Last year, while I was on holiday, my friend called me to say that she had had an MRI and the doctors found a brain tumour. I sat on a pink beach towel in the sun and listened to her. When she spoke I could picture her with her eyes shut and her hand across her face in a resigned way—like, well, I have a brain tumour now.
A slow fury was unfurling but nothing ignited. I had already lost faith in the world that bad things couldn’t happen to good people. When I was 22 I had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had a mastectomy and 16 rounds of chemotherapy over 6 months. My hair fell out, I was tired, sad, nauseous, my life changed forever. I tried to focus on kindness and conviction. I thought that by ensuring I was a good person I could similarly ensure that the cancer wouldn’t come back. Over time the naïveté of this belief walked away.
When I was 22 I had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had a mastectomy and 16 rounds of chemotherapy over 6 months. My hair fell out, I was tired, sad, nauseous, my life changed forever.
A few weeks later Eliza messaged to say that her tumour was growing at an alarming rate and her surgery had been brought forward to the next day. I changed my flights and flew to Canberra to wait with her.
When Eliza’s doctors visited her ward she would introduce me as her friend who had had breast cancer.
How crazy is that? She’d say. That we both got tumours.
We counted tumours in the staff and students at our school in the years since we graduated, 10 all up in less than 10 years – 8 teachers and then us. We wondered if that counted as a cancer cluster. Could we lodge a class action? When we told nurses about our theories their responses varied from interest to surprise to condemnation—don’t dwell on those things—but it felt good to have a common enemy in that vacuous waiting period, somewhere tangible to direct our emotions.
When I visited Eliza the morning after her surgery she was in a lot of pain. She couldn’t stop groaning and one of her eyes was swollen shut, the skin was tight, shiny and deeply purple. She said she felt like she was wearing an eye patch and she kept getting the impulse to just take it off.
Is Chloe here? She asked, and I moved to where she could see me.
I feel really sad, she said. I just keep thinking it’s so unfair. Why did this happen to us? We should be doing young people things not this bullshit.
They were thoughts I remembered having and still have often, almost every day.
What’s going to happen now? She asked.
This focus on happy endings though seems to take agency away from sick people. It forces their stories into something finite. How long after diagnosis do you have to shape your story? Weeks? Months? Does your story end as soon as you leave hospital? People feel compelled to find a positive conclusion so that they can move on, they have made sense of something and now they can focus elsewhere.
Often people focus on happy endings in order to get through painful times. This hurts now but there’s a prize waiting somewhere on the horizon. When friends asked about Eliza I told them she was recovering well but that she’d been dealt a bad hand. She had large blind spots in her vision, her hormones were badly affected, and her fatigue was extreme. I was drinking wine around a kitchen table telling friends about this when the silence crept in. One of my friends put her hands on the table, as if to summarise.
But they got it all out, she said. They got it all out and that’s great.
That unfurling fury ignited and my body tensed up. I’m not sure what I objected to, it was great that they had gotten Eliza’s tumour out. Did I want to snap back actually it’s terrible, she’s very sick? No, I also wanted to live in the reality where my friend had recovered.
This focus on happy endings though seems to take agency away from sick people. It forces their stories into something finite. How long after diagnosis do you have to shape your story? Weeks? Months? Does your story end as soon as you leave hospital? People feel compelled to find a positive conclusion so that they can move on, they have made sense of something and now they can focus elsewhere.
But in this moving on it often feels like someone is being left behind. After an explosion there is debris. There is a long process of recovery. Things don’t go back to how they were just because the threat is removed. This is what chronic illness is. You live in that waiting period. It isn’t awful, and it isn’t pitiable. You build a life that is in many ways better than what you had before.
To summarise though, to find the happy ending in everything, feels like it denies the great deal of work the chronically ill are perpetually exerting in order to live. Happy endings are a convenience that belongs only to the well. For the ill, living is a process.
What I want for my friend and for myself is the freedom to talk about the illnesses that have become part of us, even on the ‘good days’. I want the story of our bodies to unfold forever and I want to be allowed the time to listen to them, wait, and adjust the story as we see fit.
Chloe Reeson is a writer on the SBS series Homecoming Queens starring Michelle Law. Her character is played by Liv Hewson.
You can watch the first episode of Homecoming Queens on SBS On Demand.
