Читать книгу From Medicine to Miracle: How My Faith Overcame Cancer - Dr. Self Mary - Страница 10

The nightmare was terrible. I was so scared. It was horrific. I woke up sweating and drenched, my heart racing. I had wet myself. All I could hear was the sound of blood pumping in my ears and breath rasping in my chest. Maybe it was because of the chemotherapy and the drip or maybe it was because of my experience in the chapel. I’m not sure.

I saw a pack of hungry dogs. They were huge and ferocious. Their fur was a mixture of tan and black. One was faster and bigger than the others. His muscles were lean and strong. His teeth were white and hard and from his mouth drooled spit. The metal spikes on his collar shone as they caught the moonlight. I tried to run and at first it felt good. I was laughing with the ease of out-running the pack. But then I fell, down, down a long, long way and the dog was upon me. The laugh became a scream. His teeth ripped into the soft muscles of my left thigh and I felt agonizing pain and the crunch of splintering bone as his canines met and easily split my limb. The blood spurted skyward and the dog picked up my severed leg and shook it in his mouth. I could see his tongue relishing the taste of my blood. I struggled to roll over and push the killer away. But before I knew it his teeth were at my neck, ready to execute me. I should look my killer in the eye, I thought, in the courage and the despair of my final moment, and so I looked into the eyes of a murderer. I do not understand.

Yesterday Dr Tan-Shoes came to put my drip in. That was awful too. He walked up to me and nodded, carrying a shiny metal dish shaped like a bean. In it were lots of needles with plastic blobs on them, all different colours: pink and blue and green. He chose a green one. It seemed bigger than the other needles. They looked pretty sitting in the dish and I thought maybe it would not be too bad. Irene had already brought a pole with a bag of salt water hanging on it to attach to the needle. Dr Tan-Shoes held my arm and put a tight band around it to make my veins fill up. He started to shake his head and made tutting noises. Then he got the needle and stuck it in my arm and I jumped in the bed because it hurt so much. I drew my arm back and he got really cross and said the vein had popped. Blood was running all down my arm. He tried again and again but he just couldn’t get the needle in my vein and he kept getting more and more impatient. I got scared and it was hurting me so much and then I cried, but he didn’t say anything. He just kept sticking the needle in my arm. I was shaking by the end of it and there was blood everywhere, all over my bedspread. It must be very difficult to put a drip in. Then he attached the needle to the bag of fluid and went. The nurses gave me lots of tablets to help my kidneys work properly and told me the chemotherapy would start next day.

This morning, Irene came to make my bed and noticed it was all wet from my nightmare. I told her I spilt the bedpan. She washed and changed me, for I am stuck here now, chained to the bed by my drip.

‘You look tired, Mary,’ she said to me. ‘Didn’t you get any sleep?’

‘Not much.’ I didn’t sleep after the nightmare – I was too scared.

‘Are you worrying about starting the drugs? What are you thinking about, Mary?’

‘I was wondering if God gets angry with people. You know, for bad things they have done.’

‘No, Mary. God isn’t like that. He loves you – especially now you are going through pain.’

I fixed my plaster saint smile to my face and nodded in agreement. But inside I am black and hopeless.

Dr 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.