You are tired even when lying down.” Her bones ached. “Mom,” her son, Derek, would asked her later, “why do you look like a boy?” She started crying and the woman without hair cried with her. “It smelled like fumes.” One day she was standing in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror and she saw this tired woman with no hair on her head. “When they were pumping drugs through my veins during chemo, I could actually smell it,” she says. But that wasn’t even the ugly part, which was to come. They cut the cancer out and it left a perfect round hole in her breast that later refused to heal. Tubes and vials, men and women in masks and rubber on their hands. How they would grow up without a mother and an absent father. When she thought of death she agonised over what would become of her children. The thing is, when you have cancer you think of death all the time, she says. “I felt like I was carrying something very ugly with me.” When you ask Doris how it feels to have a cancerous lump in your breast, to walk around with it, to go to bed with it, to sit in the office with it, to stir your coffee with it and put your kids to bed with it, she will say it feels dirty. Later, seated in her car, in the parking lot with her best friend, they cried and talked, cried again and talked again,and continued crying until the sun got overhead at noon and the building disgorged of corporate workhorses taking their lanyards for lunch.
It was like he was speaking with words made of smoke. She just stared at him, his lips moving (just like in the movies) hearing none of the words that were coming out. She sat there not hearing him, clutching onto her car keys tightly. He cut to the chase she had cancer, he told her. He looked tired even before he opened his mouth. The technician who had the needle lodged in her breast asked her, “Can you feel any pain?” and she said, “No, I feel nothing,” and he too had that worried look on his face.Ī few days later, the doctor had her results in a brown envelope. When he was done, while he wiped his hands with sanitizer, he had a creased brow and that thoughtful look doctors have when they have felt an oncoming tragedy.Ī week later, they snuck a needle in the lump to suck tissue out. His stethoscope dangled from his neck like a pet monkey. Then she showered and wore her favourite flat shoes and went to see a doctor. What kind of a God would let her marriage end then let her contract cancer? What level of gallows humour was God playing at? It was probably nothing, she assured herself. She didn’t want to think that it could be cancer. She felt the hardness of that pebble in bed that night as a million questions pinged in her skull. She had stood under that shower feeling horror wash down her body. Something the sea washed ashore, and the sea spits out all manner of things ashore. It was while showering that she had felt a small, hard lump in her breast. “I found more security in that house than I did in my marriage.” “I mourned the loss of that house more than I mourned the loss of my marriage,” she said. She was left in a house that she could not afford, so she had moved with her two sons to her sister’s house in Kileleshwa, the house she finds herself with her sons this afternoon. Her white wedding dress hadn’t even gotten creased in the closet.
He had packed up half of his stuff in the house and left. She’s about to tell them that she’s dying of cancer.īefore that afternoon, some three months ago, she had stood in the middle of a different room, her former living room, and watched her husband of five years leave her.
In the dying afternoon light, Doris Mayoli, sits on a bed with both her young sons flanking her on either side.
0 kommentar(er)
