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VIVIAN BEARING walks on the empty stage pushing her IV pole. She is fifty, tall and very thin, barefoot, and completely bald. She wears two hospital gowns – one tied in the front and one tied in the back – a baseball cap, and a hospital ID bracelet. The house lights are at half strength. VIVIAN looks out at the audience, sizing them up.
VIVIAN (in false familiarity, waving and nodding to the audience). Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. That’s just great. (In her own professorial tone.) This is not my standard greeting, I assure you.
I tend toward something a little more formal, a little less inquisitive, such as, say, ‘Hello.’
But it is the standard greeting here.
There is some debate as to the correct response to this salutation. Should one reply ‘I feel good,’ using ‘feel’ as a copulative to link the subject, ‘I,’ to its subjective complement, ‘good’; or ‘I feel well,’ modifying with an adverb the subject’s state of being?
I don’t know. I am a professor of seventeenth-century poetry, specialising in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne.
So I just say, ‘Fine.’
Of course it is not very often that I do feel fine.
I have been asked ‘How are you feeling today?’ while I was throwing up into a plastic washbasin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice, ‘How are you feeling today?’
I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead.
I’m a little sorry I’ll miss that.
It is unfortunate that this remarkable line of inquiry has come to me so late in my career. I could have exploited its feigned solicitude to great advantage: as I was distributing the final examination to the graduate course in seventeenth-century textual criticism – ‘Hi. How are you feeling today?’
Of course I would not be wearing this costume at the time, so the question’s ironic significance would not be fully apparent.
As I trust it is now.
Irony is a literary device that will necessarily be deployed to great effect.
I ardently wish this were not so. I would prefer that a play about me be cast in the mythic-heroic-pastoral mode; but the facts, most notably stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, conspire against that. The Faerie Queene this is not.
And I was dismayed to discover that the play would contain elements of . . . humour.
I have been, at best, an unwitting accomplice. (She pauses.) It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die at the end.
They’ve given me less than two hours.
If I were poetically inclined, I might employ a threadbare metaphor – the sands of time slipping through the hourglass, the two-hour glass.
Now our sands are almost run;
More a little, and then dumb.
Shakespeare. I trust the name is familiar.
At the moment, however, I am disinclined to poetry.
I’ve got less than two hours. Then: curtain.
She disconnects herself from the IV pole and shoves it to a crossing TECHNICIAN. The house lights go out.
VIVIAN. I’ll never forget the time I found out I had cancer.
DR HARVEY KELEKIAN enters at a big desk piled high with papers.
KELEKIAN. You have cancer.
VIVIAN (to audience). See? Unforgettable. It was something of a shock. I had to sit down. (She plops down.)
KELEKIAN. Please sit down. Miss Bearing, you have advanced metastatic ovarian cancer.
VIVIAN. Go on.
KELEKIAN. You are a professor, Miss Bearing.
VIVIAN. Like yourself, Dr Kelekian.
KELEKIAN. Well, yes. Now then. You present with a growth that, unfortunately, went undetected in stages one, two, and three. Now it is an insidious adenocarcinoma, which has spread from the primary adnexal mass –
VIVIAN. ‘Insidious’?
KELEKIAN. ‘Insidious’ means undetectable at an –
VIVIAN. ‘lnsidious’ means treacherous.
KELEKIAN. Shall I continue?
VIVIAN. By all means.
KELEKIAN. Good. In invasive epithelial carcinoma, the most effective treatment modality is a chemotherapeutic agent. We are developing an experimental combination of drugs designed for primary-site ovarian, with a target specificity of stage three-and-–beyond administration. | VIVIAN: Insidious. Hmm. Curious word choice. Cancer. Cancel. ‘By cancer nature’s changing course untrimmed.’ No – that’s not it. |
Am I going too fast? | (To KELEKIAN.) No. |
Good. | |
You will be hospitalised as an in-patient for treatment each cycle. You will be on complete intake-and-output measurement for three days after each treatment to monitor kidney function. After the initial eight cycles, you will have another battery of tests. | Must read something about cancer. Must get some books, articles. Assemble a bibliography. Is anyone doing research on cancer? Concentrate. |
The antineoplastic will inevitably affect some healthy cells, including those lining the gastrointestinal tract from the lips to the anus, and the hair follicles. We will of course be relying on your resolve to withstand some of the more pernicious side effects. | Antineoplastic, Anti: against. Neo: new. Plastic. To mould. Shap ing. Antineoplastic. Against new shaping. Hair follicles. My resolve. ‘Pernicious.’ That doesn’t seem – |
KELEKIAN. Miss Bearing?
VIVIAN. I beg your pardon?
KELEKIAN. Do you have any questions so far?
VIVIAN. Please, go on.
KELEKIAN. Perhaps some of these terms are new. I realise –
VIVIAN. No, no. Ah. You’re being very thorough.
KELEKIAN. I make a point of it. And I always emphasise it with my students –
VIVIAN. So do I. ‘Thoroughness’ – I always tell my students, but they are constitutionally averse to painstaking work.
KELEKIAN. Yours, too.
VIVIAN. Oh, it’s worse every year.
KELEKIAN. And this is not dermatology, it’s medical oncology, for Chrissake.
VIVIAN. My students read through a text once – once! – and think it’s time for a break.
KELEKIAN. Mine are blind.
VIVIAN. Well, mine are deaf.
KELEKIAN (resigned, but warmly). You just have to hope . . .
VIVIAN (not so sure...
