The night before my mastectomy, I dreamed that Mum gave me my results. My mother passed away two years before my breast cancer diagnosis – Alzheimer’s finally taking her after 14 years of hell – but in my dream, she was with me, exactly as I wanted to remember her.
In my dream, Mum sat in our family sitting room, in the blue room she loved so much, beneath blue plates hanging on the walls.
Mum was as she was before her illness turned her frail and bird-like. She was not the mother I had visited for so many years in the rest-home hospital, where she lay in bed like a breathing corpse, her blank eyes staring at the ceiling. In my dream, Mum told me I would be okay. She was 60 – a year before she was diagnosed – and by the time I reached her in the chair, she had gone, disappearing like a ghost.
Over the years, I had feared plaques might be growing in my brain – not spots of cancer in my breast.
But the revelation came in a memory I can never forget. It was a hot, windy day: February 2, 2023. A radiologist pulled my mammogram pictures up on her screen, pointed to sparkles, and said three words that shocked me: “Sarah, I’m worried.’’
She booked me urgently to see a breast surgeon. First, I had to have a biopsy, when I lay on a bed in the clinic, my partner, Steve, stroking my foot, as the needle went in and out, in and out, sucking samples of my breast tissue while I counted plants on the clinic plant wall.
I told my sisters and my father that I probably had breast cancer, and right then, I wanted my mum. I was a 53-year-old woman with three daughters of my own, and I wanted my mother to be there, the way she was for me whenever I was unwell until she became unwell and we turned to caring about her. I wanted Mum to tell me it would be okay.
I’m a mother, and next I had to tell my daughters. My middle daughter, Bianca, was at university and she needed reassurance, so I relayed what the radiographer told me, that even if I had cancer, it would be curable. My youngest, Mia, in Year 13, was on a school camp, and via bad phone reception, she told me she was relieved I had had the mammogram. My eldest, Isabella, 22 at the time, assumed the mother role, responding to me as I had responded to my mother more than 20 years ago.
“Mum, don’t be so ridiculous,’’ she reassured me. “You are so healthy, don’t worry. Go and do something nice for yourself.’’
Fear rippled through my body as I waited 10 days for the confirmed diagnosis, each day so painstakingly long. But there were other words I remembered. The radiographer had said, “It looks early. Someone was looking out for you today,” and I knew it was Mum.
On March 17 – Steve’s birthday and St Patrick’s Day – I woke in a hospital bed after the surgery, so shattered I couldn’t even walk to the toilet without someone holding me up. The pain was intense. My cancerous breast tissue was gone and replaced with a silicone implant. A scar ran under my breast, red and raw. I was on a cocktail of drugs, but it was as though my breast had been stabbed with a hot poker.
Steve tried not to gasp when he saw me and was pale and quieter than usual. Isabella came into the ward on her lunchbreak, carrying a bunch of flowers. I saw it in her eyes: a mother was supposed to be strong, not in pain and suffering like I was.
Days later, I hobbled around our living room, finally home, carrying a drain bag which took the excess blood and fluid from my wound. The inserted tube bulged above my breast, like a worm had buried its way beneath my skin. The drugs made me go slightly nuts, and the pain made me sleepless. I was alive, and the cancer had gone, but I felt weak, scared and vulnerable.
I lay on the couch and Mia pressed next to me. Seventeen years earlier, she had been a baby, sucking on my left breast. She had nuzzled into it and sucked it so much that it swelled into a large B cup while my right breast, which she ignored, slowly dried up. The breast that had turned cancerous was the same one that nutured my darling wee baby, who now soothed me as a young woman.
I wanted my family – visitors came, and the district health nurse – but I really just wanted my daughters and my partner with me. I couldn’t imagine the pain: would it ever end. Would it?
I sobbed and sobbed, soaking my post-surgical bra with my tears. I hadn’t cried that hard since Mum’s funeral, when I howled 14 years of trauma that had bottled up inside.
On the couch, Mia wrapped her arms around me and stroked me. “You’ll be okay, Mum,’’ she soothed. I felt nourished. All I wanted was her: no one else.
Mia comforted me just like we had comforted Mum with our words. “Mum, you’ll be okay,’’ we had told our mother after her diagnosis. But Alzheimer’s is not curable like breast cancer; we had no idea what lay ahead for us.
I clip dead heads on a rose bush, pink petals falling to the ground. I’m a useless gardener and I turn to YouTube for tips. Gardening was one of the things Mum was so good at and I feel like I connect with her as I potter in my garden.
Cancer changed my life. It stopped me fearing the unknown and taught me to live in the moment a lot more. I don’t really notice my silicone breast. I swallow an oestrogen blocker pill every day and regularly check my breasts for lumps. I tell my friends to get their mammograms yearly – after all, that was what found my cancer.
Last June, we decided to move house because I thought: who knows how long I have to live? I’ve raised my daughters in the same house for 18 years, why not try something different?
The house we found was the one. It felt like my childhood home, a villa with a cottage garden and stained-glass windows.
Rose bushes line the front garden, reminding me of Mum hunched over, clipping and chopping and tending her rambling roses. Mum’s pink and white roses bloomed. They were beautiful and fragrant and she always popped one or two in one of her blue vases around the house.
When Mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, gardening became her solace. When she couldn’t drive a car any more, we still found her in her garden, with her roses, just like she was when we were children, when she often stayed out there until dusk.
Mum hadn’t even retired when she got her diagnosis. Her suffering and my cancer journey made me realise that you can’t assume longevity and health.
Mum rests in a grave in Napier, 260km away, but I visit her every day in my garden.
Sarah Catherall is a Wellington journalist.
