DECEMBER 4th 2019
The day arrived with the hustle and bustle of the teenagers arguing over who’d had breakfast and who was trying to avoid having breakfast. Lily looked pristine and was preening herself, while Ethan’s polar opposite appearance, looked slap dash and scruffy. Clearly wearing yesterday’s uniform, the scrunched-up fabric effect of a night spent on his bedroom floor.
Dexter was quiet and sombre, he dragged his little body down the hallway stairs, and I embraced him tightly as I inspected his face. Dexter’s nose had unsealed and bled across his face, the silver nitrate, marked and burnt the skin above his top lip and had run down his face. I gently tried to clear it off, but it wasn’t budging. His eye was sore and looked slightly off angle. He didn’t complain, but he looked exhausted and pale.
I explained we’d not eat this morning; I was still under the assumption they would be removing the nasal polyp today. I couldn’t see how they wouldn’t, it had grown overnight this morning and he looked very poorly.
I’d been Christmas shopping in London a few days before, so I dug deep into my shopping bags before we headed out– the Venom-Spiderman Lego set seemed like the perfect prize for a little boy who’d been up till 3am, poked and prodded with no avail and every doctor just assuming he’s stuck something up his nose. Jack usually would have left me to it and headed off to work, but this morning he was hesitant and decided he’d come with us to the hospital, perfect, I thought, that means I don’t have to struggle building the Lego in the waiting room, win!
We all got ready, piled into the car, lucky for us it was a Wednesday so Trix was first to be dropped off at nursery, Lily walked w
ith the boys to school and we headed up to the children’s assessment ward, just after the 8.15 am.
11am rolled round, hungry and grumpy poor little Dex was finally seen by a junior doctor. He looked up his nose curiously, talking about how they would probably have to scan before they could send him on the ward and booked in for surgery, although he seemed very keen to skip that step. His superior rolled into the room, a dark-haired slight woman, who insisted that he’ll have shoved a foreign body up his nose and this polyp was merely a reaction to that. Dexter, questioned why he would ever put something up his nose? I protested saying that he was a logical little boy and that though usual in five-year olds, would be very out of character for him.
The woman smugly brushed me off saying, ‘Well let’s just wait for the CT results’ She said through a knowing smile. Once they had left, I moaned to J
ack that the doctors all think we’re crazy for believing Dex.
Oh well surgery was off the cards, Jack nipped down to the M&S café and bought us all sandwiches, Dexter happily tucked into a cheese and ham triangle while we waited for him to be admitted. It wasn’t too long before a kind nurse hurried into the room, with name tags, she chatted away about how she couldn’t wait for her break as she clasped tags round Dexter’s slender little wrists. Before walking us to Bearwood Ward, room 10 for the end plot in a packed ward of drawn curtains.
I was full of something nasty, a breathless chesty cough I couldn’t shift, it tormented me as it was so hot, I tried to calm my coughing fits, uncomfortable to be in a hospital and coughing my lungs up. Dexter sat in the bed, we were right by the door, the heat wafted around us, we all stripped down to minimal layers in the dimly lit room. Listening to the man across from us cough and chat to his daughter, while the woman next to us chatted on the phone about her drama of coming into the ward for the third consecutive day with her child. I was already desperate to get us all home. Dexter wanted me to build his Lego, weary and bruised from coughing and five and half months pregnant I quickly passed the job over to Jack and they merrily built it while the nurses did OB's and chatted around us.
A frumpy older nurse with long wiry hair came in and asked Jack to take Dex down to the CT machine, I wasn’t able to do that because of the radiation. It was midday and within twenty minutes they were back up on the ward, praising Dex for being so good and lying still. Jack said he’d behaved perfectly and wasn’t too distressed. I had creeping dread, I’d been googling his symptoms while he’d been gone, and I started to feel that this wasn’t going to be one of those nothing events.
The time rolled on, 2.30pm and we’d heard nothing. I spoke to the nurse, she was reluctant to tell us that something had shown up on the scan that they wanted a closer look at and they now wanted an MRI scan.
An unsettled feeling rose in my chest, ‘Not a foreign object then? Not if they want to look a bit closer?’ Saying nothing, she said to Jack that a free room had become available and they’d like to make us more comfortable. Collecting our things I suspiciously followed her down to room six, it was spacious and had a small en-suite at the side.
‘Something is wrong.’ I blurted. ‘They wouldn’t move us off the ward to a private room unless there was something wrong.’ Shaking his head, Jack always the cheerful optimist really believed they had moved us because I was pregnant and coughing. I didn’t feel so confident and I instantly wanted to chase the nurse down and demand to know what she knew. 3pm came around, Jack and Dex were taken down to have an MRI, the 70’s machine was old and clunky, noisy and it took much longer. Dexter was distressed that he had a mask over his face and Jack hung inside the machine to hold his hands. Jack there every second to ease his anxiety, but Dexter wasn’t soothed, he came back to the ward upset, before we snuggled him down, his chest dipping dramatically as he sucked air in hard, through his dragged cries as he drifted off to sleep
We were left. For hours we were left not knowing.
My mind started to turn on me, I was drowning in phlegm, coughing relentlessly as I tried to sip water, my appetite had dwindled, and my phone was the only communication I had to the outside world.
5pm a soggy unappealing dinner arrived for Dexter, the nurses at the nurse stations avoided my eye contact, Jack was fobbed off by every one of them, a doctor would be with us soon they repeated, it was a tense time and the dinner sat for an hour cold.
Mum was at mine, looking after the tribe. Trix loves it when nanny stays, it was her favourite thing, so I had no concerns about the children at home. My Dad came in at 6pm to see Dexter, armed with a game of Tiddly Winks from nanny.
My frustrations were high, the room was feeling smaller by the hour, my family feed pinged continuously, with anxious messages from my sister and parents, Jack and I had nothing to update. I started to google symptoms, I found the sinus cancers- but it only effects a small portion of men above the age 40. The idea was ridiculous, Jack and mum said to me it wouldn’t be that but as the night drew on, no one was talking to us, there had been no feedback or anymore talk of nasal polyps from the arrogant doctors that had assumed it was due to a five-year-old stuffing toy parts up his nostril. No one had returned, no one had the decency to update us and I was going out of my mind. Jack was getting angrier by the minute.
Being fobbed off continued, my head was full, I coughed continuously and my irritation towards the nurses who kept coming in and out the room to do observations was getting harder to hide. They had nothing to say to us but that a doctor would be down to see us, but when? The ward wound down at nine, parents and visitors were leaving, and it feel unlikely that anyone was visiting.
Dexter's face looked a mess, dark silver nitrate oozed over his face as the large protruding lump of red tissue bled down his face, I felt helpless, I felt like no one was taking me seriously and why had the doctors left this thing in his face. How had it gotten so out of hand in three days? This thing was like a parasite stretching out his nostril, his right cheek was puffy and bulging, the not knowing was all consuming.
Dexter was exhausted and tired, and he had venom and carnage snuggled into his chest, prizes I’d won earlier that month out of the grabby arcade machines when we had hit the arcade weeks earlier with the Morton’s. Herbie, their son, the same age as Dexter where keen to collect them all and I was testing my grabbing skills to make their little dreams come true. Now in the dimly lit ward, as his podgy little arm wrapped around the angry looking toy, in an uncomfortable hospital bed the memory seemed a far cry from happier times.
The fourth of December was nearly over. 11:30pm and Jack was encouraging me to go home, I hadn’t slept well for the last two nights, I was ill and pregnant, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep soundly with Dexter in the hospital. ‘The doctors won’t come see us now, will they?’ He’d said. I knew he was probably right, so I rang a taxi and headed the five minutes up the road to our house. Mum was up, making a cup of tea in her dressing gown, we had a cup of tea and we both knew it wasn’t going to be a good outcome. Being in the hospital over the last two days, I wanted to wash the grubby feeling from my skin, mum headed back to bed, so we parted on the landing and I headed upstairs to run a bath.
I watched the water fill the bath; the noise echoed round the room in the dimly lit light of my quiet bedroom. I submerged myself into the water, a blue bath bomb swirling and fizzing round my bump. The baby wriggled under my skin as the water lapped against my skin, I felt relief, relaxing my body and for a split second closing my eyes, before the panic of falling asleep jerked me awake. My phone rested on the side table, it vibrated gently, knowing it would be Jack, I answered.
“Rach you have to come back the doctors won’t talk to me without you?’ Dread. I knew it was bad, I instantly though it must be a brain tumour, or his brain falling through his nose (one of the suggestions the junior doctor had said that to us before the scans).
‘Can I not just face time in?’
‘No you have to come back.’
I hauled myself from the warmth of the water, tugging my clothes over my damp skin, fabric sticking to me as I pulled on my jersey sweets.
Mum heard me on the stair well and came to the door.
‘Mum can you give me a lift to the hospital, Ethan and lily can babysit the young ones, only take five minutes. She nodded. I just cried as we sat together in the car.
DECEMBER 5th 2019
Now at gone midnight, I walked through the eerie hospital wards, the lift units were old, and I chose to drag myself up the three flights of stairs over getting into one of them. I pushed the door to room five, two doctors and a nurse were with Jack around Dexter’s bed, Jack was crying.
Dexter was sound asleep and yet, as I moved through the room, the doctor stood up to give me his chair. He was a slender man in his mid-forties, the nurse was crouched besides Dexter’s bedside and the student doctor stood opposite us.
Jack voice broke as he said, it’s cancer, Dexter has cancer.
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