What was the reason? I wondered in a flash of panic. Because my case was particularly bad? Would they come in through my throat, and go out through my colon, having removed all that cancerous rubbish in between? (And yet, over the two weeks before I got my appointment, the pains had definitely been lessening. Another, equally powerful jab of thought: was it too late to leave the hospital?)
But now a white-clad male nurse had arrived. I was spared from speculation by concrete choices. Would I have a sedative, in which case I would probably forget everything about what had happened, or not? My call. Des, the velvet-voiced, melting-eyed Irish nurse, talked as he took my blood pressure, caressing into extinction most of the syllables of the ‘sphygmorrter’ he was using (thus proving the point I had just made to my husband, that his precious ‘sphygmomanometer’ was a bad word that had made me misspell it), and seemed to hint that I should, or at any rate that he would. But half the patients did, half did not. ‘I’ll try without,’ I decided. Be with the bolder, tougher half.
Quite soon, knees up and semi-naked on a trolley in the procedure room, I thought, ‘Wrong decision’, but was too embarrassed to change it. They laid me down on my left side and put a blue plastic object with a hole in it between my teeth. I remembered that I often breathed through my mouth. Today, not an option. British shyness and good manners kept me lying there, gasping, be-dummied, immobile. Then I saw it, whipping steelily about in the air like a snake to my right and above me, the infinite length of the tube I was meant to swallow, at its end the tiny camera glowing with a fierce blue light, the doctor looming behind it like a fakir, green-capped, green-gowned, faceless. I closed my eyes and gave up, remembering what had finally allowed me to fly, after years of neurotic terror, someone saying, ‘You don’t have to fly the plane.’ Yes, I could not be in charge of this moment.
Seconds later, it was inside me. The doctor gave a would-be reassuring commentary, his tone merry and slightly manic: ‘This is the worst bit, we’re going over the tongue, we hmm — let’s see — YES! and down the throat, going down now, we’re in the stomach already! Now I’m going to blow some air into the stomach … Going further down, we’re in the duodenum …’
I tried to grunt in protest, to let him know he was risking my life with this five-star itinerary, and the nurse’s reassuring pressure hardened. ‘You’re doing very well, not long now.’ ‘Samples,’ said the cheery maniac, ‘scalpel’, and then something new whizzed and pinged down the tube. ‘We’re just taking some biopsies, coming back now, having a good look round inside the stomach, then we’ll be out.’ I lay there exhausted, eyes watering, weak as a baby. ‘Is it over?’
The whole thing only took five minutes. Any longer and I don’t know what I would have done, but after all, what could I have done? By now I was no longer thinking of cancer; I was just thinking, ‘Thank God he’s stopped.’ Small blessings, like small worries, briefly erase greater ones.
‘You did well,’ said the nurse. ‘Don’t worry. Lots of people actually fight. I had to hit one bloke quite hard.’
Not long after, the doctor, who without his mask looked young and gentle, came round the ward. I did not entirely take in what he had said, though I nodded and smiled and asked questions.
‘It all looked totally normal. We didn’t find anything nasty. No tumours or anything like that. The stomach looked pink and healthy. No sign of a hiatus hernia. We’ll look at the samples of course.’
We didn’t find anything nasty. No tumours. The stomach looked pink and healthy …
I never got a firm diagnosis. ‘Probably just an infection.’ Or something to do with the extra kidney randomly discovered during those five months. How different are we all from the diagrams? What strangenesses lie under the skin?
Life. I was given it back. Not a year, not five years: no shadow. It took me several days to understand, and to shrug off the greatcoat of terror. It’s a common enough experience; the mind has been told, but the body can’t turn on a sixpence from one mode to another. The chemicals that are triggered by fear can’t disperse on the instant. People talk about ‘feeling flat’ when the good news comes, of its ‘not sinking in’. The body has depths; it is an ocean. How long does it take for a storm to die down?
But later, how light I felt. How light I feel. How grateful.
Outside the glass, the house-martin swoops, closer, closer, then turns on one wing and is off again, dancing away across the void. Not pinned on its back. Not ash on the ground.