Five Days (44 page)

I hit the plunger. The scan had started. There was no accompanying noise. As always I shut my eyes, then opened them immediately as the first images appeared on the two screens in front of me, showing both mammary glands. Again I snapped my eyes shut, thinking about how her doctor would break the news to her if the growth was malignant.

But professionalism trumped fear. My eyes sprang open. And what I saw was . . .

A fibroadenoma. I'd seen so many of them over the years I could spot them immediately – and I'd yet to misjudge one. Without question, Caroline was harboring a fibroadenoma: a solid, round, rubbery lump that moves freely in the breast when pushed and is usually painless.

They are also benign. Always benign.

I now began to scrutinize the scan with care – my eye following every contour and hidden crevasse around the two mammary glands, like a cop scouring all corners of a crime scene, looking for some hidden piece of evidence that might change the forensic picture entirely. I searched the areolas, the nipples, the ducts, the lobules, the fat deposits, not to mention the adjoining ribs, the sternum and the surrounding muscles.

Nothing.

I went over the scan a third time, just to cover my tracks, making certain I hadn't overlooked anything, simultaneously ensuring that the contrast was the correct level, while the imaging was of the standard that Dr Conrad required.

Nothing.

I sat back in my chair and found myself smiling. Good news. But news that I myself could not impart, though I would find Dr Conrad in a few minutes and hope that – after hearing about the patient's pregnancy, her previous miscarriages, and her great understandable fears – she'd show the humanity I'd occasionally seen lurking behind the granitic exterior and speed through a diagnosis to Caroline's doctor.

I peered out again at this anguished, frightened woman. My contemporary. And so much a fellow sufferer. In a moment I would reach for the microphone and tell her that the scan was over and compliment her on her bravery and brace myself for an onslaught of questions –
What did you see? You've got to tell me, is it malignant? Is it benign?
What did you see?
– as soon as I walked back in to release her from the bier.

Were this my world – and it's nobody's world – what would I actually say, besides the fact that the lump is benign? What piece of counsel might I impart to her? Not wisdom – because one person's wisdom is another person's clichés. And as there are absolutely no answers to life's larger conundrums, it might be something as simple and blunt as this:

Amidst all the fear, the doubt, the longing, the setbacks, the hope for something better, the sense that you have boxed yourself in . . .

Amidst all the infernal struggles you will always have with yourself, and the realization that everything is so profoundly temporal, there is what the screen in front of me tells me:
That growth within you will not kill you.

And even if, from this moment on, you continue to block yourself, disappoint yourself, lock yourself into an existence you know you don't want, the screen still says:
All clear
. There is a chance now. But if, in the end, you can't convert that chance into change, there is still one great consolation . . . if you choose to see it:

You're going to live.

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‘Going' taken from
The Complete Poems
© Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

Extract from ‘The Hollow Men' taken from Collected Poems 1909–1962 © Estate of T.S Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

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