Listen to the author reading this piece:
My legs are covered with bruises. Twice in the last few weeks I’d fallen on the stairs. Now the back of my thigh had last week’s bruise hidden under this week’s. I try not to look at them, I put on the largest underwear I own and leave the house at half past nine. It is a twenty minute walk to get there, that gives me exactly ten minutes to get inside and go to the second floor-as little time as possible to sit and wait.
Why I bother with the careful timing I’m not sure, he always runs late and a five minute wait can easily run to twenty five. I’d have time to pretend to look at the magazines. Some charity should take it upon themselves to put decent magazines on those corridors. Old television guides don’t do much to distract a body.
The sun shines as I walk down my street, it always seems to shine for these walks, it annoys me that the elements are so at odds. Surely there should be a wind, a bitter wind at that and hail showers to walk through. But no, a steady stream of sunshine and a gentle breeze have always insisted on accompanying me there.
I step out of my street and turn onto the main road. A bus rolls by, tempting me to step on, go with it to a station and steal myself away to a rocky island off the west coast somewhere. Back at the beginning I used to indulge the thought of escaping treatment to go and sit in the rain on a rock on Inishbofin. Felt like there might be more healing there than where I was headed.
No escaping. I keep my feet going, across the slabs of granite and onto the patterned brick, the red stone that gives me the urge to walk in zig zags along with it. When all else fails just keep putting one foot in front of the other, that was one of the bits of advice I’d gotten and taken from someone.
There was definitely something about motion that seemed important. All of my daydreams had images of sliding, swinging, dancing. Me in full flow, exhilarated. Visions of uninterrupted streams of motion would come in on the day dreams all the time, day and night. All this trouble was just me having been snagged by a branch, that’s all, caught on the rocks and diverted to a side stream.
She was determined not to settle in there, but to get back out there and keep going. She was very sure of that, and kept her eye on me while I spun around in my boat, staring at the scars on my chest.
Sitting in the doctor’s office five years previously, in the middle of a busy normal day, waiting for the consultant to give me the results, was our first introduction. I remember thinking the doctor was being ridiculously over cautious. He just had to go in to take a better look, cut me open to satisfy his professional curiosity. I felt like one of those victims of unnecessary surgery you read about in the Sunday paper.
That was the last clear thought I remember. Even before the words were out of his mouth I could feel something closing in, something being turned down. The doctor stopped directing his attention to me and gave the details to my partner. I heard only fragmented words like, in the tissue, we’ll go back in and take it all out… radiotherapy…..chemotherapy. The air thickened around me. I looked at my partner, he’d gone very pale. I remember being puzzled. It wasn’t clear to me why he was looking like that.
I speed up my step and cross the road, I’d done all the stuff they told me to do and I’d made it. I just needed one final check up and today I could be out in the five year clear zone. Morning rush hour was over. I stop to look in at the quiet-looking man in the antique shop, who sits by himself and smiles and waits for the one sale that will make his week.
My days were filled with people coming and going back before this whole thing started. Filled to the brim. I’d moved from a house full of brothers and sisters to flats full of girls, to marriage and babies. I could do five things at the same time and meet myself coming back on the way to the next task. Doing and redoing. I was almost never alone before, never sought nor knew very much about being by myself. I suppose that’s why I’d never gotten acquainted with this part of me before.
I came to think of her as She. She was the part of me that took over that day in the doctor’s office. In one fell swoop, She shut off the clamour and dragged me away. Life, under her rule moved in black and white slow motion. I suppose there was no time for shades, for questioning, for the dithering that normally filled days. Suddenly something simply was or it wasn’t, could or it couldn’t. She decided everything. Energy was needed, unnecessary stuff censored. I made no fuss, none whatsoever. I let her take over.
I imagine She had always been sleeping down there, curled up quietly somewhere inside me. When she was woken up by the fright of that day, I picture her uncurling, standing up, stretching her long delicate arms and taking over. In my mind she looks languid and wispy like the Lady of Shalott in that illustration in my school poetry book. She wasn’t like me, I didn’t know where I’d gotten her from and she scared me a little. She didn’t care what I thought of her. She did her job and steered me in the direction of some things and away from others.
It was wonderful in a way. I’d never felt as free. There were no demands. It helps that people ask nothing of you when you have cancer. It’s like you are in a room at the end of a long hallway and regular life is happening at the other end. Some people come to visit and tell you their secrets, taking a chance that you are going to the grave and you might take them with you. People that never liked you are forced to be kind. It was amusing to watch them tilt their heads in pity as they spoke to you. You didn’t have to like them, you didn’t have to do anything, except what you wanted to, only what you wanted to. There were very new rules and unusual ways of seeing things.
Take the light shop for instance, you liked the light shop, so you had always stopped on the way to treatment to look in at it. Hundreds of lights glinting through crystal shades mesmerised you. They were usually being switched on every morning as you went by, switched on for you. That was more of it, everything seemed significant back then. It wasn’t simply a shop opening its doors for business, but a spectacular light display that was being run for your private delight.
When I was lying in the radiotherapy room, I imagined the machine to be an ultra modern Flemish chandelier, and I a young woman being danced attendance on by streams of light, neon blues and red blues and blue blues playfully beaming across the lines on my breast. Movements as precise and controlled as a dancer’s. She would lead me in the dance in my mind while keeping my body perfectly still. The sound of the machine being turned off, the lead doors opening, nurses muttering, slowly brought down the curtain. We took our bow. Even when I threw up on the grass in the park on the way home, somehow those days remain light filled in my memory. The scaffolding She had erected around me seemed to have kept the worst of the ugliness at bay.
Today as I watch the lights in the shop, I think, I should get one for the hall. I catch myself doing that and banish the thought as quickly. It takes work now to just stand there and love the light and not plan to do something with it.
I think, all in all, her reign lasted about six months, the blinkered world, the hushed tones, the quiet, light filled days. Then the scaffolds that shielded me were slowly removed. There was a day about a year after it all began, I was standing at the kitchen sink, and I’d swear I felt the last of something leaving. The air sucked itself out of me like a back draught and was gone. I remember thinking all the family must have stopped praying on the same day. The news was good. No more candles were being lit. People stopped thinking you might die. You’d started to annoy an odd one. No more secrets were told. You were back at work, you were going to kid’s swim meets, you were tidying up, you were making dinners, you were worrying like a normal person again.
Somewhere in there even She slipped away. She, who never let anything normal happen, had stopped doing her thing, thinking maybe I’d gotten the hang of it by then, I suppose.
She only reappears every now and again- fleetingly in the middle of the night or at the end of long baths or sometimes on the check-up walks. Trailing her long sleeves over my ruffled insides to smooth them, sometimes dismissive of my efforts, “It’s simple, you silly girl, simple, didn’t I just show you, don’t make me stand up and do it all over again, how much of a lesson do you need?”
Sometimes I miss the days when she was in charge. I miss how strong She was, how focussed and merciless she could be. This hitherto unknown version of myself that had come to be me in those troubled times, now seemed to have disappeared. It wouldn’t have hurt me to have made better friends with her.
I round onto the tree lined street, will I walk on the pavement or cross over onto the grass? I stay on the stone, my feet like the impact of the harder ground. Shoes on stones tap things out to you, All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well, is what it gives back today. Going on the grass usually makes me cry- which suits me sometimes. I’ve become a great crier, I can heave it up from the softer ground all the way through me and out my mouth in quite spectacular ways.
Christ, a car, watch the road! I shake from the fright I get when the grey blue taxi almost hits me. The shaking brings a laugh and a headline pops into my head,”Woman distracted by the fear that cancer might have resurfaced, gets run over by a car while daydreaming her way to the hospital- never getting to know if she was in the clear or not.” It’s not for the first time that I think it’s not cancer that will get me but some by-product of not paying attention.
I round the corner past the flower shop. No ordinary, bright coloured flowers on display here, just plants in muted greens and greys. Yew hedges and ivies, hostas, herbs and ferns fill the window. I go inside. It is as pleasant and cool as a country lane. I inhale deeply.
I stop by a large trailing ivy plant. In my imagination She always had ivy woven through her hair, along long arms and entwined all the way to the tips of her sinewy white fingers. She would like that plant.
The shop smells make my head light. I soak in the scent of mixed earth, cut stems and sap. I buy the ivy, a dusty coloured sage and some other shade-loving creations.
“Yes,” I say, “you can gift wrap the ivy, please.” Great lengths are taken to do this. The woman with the gardener’s hands wraps and spins twine around the brown paper that encircles the pot, letting streamers of ivy stems spill from the top.
I’ll find a shady spot and plant them in a quiet part of my place. Who knows? She might be tempted back. Maybe I could get a small part of her to stay awake. She must get bored down there being ignored. She and I might grow to know each other in more normal times.
I walk on swinging our plants, moving around the corner. The hospital is in sight.
Loretta Fahy is a native of Co. Sligo and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. She currently lives in Brussels where she has written and directed three plays for the Irish Theatre Group. Her poem, Offerings of Recompense was published in the Irish Times, Hennessy New Irish Writings, in April 2019. Linden Lined Roads and Sparrow in Lockdown were featured as part of the Irish Embassy Belgium, An Irish Garland series in December 2020. She has had poems published in Allegro, An Capall Dorcha and in the Dedalus Press Anthology, Small Wonders. One of her poems was featured on the radio programme The Prompt, RTE 1 in July 2025.
Beautiful, painful, real. 💙
thank you for sharing this private, often unwritten experience! after all, i guess, guardian angels do exist...