From Medicine to Miracle: How My Faith Overcame Cancer. Dr. Self Mary

Tan-Shoes appears with a drip bag containing a bright yellow fluid. It looks so cheerful – but it is deadly poison.

      ‘What is that?’ I ask him.

      ‘Methotrexate,’ he says. I file the name away to ask my dad about it tomorrow when he visits me.

      He picks up a syringe with something in it and injects it into a little hole underneath the green blob on the needle.

      ‘And that one?’

      ‘Vincristine.’ He selects another, much bigger, syringe.

      ‘So what is that one for?’ I am trying really hard to be nice to him to make up for my veins being so bad. Maybe then he will like me, too.

      ‘To stop you being sick.’

      ‘And my hair …?’

      He starts to walk away and, as he does, throws back a comment: ‘It will fall out now.’

      I stare at the bedcover and the pattern blurs as tears well up in my eyes and spill onto my nightdress. I am crying because it seems as if my hair can be thrown away as casually as his remark. My hair is more precious than that. I am only seventeen and my hair is so pretty. I have been growing it. The lady in the bed opposite – the one with the tummy bag – is cross.

      ‘He shouldn’t tell you like that!’ she says, and storms up the ward to find Irene who comes and sits on the bed and gives me a hug. I am so tired of losing all that I have. It is as if my body doesn’t belong to me any more.

      I watch the yellow drug dripping into my vein and wait anxiously to see how I feel. It advances in a bright wave down the tube and I can see it entering my body. It doesn’t take long. Soon I begin to heave and retch and the covers are now soaked in blood and tears and vomit. And this is how it is for the next two days. My body is racked with spasm after spasm and heaves with the strain of emptying itself of yellow poison. The hours pass in a haze and I am only vaguely aware of the morning becoming afternoon. Nurses come and go, bringing me snacks and drinks which lie untouched. Mum visits me and talks but it is like living in twilight and when she is gone I do not know if she was ever really there. Then it is night and I drift in and out of the nightmare, the same awful nightmare, only this time I know the ending and I am even more scared.

      I wake and hear the rasping breath of the lady in the next bed. She is frail and old. She has been very ill and cannot even speak. I hear the noise of her gasping and her chest rattling as my own breathless fears subside. It sounds as if her every breath is an effort. I listen to her drowning for several hours. Sometimes she moans softly in pain. And sometimes she whispers the name of a man, ‘Jack’. Nobody comes to sit by her, for it is late and she is so old. The drowning noise gets worse and I call, hesitantly, for a nurse – not knowing whether I should, but all the other ladies are asleep. The nurses cannot hear me and no-one comes to her. Suddenly, there is silence. I wait for the next breath but it doesn’t come. I hold my breath too. When I can no longer resist the urge to gulp in a huge lungful of air, I listen again. The noises are definitely gone. She is no longer breathing. Why has she stopped breathing, I wonder, and I wait for something to happen but the silence goes on. And then I realize. She is dead. I have heard the old lady die. She has died of cancer.

      I quell an overwhelming desire to scream and scream. I have never heard death before. The other ladies still sleep. I call again for a nurse and think maybe I should have done something before to help. Maybe I should have called louder and then she would not have died. Perhaps the nurses will be angry I did not call louder to summon assistance. I feel a rising sense of panic. So I lie quietly in my bed, pretending to be asleep, in case it turns out to be my fault.