Week 2: where you start to recognises the doctors’ faces but can’t remember their names

I held Elsie every night in the hospital, where we shared her single bed. I stared at her. I prayed for her. I listened to her breathing and smelt the sweat on her skin. My husband slept beside us on the fold out bed and he held my hand through the side rails in the early hours of the morning. I had never loved my little family so much before.

Doctors were worried about Elsie and action was being taken, as I recall. They were almost certain tests would show their diagnosis was accurate and so they put her port line in to begin chemotherapy immediately.

I was desperate for a cure. I wanted ‘things’ to happen yesterday. I needed good news. I demanded a plan. I sought to wrestle control back from the cancer that had so quickly rendered me useless. Someone posted on Facebook ‘relax, nothing is under control’ and I realised that truer words had never been written.

My phone was my enemy in that week. I couldn’t turn it on. I couldn’t talk. News of our trauma had spread across the country and everyone wanted to offer their support. It wasn’t that I was ungrateful, I simply couldn’t pick up the phone to listen to the messages. It hurt to hear the sadness in people’s voices. It made everything too real. It meant the world was going on out there, without us, without Elsie who so loved life and hated missing out on anything.

Week 1: in which life as we know it collapses around us

Having never lived through a cyclone I suppose I really am in no position to use such an impressive event as the basis of my comparison. But I am going to, because it feels appropriate. Because when I think of a cyclone, I think of an overwhelming sense of destruction and fear. I think of a complete loss of control. I think of saving myself and my family from impending danger, and clinging to beloved objects in a vain attempt at salvaging parts of a life that will never be the same. I think that maybe being told my two year-old daughter had cancer was sort of like that. Maybe. Sort of.

Never one for public meltdowns, I was surprised to find myself on my hands and knees outside the door to the hospital ward, where Elsie became a patient. My heart pounded in my ears, my stomach fell to the floor, my chest ached, my head spun. I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed. I had never known a burning, blinding, aching, twisting and terrifying pain such as this.

Elsie was two and a half when doctors discovered appendicitis was not the cause of her tummy pain. Rather, it was a kidney tumour. A large tumour, diagnosed as a Wilms Tumour that had spread to her lungs. I will never forget the matter-of-fact way in which the surgeon told me the news and I will love her always for the eye contact she maintained and the strength in her voice.

A whirlwind ensued. Elsie was admitted to the ward before undergoing every scan they could think to employ. I joked she hadn’t been photocopied yet. I don’t remember my husband laughing.

The moment I couldn’t control my own actions was after a day of prodding, poking, invading and assaulting my little girl who didn’t understand why mummy was letting all these people upset her so much. Nurses had given her a drug to make her dazed and to forget they were about to insert a tube through her nose into her gut. I lost it. And there I was, on the floor near the hospital elevators, overcome by grief and unable to fix my own child.