Free After Cleo by Helen Brown Page A

hop outside and pretend it’s yesterday when I was in here having a routine mammogram. But it was too late.
    â€˜I think it’s malignant.’ Her sentence smashed across the room like a crate of empty bottles. There was silence while I examined the splinters.
    â€˜But I haven’t got time to be sick,’ I told her. ‘I’m writing a book.’
    Surely she’d take my busyness with the book into account and tell my malignant cells to go on hold.
    â€˜What’s the book about?’ she asked politely.
    â€˜Healing,’ I replied. I didn’t have the energy to go into detail. She smiled wryly. There was far too much knowledge in her eyes.
    I glanced down at her hands. They were small, almost dainty, with efficient-looking fingers.
    â€˜Brave’ and ‘positive’ are words associated with people in this situation. I could summon up neither. Cancer patients, especially if they’re film stars or rock singers, are often described as wanting to ‘fight this thing’. There wasn’t an ounce of aggression in me. I felt like a creature in a wildlife programme caught between the jaws of a powerful predator, its teeth sinking into my neck. I simply wanted to implode quietly in the corner.
    â€˜The growth is large,’ she continued gently. ‘It’s spread across the breast.’
    â€˜Mastectomy?’ I asked.
    â€˜Yes,’ she answered.
    Hang on. Couldn’t we strike a deal here? Couldn’t she make do with a lumpectomy like the ones I’d read about in magazines?
    She said a lumpectomy was impossible considering the size of the growth. Performing a lumpectomy would mean taking the whole breast anyway. I glanced across at the man I’d met twenty years earlier; the man who’d been mad enough to marry me. He silently examined his fingernails. I needed to know the dimensions of the catastrophe.
    â€˜And the other breast?’
    â€˜Possibly it will have to go, too. We won’t be sure until the biopsy and MRI results are through.’
    â€˜Do you think I’m going to . . . ?’
    â€˜You’ve had enough information to absorb for one day,’ she chirped. ‘Let’s hope I’m wrong and the growth’s harmless.’
    Her words disintegrated into gibberish. She wrote a prescription for sleeping pills. The days would be easier to get through, she said, if I’d had a decent night’s sleep.
    The clinic nurse handed me a psychologist’s business card. A shrink? Hell no , I thought, but slipped the card in my handbag anyway. I was going to need all the help I could get.
    In the biopsy room a man who could’ve been mistaken for a model train enthusiast attacked my breast with a miniature ditch-digger that had a staple gun attached. The local anaesthetic had little effect. His gun discharged four painful shots before he was satisfied he had a sample of the offending tissue.
    Outside the clinic, beside the car, I wept into Philip’s neck. Trees in a nearby park waved their arms in sympathy. I’d encountered death before – my son, both parents and various friends. But I wasn’t ready to clasp its bony claw. Not just yet.
    I wanted to be around for Rob’s wedding in January. Katharine still needed a mother. And Philip would be hopeless without someone to trim his ear hair.
    The concept of dying – of shaking free of my body – was okay, providing it was relatively painless. What I couldn’t face was the prospect of leaving my husband and kids.
    That evening, forks scraped through risotto while I recounted the day’s events. The girls nodded solemnly, uncertain how to arrange their smooth young faces. I’d sometimes wondered what they’d look like once life had etched a few wrinkles in their features. Perhaps now I’d never find out.
    After loading the dishwasher, Lydia went upstairs. Any minute now she’d tell us she’d changed her mind about