, until they start singing loudly about dead mums and we stiffen, glancing sideways at Z in her seat to see if there’s an adverse reaction. Turns out she’s just bored.

Before cancer, well, before knowledge of the cancer, Melbourne was meant to double as a weaning weekend, to get B off the boob, but with the new circumstances I’m not sure mastitis is a risk I should take. I stand under hot showers and express in the early hours when I can’t sleep. I miss my baby.

I give in to B as soon as I’m home. She’s been unwell all weekend and I’m aching for her. I sob as I feed her. I won’t have a choice soon, let the poor kid have her comfort now. I reach for Tim in the dark. All it takes is one hand on his arm and it’s like setting a stone on my anxiety, which has a weightless quality, a nauseating levitation. I ask him if he missed me. He answers with our standard reply, “Not very much.”

I offer refunds to people who have booked my shoots in the periods of uncertainty ahead. My career that had slowed with B’s birth is now seemingly trickling down a drain. I still talk about our Christmas trip to Europe as if it’s a definite, but I feel a stab of resentment as the wax flowers emerge in the pre-spring sunshine and a whiff of warmer weather reminds me of our backyard and relatively new pool, how the garden’s grown in, how lucky we are to have this private paradise. Will I be stuck inside for this round of summer? Will I get margaritas in the shallow end or will I be head down in a bucket in bed?

There is laughter, more laughter than sadness. Trying on wigs with Leanne and Z, trying to decide what I could wear if I lose my hair, cobalt blue bob or ginger dreadlocks. Friends send me a tiny cake with black icing that says sorry you have cancer in cursive with a little sad face piped crudely next to it. It sends me into fits of laughter while Tim frowns and says he doesn’t find it funny. Later, when we try it, it tastes like intense almond essence, inedible. Z says maybe they put cancer in it.

The three-week milestone of my diagnosis is my 42^nd birthday and the eve of my first appointment. There have been many thousands of thoughts between. I have fleeting periods of manic elation at simple things like a plate of oysters, crayons lined up in colour order, a bobbing kangaroo paw or the light slicing through the horizontal blinds. Inexplicably happy, I wonder if they’re glimpses of heaven, an encouragement that if in fact you do die, it’s going to be okay.

On the way to shoot with a client I have a massive panic attack. Fortunately, or unfortunately, they are like second nature to me and I drive through it, coaching myself down, trying to focus on how nice it is when pelicans sit on the lights above the freeway. There are not many tears and only a smidgen of self-pity. This is not about me. Whatever I have to do is for the girls, and so, onward we go. 

The surgeon is unhappy with my assertion that I should get a nice new pair of C-cup fake boobs as my silver lining. She scolds me about prioritising my looks over my health, lectures me about minimising risk. My search history is 90% Korean skincare, and I rush an appointment to have my eyebrows micro-bladed so at least they can’t fall off. I’m told I likely have up to six months of chemotherapy. I think about ordering those sheer curtains I want so I don’t have to watch my friends and family having fun in the pool without me for the next six months. I’m so jealous. As many times as I think about dying I think about vanity, preserving my hair, my skin. I think maybe some chemo spews will help me lose weight.  

I clean my fridge out. I sit in the new Irish pub in Fremantle and get drunk on Magners. I plan a birthday party for Z. I make playdough for the baby and watch her stab it with a plastic fork. I hold them both, one under each arm and they fight across my chest, staking claim over their half of my body, one breast each to rest on. I read about crocodiles snapping and magpies swooping. I drone on about trumpet practice and hair washing. I tip liquid turkey tail into my coffee. I tip handfuls of Epsom’s salts into a bath. Flowers arrive at my door and I move them around the house to avoid the harsh blast from the heater. On my birthday, daffodils, fragile and frilly.

When we say goodbye to Rhys at Tullamarine, unsure if we’ll see him again before he becomes a resident of faraway Brooklyn, it crosses my mind that this might be the last time I see him in a couple of years. Not until later I think, really, actually, it could be the last time I see him ever again. But that’s true of every interaction, isn’t it? It’s why we say proper goodbyes before heading to work or falling asleep. It’s why we say drive safe and send our last texts of I love you as the seatbelt sign goes on.

If I dug around in a big pile of slides and came up with the stills from the last four weeks, I would think, this person has a happy life. This person with her beautiful family and bountiful friends and blooming winter garden. She is lucky.

Taya. x

Taya Reid is a writer and photographer working and living in Walyup on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja

Email Taya: taya@tayareid.com

Instagram: @tayareidstories

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