Page 65 of While I’m Still Here

Her gaze snaps back to mine. For several seconds she simply looks at me, and I watch the realisation move across her face. “You actually do.”

“Yes,” I nod.

“Fuck.”

Her eyes become bright, and she immediately looks down at her coffee. I don't mention it. Eventually, she clears her throat and asks whether I was angry at my body. When I tell her I was, another question follows, then another. Did I feel stupid for being angry? Did I Google things I knew I shouldn't? Did I convince myself every ache meant the cancer had spread? Did I look at photographs of mastectomy scars?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Far too many.

The questions begin arriving faster once she realises I'm not going to judge her for asking them.

“Did the drains make you feel sick?”

The question arrives while I'm halfway through my coffee, delivered with the same serious concentration Bea has applied to every question she's asked me since we sat down. She’s been working her way through surgery methodically, jumping between practical questions and things I suspect she’s too embarrassed to ask anyone on her medical team, although I’ve already told her twice that nothing she asks me will offend me.

I set my cup back onto its saucer. “The first time I looked at them.”

Her eyebrows lift. “Really?”

“Really.”

I don't tell her immediately that sick isn't quite the right word. It wasn't nausea exactly. It was the strange, visceral disconnect of looking down and seeing something coming out of my body that had not been there when I went to sleep. I'd known about drains beforehand. They’d explained them to me, probably more than once, but knowing a drain would be there and waking up with one attached to me were entirely different experiences.

Bea is watching my face closely enough that I know she's noticed the pause.

“It wasn't as bad as whatever you're imagining,” I tell her.

“You don't know what I'm imagining.”

“Your face is surprisingly informative.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Rude. Were they painful?”

“Mostly annoying.” I think about it for a moment, trying to separate the drain itself from everything surrounding it. Surgery has become condensed in my memory over the last two years, less a sequence of individual sensations now and more a collection of impressions. Tightness. Exhaustion. Dressings. The peculiar vulnerability of needing help with things I'd never previously considered tasks. “There was discomfort, obviously, but I don't remember the drain itself being the worst part. I mostly remember being extremely aware that it existed and worrying I'd catch it on something.”

Bea's expression changes immediately. “Oh, fucking hell.”

“What?”

“I hadn't thought about catching it.”

“You're unlikely to forget after the first twenty-four hours.”

“That's not reassuring.”

“It wasn't intended to be.”

“You are genuinely terrible at this.”

“You keep asking me questions, and I intend to be honest with you,” I tell her.

“Because you keep answering them.”