And that mine was the second largest of the four.
I am eighty years old and I had been carrying twenty-one kilograms of fluid around that house for about eighteen months.
Up and down those stairs. Out to the bins. To church on a Sunday.
The fluttering in the night was fluid moving.
That is all it ever was. It shifts when you turn over in bed and then it settles again, and it feels like nothing else on earth, and it is completely harmless.
I had spent three weeks lying awake at two in the morning with my hand on my own stomach being frightened of a thing that was just liquid finding its level.
Those things grow slowly. That is their entire character and it is the reason they get to that size.
Nothing hurts. Nothing bleeds. Nothing happens suddenly enough to make anybody do anything about it.
Dr. Opoku was extremely careful with me about this part, and I made that woman say all of it twice, and the second time I had Dov in the room.
If that thing had been found at four or five centimeters, it is a straightforward day case.
In at eight, home by six. A week taking it easy. A scar you would need telling about.
At thirty-eight centimeters, at eighty years of age, it was four hours of surgery, a vertical incision from the breastbone down, and nine days on a ward.
It was found. I am all right.
I want that said plainly before anything else, because I have a great-granddaughter who is four and who is going to read this one day.
But there is a question sitting underneath it, which Dr. Opoku asked me gently and which is the entire reason any of the rest came out.
She said: “Mrs. Vanterpool. When was your last abdominal imaging?”
And I said I had not had any.
And that woman looked back down at the thin folder on her desk.
And said that according to what was in front of her, I had eleven of them. Between the March of 2002 and the November of 2013.
One a year, for eleven years, at a facility in Marren.
PART 3
Dov brought that envelope up to the ward on the Thursday afternoon.
He had it in his inside pocket and he would not hand it over until he had got a chair and sat down next to the bed.
Twelve years in the drawer of a bedside table. Under a lamp I have changed the bulb in about forty times.
Four inches from my own head, every night, for four thousand three hundred nights.
It is one page. Both sides.
My husband’s handwriting, which was never good and which had got considerably worse by the October of 2014.
See more on the next page
