Minus one breast – at first, she hadn’t wanted to admit it, the pain, the sorrow. She had done what she always did and drawn a veil over it, in a vain attempt to distance herself, to push it back behind a screen. It was nothing, she had repeated to herself, plastic surgery can work wonders. But it was an ugly, dissembling word: mastectomy. Really, it was an amputation, a mutilation, an aberration. Perhaps, if she was lucky, it was a path to healing, too? Who could promise her that? When Hannah had heard the news of her mother’s illness, she had looked very sad. She had thought for a moment, and then she had said: Mom, you’re an Amazon. Sarah had smiled. Not long before, her daughter had written a school project on that very topic. She had corrected it herself. She remembered it now:

The word Amazon comes from the Greek mazos or mammary, preceded by ‘a’, meaning ‘deprived of’.

The Amazons were women in the ancient world, who cut off their right breasts so that they would make better archers. They were a nation of warriors, both feared and respected. They reproduced with men from neighbouring tribes but raised their children alone. They employed men as domestic servants. They fought in many wars and were often victorious.

Sarah was anything but certain she could win this war. The body she had pushed, ignored, neglected, even starved over the years – no time to eat, no time to sleep – was taking its revenge now, cruelly reminding her of its existence. Sarah was a shadow, a pale copy of her old self, reflected pitilessly, there in the mirror.

Her hair saddened her the most. It was coming out in handfuls now. The oncologist had warned her, like some grim oracle: it would start falling out after the second round of chemo. Sarah had found dozens of hairs strewn like fallen warriors over her pillow. She dreaded this more than anything. Hair loss was the embodiment of the disease. A bald woman was a sick woman, no matter if she sported a beautiful sweater, high heels, the latest must-have bag. No one would notice. That was all there was: the bald head, an admission, a confession, a symbol of suffering. A man with a shaved head could be sexy, but a bald woman would always be ill.

And so the cancer had robbed her of everything: her job, her looks, her femininity.

She pictured her mother, defeated by the same disease. She could go back to bed and slip away in silence, join her down there where she lay in the earth, share her eternal rest. It was a morbid yet comforting thought. It was soothing, in a way, to think that everything had an end, that the most unbearable torment could cease tomorrow.