Support Prof. Milross's CAPE TO CAPE TREK to raise money for Chris O'Brien Lifehouse.
Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is Australia’s first not-for-profit cancer hospital with all cancer services under one roof. As a not-for-profit hospital they rely on the ongoing support of the community to achieve lasting change in the way they prevent and treat cancer in Australia. To learn more about their current work www.mylifehouse.org.au.
The surgeon's scalpel is clean and gleaming and precise, like a paring knife scooping a bruise out of a fruit. But cancer cells can evade both the X-ray and the knife, the eye and the blade. The fugitive cells elude detection; they could be anywhere, or nowhere.
Absence of ocular proof is no reason to believe that the cancer isn’t there; on the contrary, absence multiplies the paranoid suspicion of its lurking presence, as Othello well knew. And so it was back to Sydney for another Positron Emission Tomography, or PET for short.
However, it's neither a pet nor is it short, so before I entered that lead-lined room where they would give me that radioactive injection which would then need to course (or curse, depending on your point of view) through my veins for a whole hour before they put me through that 'Tunnel of Love' for another thirty minutes, I thought I'd better grab Jerome K. Jerome's book "Three Men in a Boat" to while away the time.
The nurse who was about to stick that canulla into my vein - in vain at first as the vein in my arm kept collapsing long before I did - forbade me to occupy my brain with a slow re-read of something as innocent as "Three Men in a Boat" despite my assurances that it was not D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover".
Lying there and starring with vacuous eyes at the lead-lined walls, I was uplifted to detect a small notice on the wall which read - inter alia, as you Latin scholars would say -, "We scan many patients; each time staff come into contact with a patient who has been injected for a scan, they are exposed to radiation ..." What an old-fashioned and beautifully correct use of a semicolon, that little break midway between the quick skip of a comma and the patient pause of a full-stop!
The lead-lining may stop radiation but not noise from coming through the walls and so I was forced to eavesdrop on an octogenarian's mobile phone conversation in the adjoining injecting room - I never saw him but knew his age because we had to identify ourselves constantly to the incoming attendants by name and date of birth. "Too much information!" I felt like screaming as his fruity language excited me more than even D.H. Lawrence would've done. And what about allowing a mobile phone but not "Three Men in a Boat"?
An hour later I was commanded to empty my bladder in a room marked "Patient's Toilet" - what? do they only have one patient? what a letdown after that lovely semicolon! - before being shuttled back and forth for another thirty minutes in that claustrophobia-causing "Tunnel of Love".
The results of the scan were given to me on a stick. They were said to be negative which sounded absolutely positive. Happiness on a stick!
Maybe I've started reading Eugene O'Kelly's book too soon. Maybe I will live forever! So far so good!
P.S. I am back at peaceful "Riverbend". Padma tells me she wants to visit her sister in Melbourne for a week. Why not make it two weeks and give me a holiday as well? She has booked the V/Line bus for Sunday after which "Riverbend" will be even more peaceful! Dulce Domum.
