Chapter 6: Guardian Angel

HELEN sees the car pull up through the slats of the fence that run along one side of the apartment complex Peggy stays in. I see her walk quickly, nervously toward the gate. I get out of the car. I do not give her the thumbs-up.

“What, nee?” she says, using the endearment we use for one another, short for “honey”. When either of us goes, "What, nee?" in our book it conveys everything one human being can feel for another.

I just look at her as I cross the public driveway, slow, deliberate. Her knees begin to shake. I can see it. She can see me. She knows it’s bad. I just go up to her and hold her and break the news. “I have a tumour on my pancreas and it’s most likely malignant.” And she shakes, and shakes and shakes, and she keeps on shaking.

  Helen and I at Royal National Park
  in Sydney's south. (Picture by Fran Foo)

“He’s referred me for surgery next Wednesday.” I drive the nails in, and she begins a quiet wail, the saddest sound. If I’m not holding her tight, she will collapse. Her weight just goes dead in my arms. In my periphery are Peggy’s closest friends and Fook Pow, Helen’s elder brother. They look like they have been briefed before my arrival. Some of them politely turn away. Pow is like, I just don’t understand this… first Ginny, then Peggy, now this, and Peggy hasn’t even gone.

“It’ll be OK,” I tell my wife, whispering into her ear. “I will be OK. We will be OK. I promise.” For the second time in my life, I make a vow to the one woman I have come to love and learned to love. I make the promise, not knowing if I will be true to my word, only that I will try till my dying breath. I add the bit that will come to sustain us in no small measure in the days to come — “Magar said, ‘Early discovery’.” 

Of course it isn’t good enough for her. “No, no, NO! We are going back to the clinic now. I have some questions for him,” she says, still shaking. I say, “Come on, nee. The clinic is busy, it’s closed for lunch. He doesn’t know anything else.” But she will not be put off. “No, I want to talk to him, bloody hell,” she says, like she can fix this if she can just ask a few really good questions.

*****

“Helen, all this grey hair you see now,” Magar says, pulling at his crew cut, “is from my patients wanting to know how this happened.” Exasperated, trying hard not to vent his frustration at yet another patient, or loved one, who believes in the infallibility of doctors. “I just don’t know,” he says, arms stretched out in surrender to the power of the question he has no answer to.

I notice for the first time since coming under Magar’s care that he has lost a lot of his hair over the years. And I feel sorry him, not least because Helen then says, “But you sent him for all those tests, and he was fine all this time.”

The silence is broken. “Try not to worry,” the poor man says, like he must say to so many of his patients who think, you only have to go to Magar and everything will be all right. “Most people find out when it’s too late.” By the time he gently reminds us that scheduled patients are waiting outside his office, he has pulled out the magic bullet of “early discovery” again.

As we leave the clinic, we are both shell-shocked. There is not much to say. I am exhausted. We also know we must continue to be parents. There’s a quiet, unassuming strength we have, as a couple, knowing we can overcome a lot of bad stuff, which we have done, as long as we remain together. She knows it better than I.

But Helen cannot be left in charge of this. No. I make the calls from now. I have to lead my wife, my children, my family. Finally. I charge myself with easing her fear, and if the children see a promise of calm in their mother’s face, that’s their cue to allow themselves a bit of relief from the numbing fear, shock, horror they must be feeling. I must look after my wife. That’s the first step. The rest will follow. Don’t worry. Just believe. God will give me, this day and every day, my daily bread. I will feed on the bread.

Helen, at a Buddhist retreat just
outside Taiping, Malaysia.

Helen has ensured there are other arrangements for Peggy’s care for the rest of the day, and she has already switched roles, moving from watching her sister die to keeping her husband alive. Neither of us need return to Lugarno. Peggy is in good hands. I have the guardian angel I didn’t know God had gifted me with.

In the days, weeks and months to come, she is at my beck and call, and I don’t even need to call. Helen is just there, foreseeing every need of mine. She is at the computer every day, learning every bit she needs to know about the disease. At every appointment with a medical specialist, she is armed with the questions I don’t know enough to ask, notebook and pen at the ready. I notice she’s purloined the Moleskine given to me by Leslie Lopez, a cousin who’s like my brother, and a fellow journalist. By this time, I have switched off. Information overload. Days into weeks into months my wife reads all the brochures on the drugs I will come to ingest, the chemotherapy I will undergo, absorbing all the detail I have no energy to assemble and cast judgment on.

Meanwhile, I bide my time. I have to grow accustomed to my new face before I can safely allow, with rock-solid conviction, my actions to speak louder than any words I might conjure. I have to understand, in my bones, the lesson I will soon have to share with my wife. It is a strange connection, having to watch over your own guardian angel.

Another thing I don’t give voice to is the fact that I may, quite literally, have five days left to live, before I undergo critical surgery for the first time in my life. Five days “to settle your affairs, young man”, the voice tells me silently. So little time to think, to hold my wife, talk to my children, tell the family back home. Five days. That’s cruel. I know I have left all my worldly possessions to Helen. After a while, that’s all that matters.