Laser Beams and Plasterboards
The last fortnight has passed by in a blur of social outings, home developments and, of course, cyberknife treatments. The treatment side of things has been a strange and surreal experience, but mercifully mild side-effects have allowed me to continue to live my life in the busy time of setting up our new home.
We’ll begin with the cyberknife. Cyberknife treatment was to occur over five forty-minute sessions, spaced out across two and a half weeks. For the first session, we arrived half an hour beforehand, making our way down to the lower level of the cancer centre, where I was greeted by a nurse with anti-nausea medication. The tablet dissolved under my tongue, a saccharine, artificial flavour of strawberries filling my mouth. We waited in the comfortable sitting room as the medication did its work, passing the time reading and watching the fish that swam lazily around the aquarium against the far wall. Thirty minutes later, I was beckoned into the adjoining room by one of the treatment specialists. I said goodbye to Alessandra — who had curled up comfortably in a padded recliner to mark up her experience of the first draft of my novel — and followed the specialist around the corner, to where the cyberknife and its attendants awaited me.
Do not enter the aquarium
The bench sat in the center of the room, the cyberknife hunched over at its head. It was a huge, hulking beast of a machine, clad in a futuristic matte white plastic with black ribbed cables curling about the joints. My body mold was already in place on the bench, and I was guided to lay down upon it, arms by my sides. Green lasers mapped out the centerline and segments of my body, and the aides shifted the mold until I was perfectly positioned. Above me, a broad circle, perhaps two meters in diameter, was cut into the ceiling, the depression rimmed with flourescent lighting that only added to the futuristic atmosphere of the room. Flanking either side of the circle above, hanging from the ceiling to observe me, were two small, droid-like units, their single-eye cameras staring blankly down at me. X-ray scanners, I was told, charged with taking scans and feeding their information back to the cyberknife as it worked. I glanced backward at the cyberknife machine just behind my head, its body ending in its own enormous brain-case sporting a cyclopean, apertured eye as big as a closed fist. It hadn’t noticed me yet. I took in the cyberknife, then returned my gaze to the droids. The Mother and its Children, I thought without thinking. It felt like I had wandered out of my world and into a spacebase medical facility of the future — one run by clicking, whirring creatures of metal and plastic, with little interest in the meat-and-bone humans they were tasked with helping. And here I was, a sacrifice placed in its lair, awaiting its Medusa-like gaze, required to lie as still as stone as it bored into my liver and sought its prize.
Mother and Child
“Alright, we’ll see you shortly!” One of the nurses said chirpily as she finished taping the breathing sensors to my chest. She turned heel and strolled out of the room. Don’t leave me here with Them, I thought half-jokingly, never taking my eye off the Children. Then I heard a click, and the Mother came to life.
The cyberknife started up with a sound like a laser beam booting up a ‘90s internet modem. The sound rose from a deep, garbled thrum to a warbling tone like liquid electricity and, as that hum hung steady in the air, the huge head and body of the cyberknife machine began to uncurl. Its head passed mine, and the eye aperture took me in as it searched down my body, heading for the lower right section of rib cage where a gold tracking marker had been inserted weeks earlier. It found its position, undulating up and down in gentle, juddering movements, in perfect unison to the rise and fall of my chest and the rhythmic vibration of my heart. Synced up, it began to work.
For the next forty minutes, the Mother explored the tumour through my flesh from every angle, examining it like a curious child with an unusual marble. It swiveled over me and around the bench, coming mere inches from my face as it worked, clicking and humming as it blasted electric radiation through its narrow aperture and into the growth in my liver. It occasionally stopped and cocked its head to one side, as though something had caught its interest, before resuming the job at hand. I watched it for the full forty minutes, equally unnerved and intrigued. I felt nothing, saw nothing, and yet I knew that this machine was somehow destroying the cancer inside of me. Then, without warning, it retracted back and returned to sleep; satisfied, perhaps, for the time being,
Happy to say goodbye
That night, I felt ill, pushing through cooking dinner and only picking at the result. I had chosen to fast since the night before, and it seemed likely that this was only amplifying my symptoms. After a rest and some Panadol, however, I was able to rejoin the world and go for a walk with Alessandra to round out the day.
The remaining scans followed much the same pattern as the first. The cyberknife machine seemed to shed its sinister edge after the first session, and it seemed increasingly maternal, fussing over me incessantly as I sank into a meditative state under its critical eye. Treatment time flew by, and I counted myself fortunate that the level of nausea I felt that first evening didn’t return. After each session, I found that I would feel sapped of strength and mildly off for the rest of the day — but so long as I took plenty of rest and avoided overexerting myself, it was little worse than the onset of the flu. Alessandra did her part, sternly admonishing me whenever I sought to test my limits prematurely; and, despite my protestations, I was glad for her insistence that I take the necessary time to recover.
…
In the meantime, we split the remainder of our time and energy between family, friends, and progressing with the work needed on our new apartment. Brunches and dinners, group catch-ups with friends and family, and other activities replenished our souls. One evening was spent singing and talking with a group of my close friends; another, having dinner with a lovely couple who invited us into their home and grilled the perfect steak on their barbeque, as we spoke of hope and psychology and our relationship with death. Easter brunch was a busy affair — a long table filled with family, sharing an exquisite meal which Alessandra and planned and prepared with love. Alessandra and I even attended a breathwork event on the sand at City Beach one morning, finishing with a two-minute meditation in the frozen water of one of several ice baths, set up by the water’s edge for the occasion. Numb and aching from the cold, we slowed our breathing and sat in the discomfort until, released from the icy grip of the frigid water, we ran into the embrace of the ocean, which felt like a hot tub by comparison.
…
The work on the apartment began slowly, but quickly picked up speed. We started by taking recommendations for tilers, plasterers and cabinet makers from our social network, and were provided with inroads to a family-owned flooring company by Sabre’s adoptive parents, when we visited our favourite goofball for a morning of play. We debated about tiling and floorboarding, and eventually arranged a measure and quote to rip up the old carpeting in the bedrooms and replace it with timber floorboards, leaving the tiled living room as-is. Alessandra called many of the recommendations, booking in dates and times for several quotes, and securing a plumber to remove the laundry sink to free up the space by the door. We were preparing for the complexity of arranging a slew of contractors over the weeks to come. Little did we know how much simpler the process was about to become, with a trickle of serendipity crystallising and just the right moment.
Sold!
I will back up for a moment, and bring you to the time before we set of with Pumbaa on our trip up the WA coastline. It was April of 2023, and we were wrapping things up before hitting the road, selling as much as possible and storing the rest. One of the bigger jobs we had to contend with was selling our respective cars — though they were both in good condition, we knew, and would sell easily enough. Alessandra’s car was bought by a cheerful Chilean man for his niece, who had just flown in from Chile and would be staying with her uncle until she got on her feet. The uncle, who had immigrated many years earlier, took her to come and look at the car, introducing himself as Hans. The German name felt somehow incongruous with his character, which was Chilean through and through; that energy, openness and vitality of spirit clear — even as we took the car for a test drive around the neighborhood. We agreed on a price, and arranged to bring the car to them the following day. When we arrived, we were invited in for morning tea and mate — a traditional, refreshing South American herbal drink. There, we chatted about our travel plans and learned more about Hans and his niece as we drank our mate. Hans showed us around his home, pointing out many of the modifications he’d completed himself using the skills he had developed through his business in home renovations. He showed us videos of his band, too, which performs upbeat Chilean music for a variety of venues around Perth, and we told him we would seek his services for our wedding. When morning tea came to a close, Hans expressed to us that he felt there was a reason for our meeting as we did. He added us on facebook and gave us his business card — for my mum was looking at renovating her bathroom at the time — telling us to contact him if we needed his help with anything.
My mum never did get in touch with Hans, but she kept his business card, fixed with a magnet to the fridge. In our discussions with her about renovations, she pointed out the card, reminding us that we already had a contact who may be able to help us — at least with the tiling and bathroom. Alessandra gave him a call, explaining our situation and our hope that he may be able to help with the apartment, and he insisted on coming over within a few days to have a look, waiting for us at the agreed time out the front of the apartment as he sat on an easy chair by the pool. He greeted us as one greets family, and together we went through the work we wanted to have done, pointing out the cracks in the plaster on the ceiling; the laundry area by the door, the cabinetry in the kitchen and the tiling in the bathroom. Hans whipped out a tape measure and got to work, giving us measurements of the various types of tiles and advising us on how much of each we would need to order. He made recommendations of several places we could go that provided good quality materials for cheap, and we made notes as he flew from room to room. He could do the plastering, he said. And the remodeling and tiling of the bathroom. And the kitchen splashback. And the laundry. In fact, he said with a wave of his hand, he could do most of it easily — only the cabinetry would be beyond his scope of expertise. In the end, we handed him the keys, and he promised to get started on the plastering as early as the following week. We were over the moon — not only did we have a whole new set of information to inform our design choices and options, but we would be able to have much of it done sooner than expected by someone we could trust, and at a fraction of the cost.
The following day was spent flitting from shop to shop, looking at kitchenware, tiling and bathroom options. One the recommendations from Hans proved to stock much of what we were after, and we took photos of all the items that grabbed our interest, so that we could return to them later. By late afternoon, we had all but planned out the bathroom. Leaving the cabinetry for another day, we hopped back into the car, blasted the A/C to offset the heat of the day and headed for home.
First stop: flooring
…
With so much going on, it has taken a certain presence of mind to remain rooted in our moment-to-moment experience, without getting swept away by the pace of it all. Nevertheless, we are doing what we can to focus on making the most of the present, as we work together to build a new future.
So, what have we learned from this fortnight of treatment, recovery and forward-planning?
Listening to one’s body is pivotal in recovery, and the messages it sends should not be dismissed just because they do not necessarily support our plans.
Time with others is soul-food.
Accepting and moving into discomfort increases one’s sensitivity to pleasure.
Beautiful people are everywhere, and you never know what a chance meeting might bring down the line.
Medicine has come a long, long way, and the future is here, now. Watch out for the machines.
