Lone Twin by Michelle Diener

Author:Michelle Diener
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Selfpublishing

The gift of emotional release

Despite being thrust back into the ongoing horrors of the world of chemotherapy, still Nicole laughed, and looked for the joy in every experience around her.

I guess lots of people walk out of an oncologist’s office with tears streaming down their face, but few would have tears of laughter. The cause of our mirth was an incident on the way out of Dr Syd’s office after Nicole’s monthly treatment review appointment. His office was on the third floor of a busy inner city private hospital. The lifts to the office were in the central foyer, right next to a crowded coffee shop, usually full of people looking like they too could use a good belly laugh.

The day before each appointment with the oncologist, Nicole had to go and see her GP for a blood test. She had the greatest respect for him and his colleagues and was always grateful for the extra time and attention they offered her whenever she needed it. At these appointments, the GP would take some blood from her arm, send it off to be analysed, then later that afternoon, she would return to his office to find out the results. The blood test measured, among other things, the level of ‘tumour marker’ in her blood. Cancer tumours secrete a chemical into the bloodstream – the higher the tumour marker reading, the bigger the tumour, or the more vigorously it’s growing. This was a less invasive way of finding out what was happening inside her body than scanning and gave the doctor a baseline from which to plan treatment decisions.

This time, Nicole’s GP had seemed preoccupied when she went to see him to get her results. He told her that her tumour markers were over 1000, a jump up from last time. Nicole rang me to warn me that the visit to the oncologist the next day might not be good news, because her GP had said her tumour markers were up. She told me that she had the old ‘frozen heart’ feeling she remembered so well from her first diagnosis, because she was sure a score of over 1000 meant bad news. What would this mean, we wondered? Chemo for longer, stronger doses to make her sicker as it made her better, or was this the point where the oncologist turned to her and said, I’m sorry Nicole, there’s nothing more we can do for you. SHE told ME not to worry; we’d sort it out in the morning when we saw Dr Syd. It was a long, agonising night, the kind where the 3am terrors sneak into your head and put a stranglehold on your heart and your stomach churns with worry. Everything is always much, much worse at 3am. Not even squeezing condensed milk straight out of the tube into your mouth can fix the 3am terrors.

I met Nicole the next morning in the foyer of Syd’s office. We always dreaded these appointments. A waiting room full of people

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