Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
Every month we do this together like some sort of wedding ritual. I lie down on the bed. I try to relax. He gets out the needle. He takes a breath. I take a breath. He removes the safety cap. I refuse to look. Which side is it again?
March, left, April, right, May, left. It’s left. Left of the belly button. Think of your happy place.
I remember the first time we did this. It was at the end of all the treatment. The IVF, the surgery, the chemo, the radiation. All finished. The doctors had given me the monthly needle until now. But the doctors were gone, the hospitals were gone. And we were left sitting on a bed at home, just the two of us, trying to figure out what the fuck came next.
We sat on the bed together, trying to come to grips with the idea of this monthly date. I’d asked him to do it for me. I was sick of all the appointments; it was easier just to do at home and besides, I told him, it would give him the chance to save my life every single month. He could be a hero, a lifesaver – every single month.
It’s the thickest needle I have ever seen. Once, early on, I got the nurse at my local GP to administer it. She gasped at the size of the needle. And once, my dad, an anaesthetist who spent half his life giving needles, did it for me – and even he was taken aback at the size of the needle.
But Terry learnt how to do it. The doctor showed him how to remove the safety catch. How to grab the fold of my skin, just next to my belly button. And how to plunge the needle into that skin.
Every month my happy place changes. Sometimes it’s swimming in the ocean at our summer beach holiday at Tura. Sometimes it’s a white and soft and fluffy cloud. Sometimes it’s Lake Rosanna, a place we sat listening to the frogs in the Tasmanian wilderness. I go there while my body lies on the bed.