The Sphere #1 | "Viewed from the harbor..."
Short story description: Susan lives on the lush coast of eastern Ireland, taking care of her daughter and her many patients. But an enemy Susan is intimately familiar with begins a full on assault on her duties as a mother and a doctor.
Viewed from the harbor, Breasal Oncology Centre was barely clinging to the edge of Carrick's Bluff. Draped as it was in its medieval clothing, its crenelated walls bombarded with ivy and swallow nests, the clinic seemed a fortress out of the Dark Ages. One could hardly imagine this was one of the most modernly equipped facilities south of Dublin. Inside the old mansion thousands of yards of cables were weaving through like tentacles of an electrical octopus.
Day in and day out, people of Wicklow, a town on the rugged Eastern coast of Ireland, were climbing the twisting alleys to Breasal, most of them not very happy with their destination. Among them Susan Kelly -- a doctor at the Centre.
That morning Susan had woken up frustrated after a night spent writhing in the cold sweats of bad dreams. As she passed by the newsstand she slowed down her pace -- a glance at the headlines and it was enough for her to realize this was just an ordinary Wednesday, one more on the endless string of Wednesdays at Breasal, the place where she had begun working after graduating from Dublin Medical Academy, some fifteen years ago.
Up the winding brick alley, in through the automatic door, a right turn, a left turn, a short walk through the transparent passageway allowing a brief glimpse of the sea, and there it was: The Cave, another name for the hallway where her patients would be stirring about like cattle at the slaughterhouse.
Some of them were just about to receive the usual bloodcurdling news one would receive at an Oncology ward, such as "You've got cancer" or "We have to continue with chemotherapy" -- the "we" was very important, as Susan's experience had taught her. The patients' faces were wrinkled with worry while their bodies appeared crippled under the burden of possibility. Susan knew they were wondering how much time they had left, but so was she. Mrs. O'Ceallaigh, one of her late patients, had once told her she would have given anything to know her exact time of death, stick to the schedule and thus end her tormenting tribulations. She was one of the most down-to-earth and mentally balanced people Susan had ever met, but death had still caught her by surprise.
Her office was on the sea side and when she opened the window she could both hear and smell the waves carving into the base of the cliffs down beneath, at the bottom of Carrick's Bluff. Carrick House, once home of the old O'Cullen clan, had been built right on the edge, providing good defense in case of attack. Nowadays, however, the sole enemies left charging on the building were the stud farms of waves the sea was sending to undermine it.
After she finished with the morning visits, Susan buried herself into the armchair. Lately, she had begun to hate the hallway outside her office and crossing it gave her goose bumps. She felt she was interrupting an open-casket funeral on a daily basis; going through the crowd in the large waiting room she could almost smell the formol soon be applied on some of these unfortunate bodies. The patients were always pretending nothing was wrong, but their small-talk sounded quite out of tune to Susan, who was more than aware most of them were in serious conditions. She fought hard to keep her doctor's edge with all the suffering going on around her. After all, if you found out you have cancer, you wouldn't want your doctor, the person you put all your faith in, to already start shedding tears of compassion, would you?
Sometimes Susan doubted her classical approach to giving bad news. She felt that white lies such as "You're going to be fine," "I won't let anything happen to you," or "Chemotherapy should take care of it," could sometimes do more harm than a plain "You may die." No matter how much she stumbled upon words of comfort, at the end of the day she would always have that bitter taste in her mouth. Because she of all people knew that only a miracle could save some of her patients. Why give people the illusion of life when death will chainsaw through it like it was timber? Shouldn't she try to prepare them for the end somehow? But how?
A friend had given her a book once called The Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying, with great insights as how to care for people in terminal conditions, to help them feel more comfortable with the idea of their demise, but she had found it difficult to put into practice. First, you had to see death in an entirely different way than Susan did in order to help someone pass away peacefully, as the book taught. You had to be able to cope with death yourself, to think of it every time you got the chance, to bathe in the idea of it at a snap of a finger. But whenever Susan came to think about death she would put it out like a cigarette butt; she would then throw a bucket of ignorance over the smoldering remnant and that was that. And every morning, at work, when Dr. Susan Kelly crossed The Cave to go into her office she would pick up her pace, slaloming through the people there as if they were contagious.
Sitting there, looking out the window with an ear on the roar of the sea, glimpses of her dreams from the previous night began to creep into her thoughts. She felt them more than she saw them: her body was being overrun by a stampede of termites eating her inside out; the veins had now become myriads of tunnels channeling the insects into the very heart of her cells. The body itself was now no more than a hollow hive, pulsing with munching insects. Hungry little monsters.
She snapped out of it when the door opened, and nurse Dunellen came in with the news that her patient had just cancelled his appointment at the last minute. As Dunellen went out Susan turned the armchair to the window, pleading to the the waves to wash out the nightmares.
"Be brave," she told herself, taking a big breath of salty vapors to somehow rinse off the armies of intruders.
On a little table by her side her daughter was encouraging her from an ivory-framed picture. Every time she had bad thoughts, the picture was her magic carpet, flying her over the marshes of anguish.
"I hate this place," she cried.
Although Susan was a respected doctor in Wicklow community, she didn't actually want to become a practicing oncologist. It was the only choice she had left after Erin was born. With a child to raise and no husband by her side, isolating herself in a laboratory in Northern Scotland to do top research had suddenly not seemed such a good idea anymore. So she remained in Ireland, settling with Erin in the gardens of Wicklow, a nice coastal city with lush green parks and healthy sea air. The job at Breasal was easy to obtain, as the old Dr. Casey was just retiring early due to illness. Ever since then she had been fighting off her fear of suffering, especially after Brian, her fiancé from Dublin, had left her to be both mother and father to Erin. Although her old wounds had almost healed, now she would bathe in other people's pain on a daily basis.
Erin had grown into a fine teenager and, unlike other girls her age, she had no issues to settle with her mum. Susan would come home every afternoon to have her daughter greet her with a big smile and a hug. After lunch they would both sit down at the teen-style desk by the window and do some homework together until Susan would get up and let Erin study by herself. The evening was for entertainment and they would often catch a movie at the cinema just down the street, where Erin would cling forcefully to her mother's arm and close her eyes when a scene would become too frightening. Yes, Susan loved her daughter and the possibility of losing her made her head spin.
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