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‘Right.’ Although actually I don’t want to hear, because the last time she told me the nitty gritty of what a double mastectomy entails, I nearly passed out. Still, I fix a polite and faintly interested smile on my face as Dr. Stein launches into a description of how she’s going to cut into my breasts and suction all the tissue out. I glance at Heather and see how pale she looks, and amazingly, I almost laugh. This is definitely not for the faint of heart.
‘As for the reconstruction, we’re not going to be able to determine whether we have the right conditions for that until during the operation.’ Conditions. I think of weather conditions; it’s a little too stormy for that. I nod.
‘Okay, great. Any questions?’
‘When… when will I feel better? I mean, enough to call my son and talk to him?’
‘The mastectomy takes about two hours, and if we’re able to do a reconstruction, that will be another two to three hours. Then you’ll be in a recovery room for about three hours, before you’re back in your hospital room.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s nearly ten now, so I’d imagine you might be up for making a phone call tonight around nine or ten, but if not, definitely by tomorrow morning.’
‘Okay.’ Tomorrow morning. I can hang on that long if I need to.
‘So all I need to do now is make some marks with my special pen.’ She brandishes what looks like a child’s marker.
‘Do you want me to…?’ Heather begins, but I shake my head.
‘It’s okay.’ I feel badly, making her leave the room every time I need privacy, and the truth is, I don’t want to go through these moments alone.
‘All right.’ With brisk movements Dr. Stein slips the hospital gown off my shoulders and I am naked to the waist. I thought she’d be a little more discreet, but obviously discretion went out the window a long time ago.
Dr. Stein asks me to sit up straight while she makes some lines and crosses on my breasts, which look flabby and old, but they’re still mine. They’re still there. Heather is averting her head, and I appreciate the effort.
‘So that’s where you’re going to cut,’ I say, and Dr. Stein nods cheerfully.
‘You’ll find the incisions will be barely noticeable once we’ve reconstructed your breasts.’
Which is a sentence that in another situation, another life, might have made me laugh.
‘All right.’ Dr. Stein helps to pull up my hospital gown. ‘I’ll see you in surgery in about ten minutes.’
She leaves, and quite suddenly, I am seized by panic. I’m having one of my old panic attacks, like I did right after my father died. I can’t breathe; air comes in and out in wheezy gasps and I bend over, my arms wrapped around my waist.
‘Grace?’ Heather rubs my bare back. ‘Grace, it’s going to be okay.’
I am gulping for air, sweat prickling across my shoulder blades and pooling between my breasts.
‘I’m scared,’ I say through chattering teeth. ‘I’m so scared.’
‘It’s all right to be scared.’ Heather is still rubbing my back, the way I rub Isaac’s after he’s had a nightmare. ‘Anyone would be scared in this situation. I’m scared.’
I laugh, or try to, but it comes out like a sob. I put my hand to my mouth to keep the rest in. Heather puts her arms around me.
‘It’ll be all right,’ she whispers. ‘It’s going to be all right, Grace.’ I close my eyes as I relax into her embrace, the comfort she offers me freely, that I never, ever expected to receive – and yet so desperately need. Yes, it’s going to be all right, I think, lulled by her words, her motherly tone. It has to be.
Part Three
Twenty-Four
HEATHER
I stay in the hospital until long after Grace goes into surgery. I accompanied her into a little room, some kind of pre-operating room, where she lay down on a stretcher and they hooked her up to an IV. Machines were beeping and the number of nurses and doctors bustling around with tubes and needles surprised me; this was clearly a major event.
Grace looked small on the stretcher, her face pale, her poor head with its wispy hair as fragile as an egg. I could have wept for her. The whole experience cut me to the bone, as I sensed the pain and fear she felt. I hadn’t expected to feel so much, to ache so much… for Grace.
After they wheel her into the operating room a nurse ushers me out, and I wander down antiseptic corridors before I find a café. I buy a latte and sit at a table, lost in a haze of thought, my coffee forgotten.
I am thinking of Isaac as a baby, Grace under the knife. The way he smelled in those newborn days, when I buried my nose in his neck. The way Grace looked on, anxious and exhausted, while I pretended to know it all. It all seems so unbearably petty now, the deliberate one-upmanship I couldn’t keep myself from, even though I knew it didn’t do any good for either of us.
Then my thoughts move to my own family – Amy’s anger, Emma’s confusion, Lucy’s needs, Kev’s resentment. So much to deal with, day after day after day. And then back to Grace, wondering how she has coped with cancer all by herself, and then considering how much she needs me right now. How much I want to finally be needed. It all drifts through my dazed mind as I sit and stare into space while the hours tick by unnoticed.
