A Few Words About Breasts
Abi is on antibiotics because the doctor dropped her skull on the floor. The doctor said, “Sorry.“ He said it slipped off his hand during surgery.
Abi’s a friend of my wife. Abi is on antibiotics because the doctor dropped her skull on the floor. The doctor said, “Sorry.“ He said it slipped off his hand during surgery. But she’ll be alright, he said. He knows what he’s doing.
And it’s not like Abi was feeling dizzy, or passing out while having an orgasm, or falling asleep in the hall cupboard hugging a broom. Abi was hitting the gym and running on that treadmill until a few weeks ago. Until she needed a new pair of glasses. So she sits at the optician’s chair, her face resting on the tonometer and the guy with a coat asks her to look straight. Air puffing. Spitting into her eyes. The optician asks if Abi wants an extra check. It’s free. It can see what’s behind her eyeballs and see if there’s anything wrong. Would she like to see what’s behind her eyeballs? And Abi’s just wondering about dinner with her in-laws that evening, so without thinking, she says, “Yeah. Sure.“ No one has ever looked that deep into her brain.
Then Abi buys herself a new pair of glasses and is also asked to go and see a specialist. It’s probably nothing the optician says, but just in case. And the specialist looks at the scans with a frown. He asks Abi for an X-ray of her brain. And no one has really looked into her skull that much. Then Abi’s wearing a Dalmatian hospital gown and is asked not to eat anything after dinner because the anaesthetics really don’t like a full stomach. She had to cancel three meetings with some new clients. Put on hold all the others. Abi’s sharing videos on social media with that golden retriever of her husband, and they both have to freeze their big family plans until they carve that thing out of her brain. Then she might have to skip the hairdresser for a while because of the chemo.
Go get a pair of new glasses and you might decide not to have kids anymore. The house of cards our lives have become. You really try to keep all windows shut not to blow it all away with a draft of wind.
After surgery, the doctor said the antibiotics would fix whatever Abi’s skull might have caught. The surgery went great. He said now she’ll live 20 more years for sure. After that, they really don’t know. Abi packs her bag and books an appointment with her hairdresser and the only thing, the only thought pounding in her scarred head is, “What the fuck just happened?“
I tell this whole story to my mum on our video call. I tell her that there’s a very fine line between prevention and over-diagnosis. What the doctor found in my mum’s scans last week is probably nothing. It’ll be alright, I’m sure, I tell her. And with two big red onions for eyes, wiping tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand my mum says, “How do you know?“
I tell her it’s like that time I was thousands of miles away and saw her going timber without knowing it. It’s a feeling. One of those mother-and-son things Western philosophy can’t explain.
If you can pop a cork off a wine bottle, you can fall in love and get your heart crushed, or if you can read a news article, that’s probably because you’ve fed yourself out of your mother’s breasts when you were a baby. My sister and I are no different, and we squeezed all the milk out of our mum’s breasts and she has felt some small lumps since. This was back when your TV set had only a handful of channels and you had to turn a handle on your radio to get the right station.
On the video call, my mum says, “I know my body.“ She says, “I’ve had these lumps since I breastfed you two.“ When she mentioned that at the hospital, the doctor said, no, that’s impossible, she must be mistaken.
So the doctor booked my mum in for more tests. The doctor said, “It doesn’t look great.“ And now my mum doesn’t sleep at night trying to remember money they might have borrowed that she might have forgotten, pondering if she should have sent Christmas cards to distant relatives she never gave a shit about. In between shifts at the care home, she’s going through the endless to-do list of things she’ll need to wrap up.
And looking at her on the video call, I say, “Well.” Her eyes squeezed in a small cut while she’s sobbing, I say, “That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?“
25 years. That’s how long every year they’ve sent my mum an invite for a free screening. And she always ripped it up. Hoping to be on shift on the day of the appointment. Burying the letter in the recycle bin and going on with her day.
Her philosophy is that if something needs to go wrong, she doesn’t want to know about it until the very end. And I’ve got the feeling that my mum understands something that often slips away in the carousel of groceries, work, dinners, doctor appointments and prescriptions. Your mind can sicken and heal your body like anything else. A hammering thought in your head can eat you from the inside like the deadliest virus. Keeping them a way means keeping yourself out of trouble.
On the call, I try to make her laugh. Saying something stupid, since that always comes easy to me. But there’s one thing I’m curious about. So I ask. I say, “Why did you open the letter this time?“
And my mum says she really doesn’t know. She says it was a feeling. She opened the letter, and the appointment wasn’t clashing with her shift. So she went. “Does it make sense?“ she asks. And yes, it does.
We’re all instinct and gut feeling on my mum’s side of the family. Like when fresh out of University instead of looking for a job I disappeared on the Pyrenees for two months on my own. Or when I quit my well-paid job in London to become a farmer. Stuff that doesn’t make sense to anyone but you. And that’s what really matters.
My mum did her breast biopsy. The doctor was the same one who told her it really wasn’t looking good. The same doctor who said this was all strictly necessary. The same doctor that pierced my mum’s under her breasts with a big syringe and a shaky hand. Then the paper towel of the bed was covered in blood. The doctor said, “Sorry.“ There might be a small bruise in the next few days and she helped my mum put her bra back on.
The cut did swell into a big lump the colour of an eggplant. And now my mum is waiting for the results that should come any day now. But she doesn’t want to talk about it. I only ask when I feel it’s been too long without an update. My mum, she fills in all the silent pauses in our conversations asking about the weather up here. Asking about the dog. About work. She’s filling the gaps. In case I bring up the topic. She’s just trying every day to keep it off her head.
So now we’re doing what everyone does holding a parcel by the post office with too many people inside. We wait. And you with us.