Eating the Underworld Read Free Page B

but because I wanted to see her, with the kind of impatience usually afforded to lovers. I wanted to be there already, not dawdling on the road. Drawing up to the blue-windowed, pale brick house by the sea, I would hurry to get out of the car. It was like the joyous anticipation of waiting to greet someone loved, who has been overseas. Except that here, it was the reverse. Each day was the greeting of someone beloved who was here now, but might soon be away, on unknown and unreachable waters.
    My mother did not want to believe that this disease would kill her. She wanted to live, to see her grandchildren grow up. To be there for them and for us. Ihad come prepared to talk about death and dying—the hard subjects. I wasn’t sure what to do when I realised that she didn’t want to enter those areas. I puzzled for a while and then decided that what was important was respecting her needs, her wishes. And in the end, it didn’t matter that we never talked about her death. What mattered was the love. And that was there, regardless of subject matter. Those last two, intensely loving months of looking after her were truly one of the gifts of my life. I am always grateful for them.
    It is strange that the building where the journey of my illness begins is the one where my mother’s ended. I remain aware of it as I enter the building and find my way to the desk where I present myself in the form of a white slip of paper covered with doctor’s scrawl.
    As requested, I sit down to wait. And drink more water. Is that possible? With all this water, I am beginning to feel whale-like. I am also starting to eye the sign that says ‘Ladies’. My bladder and the unknowing ultrasound technician are now in a race for supremacy. The ultrasound technician wins out by a hair. Just as I am about to give up and empty all, she appears in her white coat and beckons me on.
    I am handed the latest in hospital chic—a paper outfit in anaemic green. I do the Clark Kent thing and emerge from the cubicle in my new persona of badly wrapped cabbage roll. On the examination couch, I try not to wince while the technician smears gel, which has come straight from the Antarctic to me, over my abdomen.
    â€˜Yes, it is a little chilly,’ she says in response to mytwitches, with that wonderful sense of understatement so common to health professionals. She then produces the wand—no fairy dust, just a metal stick—and glides it along my abdomen. The screen comes alight with images of my interior. My abdominal cavity is a TV star.
    The technician keeps up a pleasant chatter as she does her work. After a few neck-straining attempts to view the TV screen—it has been placed just outside my line of sight—I give up and rely on her to be my tour guide.
    â€˜It’s definitely not fibroids,’ she says cheerfully. I relax, thinking this is good, it means no surgery. It hasn’t occurred to me yet that if it’s not fibroids, it has to be something else.
    â€˜Can’t see the right ovary,’ she says, squinting and shifting the wand from side to side. This still doesn’t disturb me. Benignly, I imagine the ovary playing hide-and-seek behind whatever it is that ovaries play hide-and-seek. It hasn’t yet dawned that ovaries don’t usually play hide-and-seek.
    â€˜There, I think I’ve got everything,’ she says. ‘I just have to get the radiologist to okay it all.’
    She exits and returns a few minutes later followed by a slim, sober-looking young man. He examines the picture on the TV screen, his expression fixed. Not a muscle twitches, not a word is spoken and yet suddenly I know that something is very wrong. None of us says anything. Radiologists are supposed to deliver the news to the patient’s doctor, not to the patient. I have the impulse to ask him what he sees, butI know he won’t tell me and I don’t want to plead.
    It is my first encounter with this