* camera obscura ,

[Audrey Harper]

This is the memory thread of one of my beloved characters, Audrey James Harper. The memories are not necessarily in order, however, they are the memories that have affected my dear girl immensely, so without further adieu...

[Audrey Harper]

audrey james harper,
september twentieth two thousand seven

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
- Agatha Christie

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" I DON'T LIKE THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE. It isn’t just the office, it’s that weird lemon smell that mirrors the one at the hospital, it’s the toys in the corner, with the headless barbies and the legless g.i Joes, it’s that crabby receptionist who is giving me the stink eye because I came in with my dirty jeans and converse sneakers and smelling like photo developer when the office distinctly requests me to not wear a scent. It isn’t my fault; the chemical has practically sunk into my pores permanently. It is a little faded now though, because I don’t get to go into my dark room as often as I did before, all thanks to the time-suck known as higher education. A price I pay is through my decreasing social life. But it isn’t like I’m a horrible mess, and it isn’t like I had a raging life before UCLA. I simply don’t like people, which get in the way of partying until I puke and what not. But I’m not as bad as Matt, no he is a horrid misanthrope, definite people-hater, whereas I have more of a refined hate of humans. Stupidity that is what annoys me.

Actually, a lot of things annoy me, but it is mostly stupidity that does the trick. Like that mother with those twins sitting a few seats to my left. She’s on a cell phone, which I don’t mind, hey. We all have them, but the fact that she hasn’t noticed that the littler one of the two toddlers has just shoved Polly Pocket up his nose alarms me. Children in general alarm me. They are whiny, manipulative miniature humans that one was stuck with until they were the ages of eighteen. That is just way to long. I don’t ever want them. However, if I do feel the maternal nagging in the pit of my heart, I think I’m going to stick with adoption, and only adopt those who are potty trained and can handle swearing. Like a fourteen year old. It knows how a toilet works, knows how to swear and still young enough to idolize me. Who wouldn’t want that? But the downfall of that would be their constant giggling at the words vagina or penis… that’s a fine line.

I’m hoping to God or whatever imaginary being I create to have faith in knows I don’t like children and knows that if I do reproduce, that they will be like me. Snarky, annoyed, cynical… you know, all the great qualities in human beings; all the entertaining ones at least. But I can never imagine myself as a mother, a crazy spinster aunt perhaps, but never a mother. Maybe I’m being biased, for I never had a mother, but still, me a mom? No thanks. That requires a certain measured patience and like I have explained earlier, I can’t handle stupidity very well so patience is out of the deal too. Raising a family, hell, being a family requires commitment, love… I don’t even know what the fuck those words even mean. Especially the latter, that word scares me, almost as much as commitment. What happens when someone is in love? What happens after they’ve admitted to the highest point of their relationship, to the peak of the roller coaster? That is what scares me, being at the highest only means going downhill from there. And I would rather save myself from the bullshit. Commitment coinciding with love being illustrated as the most beautiful and permanent thing makes me think of the statistics of divorce, unhappy couples and everything else defying those two principles. It makes you wonder if there is such thing as love or is it really just a fantasy we all live with to make life more bearable.

It is a wonder how I’ve managed to have relationships, really. Being a cynic, a sarcastic cynic, makes it hard not to sabotage them, even though no matter how much I try I end up sabotaging them anyhow. So I took a new approach to my old relationship I had with someone, I tried not doing anything about my self-sabotaging ways, because to be honest, the person I was with, we should have ended things before they began. Somehow, it was different with Hayes. He had this amazing ability to get under my skin the instant he would walk into a room, yet I liked that. We would fight like an old married couple, even worse because old married couples could divorce, and we were stuck with each other. But it was when I went with him to Greece when he his father had that heart attack, something changed slowly. It was an awkward transition, going from that belligerent girl to being someone’s girlfriend. I never want to be anyone’s anything and just like that, I accepted the fact that I was his girlfriend. Mind you it was when his angry prissy mother gave me twenty up/down looks, already pegging me down as some leech out for some publicity, but still. But alas, that relationship was doomed from the beginning it was only time that took for it to crumble. However, the weird thing was, I actually, genuinely liked him… a lot.

But back to this stupid place; I was here against my will, surprising isn’t it? I mean, I’ve always been accustomed to getting bruises and cuts and scrapes… Rugby and Hockey do that to a person. It was common knowledge that if one participated in violent athletics, they would have violent legacies left in the forms of concussions, bruising and bleeding. It wasn’t anything new to me. This entire thing happened a couple hours ago, of course my first weekend back home from UCLA. So when I was working in the garage, repairing the sunken tree house, I cut through the web of my left hand. No big deal, a couple stitches and a few Tylenol 3 tablets would do the trick, problem solved. But it was the conversation I had with Matt a few hours later that really ticked me off, resulting in my presence here, my most hated of all places. But the conversation persuading me to be here was quite entertaining if I do recall: “What in the hell were you doing?” “I was fixing the tree house; I needed to cut a piece of wood and might have cut my hand… what’s the big deal?” “You’re bleeding like a murder victim.” “Yeah, because I just cut my hand. Pay attention almost-doctor Buchanan.” “No seriously, Aud, I bandaged your hand hours ago, the bleeding should have stopped… Why do you have so many bruises?” “Dude, I cut the web of my hand and I play rugby, it doesn’t take a fucking genius, kiddo.” “You’re going to the Doctor; you’re getting a blood test” “I FUCKING HATE BLOOD TESTS! You can’t make me. “ “Audrey James Mary Louisa Harper, go to the hospital and get a blood test now.” “Fine… Wait, where did the ‘Mary Louisa’ part come in from?” “Just GO!” “Fine… Dick.”

And so, here I was, after that sadistic nurse stabbed me several times to get three damn vials of blood, awaiting my blood results, shit I could have conjured up myself. The doc will start by asking how I’m feeling, how’s school, the regular monotony and then he will sit down on his rolling stool, adjust his glasses further up the bridge of his nose before scanning my file and the results. He’ll mention how my iron levels are a bit on the low side, and will make some witty remark about the bandage on my hand to which I’ll nod and smile politely but really I’m thinking of his demise. Why am I so nice to the doctor? They can legally prescribe heinous medicines and evil procedures, so yeah; I’ll be nice to my enemies. Now that I think about it, I wish that was how this appointment went, perfectly symmetric with my estimation. But alas, it did not, for I was sitting in the actual off of the doctor, not the one with the leather bed and the waxy paper spread across it, with a cabinet of medical supplies and stacks of old magazines. I was in the office where the doc held all his degrees against the wall, the one with a monstrous mahogany desk and a cushy leather chair with two chairs opposing it, more like a lawyer’s office rather than a medical professional one. It was really uncomfortable to be sitting there, not knowing why I was in such a well decorated room rather than the regular old room.

I’ve met this doctor before, only a few times earlier; I’m not much of a person who gets sick often. As I sink in a little into this chair, I look over his desk. Picture frames neatly displayed on the corner, a book dead center of the desk with a few blocks of post-it notes and a cracked mug with the words ‘world’s greatest dad’ sprawled across the front containing various writing utensils... It was organized, almost too organized for a man with chicken scratch writing. The desk also contained a little plaque that had ‘Dr. Gamble’ written across it in capitals. Yeah, my doc’s name was Gamble… I had a good feeling, and a handful of puns, about this one. But before I could come up with more, he came into the room, his glasses perched atop his prominent nose, his six foot fucking tall figure gliding over the deathly plush carpeting that made me stumble, over to his desk in one fluid movement. I wish I was that graceful. But instead of the regular chit chat we shared, Doc jump right into things. On any regular occasion I would have loved that, minor chit chat annoyed the shit out of me. It was redundant and useless. “Hi, how are you?” “Good, how are you? “ “Good, how’s school?” “Good.” When will that circle fucking end? And no one ever actually shares how they actually feel, how they dread going back to school because all you’ve ever known was in this shitshow of a town. How living with strangers scares you. How you say ‘good’ but when you actually feel like screaming your head off because nothing is going right. All this flaky talk got to me, but I took it for granted.

“Audrey, you’re results came in, and it isn’t good... ” Dr. Gamble started, taking a big breath, staring intently at my file in front of him. He kept flipping through pages, doing that disgusting licking of the thumb thing. Ew, those poor pieces of paper, being assaulted by saliva. “Your white blood cell count is abnormally high, most likely interfering with the production of your red blood cells.” He took another long, measured breath, like the words that were coming out of his mouth were killing him. I didn’t understand him at first; I think he was mistaking me for somebody else. Awkward blood cell levels meant cancer and in my experience, only nice people get cancer. My Nana, my uncle Jack… Saints in the entirety of the word, got cancer, but me…I’m a complete bitch; I’ve come to terms with that little known fact. He looks down and then up at me, a very George Clooney move of him, except Georgey Boy isn’t going to tell me that I may have a fatal disease. “To confirm my suspicions, I want you to see Dr. Fayal after our talk, to have your blood work re-evaluated, just in case this is just some sort of lowly deficiency, ” He hands me an off-white coloured card, with Dr. Fayal, Haematology/Oncology written across it in raised lettering. Oncology? That meant…“Are you implying I may have cancer?" The words just fall out of my mouth like drool from a baby. Those words were so foreign to me, I’m awestruck that I have said them; breaking through the bullshit and the roundabout way Gamble is going on about. His lips purse into a straight line and that gives me my answer as I just pick up and leave, storming out of his office. I push my way through the nurses and concerned relatives of people I will never come to know, bursting through the doors onto the little veranda, a flat surface, and stories above the property of the hospital.

The familiar sea air greets me; I close my eyes, pictures waves upon waves crashing the shore, the cool water grazing my fingertips. The card in my left hand is crumpled into a ball; this was so surreal, it wasn’t really happening. But one of the most awful and perhaps the most greatest things to come to my mind was an image of Petros. Okay, I wasn’t feeling all sentimental or romantic or anything that vomit inducing. It was just a thought spurred from that image of his grossly handsome face, a compliment I would have never admitted to him, I was glad we broke things off. Not because I didn’t want him in my life, but because I didn’t want to be with him like this, forcing him to be with me when I was… well, in this ‘state.’ It was very unflattering to have a relationship occurring only because one party was suffering from some disease while the other was forced to be there; a guilt-ridden relationship wasn’t something I would ever want. Eventually as the salt air fills my lungs, I open my fist finger by finger; unravelling the ball of stiff paper I’ve managed to kill. My fingers trace over the name of my oncologist, my head trying to reason with my thoughts that perhaps there was something wrong with my blood test that this was a giant misunderstanding, but my gut knew better. I read and re-read my oncologist’s name over and over, Dr. Fayal. Yeah, Doctor Fail. It was almost as if I knew my fate against the raging cancer inside me before I went in to see this person.

I think I always knew why I never liked going to the doctor."

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[Audrey Harper]

audrey james harper,
october fourteenth two thousand seven

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
-Ernest Becker

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" I WISH I WAS A SORCERER. Sorcerers have such cool abilities, like glowing plasma orbs and mass amounts of power and time bending skills. I want to bend time, maybe even push it into the future. I know a lot of people who want to turn time backwards, but I really don’t see the point in that. I mean, it’ll be cool to change stuff when we’re back in that time period… But I would only think of imminent doom that has already occurred. And then due to the fact that I’ll be all knowing and what not, I’ll be voicing all the bad things in the world and people will call me a psycho out loud. Not that I’m not, I’m just as psychotic now as I was before my chemo began, before any of this cancer talk began. To be honest, I’m sort of glad that I found out early enough that I can do something about it, I mean, no one ever regrets finding something out early only to eliminate it before it gets too fatal, right? Exactly. However, I often wondered if I would have been happier just knowing I have cancer rather than diving into the specifics, as if vague information would have kept my hopes up better than knowing I have a rare form of leukemia.

I have acute myeloid leukemia or AML as the folks down in oncology like to say. Those spiffy oncologists, coming up with abbreviations and what not. To sum it up, I have abnormally shaped and rapidly growing white blood cells in my bone marrow which gets in the way of the production of my regular old blood cells. Dick move, freak white blood cells, dick move. What are the solutions to this amazing disease you may ask? Well, let’s start with a round of poison, but more regularly known as chemotherapy, and maybe if I’m special enough a bone marrow transplant or two. Yay! Not. Now I wondered about radiation, because that’s what I’ve heard that chemo and radiation go hand in hand, of course make you puke equally enough, but hand in hand nonetheless. Not with AML, very bad idea with AML. It royally fucks shit up, if shit isn’t fucked enough as it is. But right now, and I mean, right now, nurse Roberts is attaching the chemo drip to my newly minted port-a-cath; now port-a-caths, or just ports, but when I say ports I think of ports at the pier or something, another marvellous invention in the cancer field. Basically, about three days ago, I went into surgery to get this tube this “installed” into my chest, just below my clavicle. Since I’m going to go in for chemotherapy often, it is a simpler way to deliver the poison throughout my body via the circulatory system, and that means it the poison won’t touch my skin or muscle tissues, thus avoiding damage to them both. And on top of those epic benefits, it’s a dual chambered one as well, one for poison and another for platelets and what not, but both go into the same spot. It’s a little sore, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s cool looking too, you can see it under my skin, but that isn’t the only thing that is attached to my body. I also have two chambered central venous catheter, which is outside of my body, like tubes just dangling on my chest. It sort of makes it hard to wear low cut shirts, but how often did I wear them before? Exactly, never. But it was easier this way, easier to get better, which is ironic, considering I’ve got to fill myself with chemotherapy a certain kind of poison.

Oh chemotherapy. What a bitch. I swear, I think I’ve vomited my entire stomach content in the past two chemotherapy appointments I’ve gone in. The second appointment wasn’t as bad, but still. I should have drank my weight in alcoholic beverages, should have made my liver regret ever forming in my body… Because at least with a hangover the next day, it isn’t so bad, you won’t get a nose bleed and think since you don’t have enough platelets that it won’t stop unless you do to the hospital and get a packet or two injected into yourself. But I should be happy, for I’m not losing my hair, which is a bonus… but I was actually looking forward to being bald and not taking care of my long hair. Granted that I love my long hair, it used to be soft and wavy and a little curly. But now, it’s thinner, and coarser, but hasn’t fallen out like I’ve expected. Fayal said not all cancer patients lose their hair, and I suppose I’m grateful for that. I mean, I’m not much of a pity person, so if I’m rocking out like a baldy, people will jump to conclusions and do those head shaking looking down things while mumbling “Oh that’s too bad” or “Oh I’m so sorry.” But in reality, those sympathizers are only thinking about “Hope this shit doesn’t happen to me.” It just bugs me that people think that now I’m too far gone that this disease, these mutated cell have now defined me. All my qualities and characteristics that I’ve worked so hard to gain and object to the world are diminished, now all anyone ever sees is ‘cancer patient.’ That’s all. Or they’ll automatically define me as a ‘trooper’ or a ‘fighter’ whereas I don’t do anything, but rather, I sit in a chair while Nurse Roberts hooks me up every appointment with some poison to shoot through my bloodstream and I’m lounging for an hour skimming through old magazines with celebrities I don’t know of within the pages.

But the god honest truth, hah, funny I’m using God in this sentence is that I’m scared. I haven’t admitted this to anyone, but I am. I’m afraid of turning into skin and bones and so sallow that you can see each individual capillary in my body with one quick glance. I’m not scared of dying, but how I’ll be right before I die, how I’ll be remembered as that chick who just lost her battle with cancer in the end or some other clichéd expression that would be heard in cancer marathons and relays everywhere. I understand that all the money raised is essentially for my benefit and if I was living in Canada all this shit would be free, which makes me question that if Americans boast about being the greatest nation to ever exist, why does it not have one of the most fundamental things necessary for life for everyone? Americans are weird, despite the fact that I’m slowly getting a subtly Americanized Irish accent, which isn’t my actual accent at all, stupid Matteo being a pure blood Irishman and stupid Valkyrie being in California. But I’m not saying those marathons that raise hope, money and awareness are bad, they are perfectly acceptable, but I just don’t want to be vastly associated with them if that makes some sense.

I don’t want to become another statistic; I want to remain a human being until my fateful demise. "

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