Last time, she’d felt trapped. Feverishly trapped. During those long hours in the oncology ward she’d had so much time to sit and think while poison siphoned into her veins via the chemo bowser, parked beside her at the beginning of every visit. As the fluids soaked through the corridors of her body, her awareness of the mechanics of her veins, her vessels and her cells, heightened. It was awful. She’d never felt so alive, so strange, so rotten. It was like she’d morphed into a creature with scars instead of breasts, a hairless body; delicate, translucent skin and bloody gums. She’s small, anyway—runty, she always called herself before the cancer, in a faux self-deprecating kind of way—but she became truly runty as the chemo ate what little flesh she had from her bones. Runty to the point she became something else as her vertebrae began to protrude, cog-like, from her back, and her shoulder blades came to look like the wings of a flightless bird.

She didn’t know if the waves of frenzied irritation she experienced while sitting in that chemo chair were all in her head, but at times she had to clamp her teeth shut and press her fingernails—so fragile, so laddered, so red-raw—into the cushioned arms of the chair and consciously stop herself from ripping the needles from her veins. It felt so wrong. It was like every sensation she experienced in that ward took on a hysteria that fed the awareness that she was trapped by her sickness, by medicine, by her body, by her childless future, by the very concrete of the hospital building. And all the while, deftly manicured women in ads for nappies, for baby food, for cleaning products, smiled secret smiles at her from the muted television set that was mounted on the hospital wall.

She was trapped, last time.

This time, she has been freed. She can feel it in her chest and on her chest, which aches and stings in the most cathartic way imaginable. She’s bruised, battered and freed. She’s a creature, with scars instead of breasts, but she has her hair—her hair, not that downy poodle regrowth—she has her skin, which is a hardy pelt again, and she has her tough, leathery gums. She’s Lucy.

And the octopus is—what happened to it? she wonders. But she can only bring herself to wonder idly. She’s warm. The room hums. She curls her toes. Sleeping seems like a nice thing to do.

Fragments of the past day—days?—skitter about her disassembling consciousness: