38

The next morning, Caroline pulled her car into the now-familiar car park and turned off the engine. It wasn’t a place she enjoyed visiting, but she hoped today could signal that it wouldn’t be necessary to make too many more visits.

She walked over to the pay and display machine, bought a ticket and put it on her dashboard, before locking her car and walking into the main building.

A little over twenty minutes later, she was sitting in a comfortable chair inside the brightly-lit consulting room of Mr Pankash Anand, the man who’d come to know her more intimately than her own husband over recent months.

‘How have you been getting on?’ he asked her, his kind face and gentle smile immediately putting her at ease, as it always did.

‘Okay, I think.’

‘Any side effects? Dizziness? Vomiting?’

Caroline shook her head. ‘No, nothing like that. I’ve been fine.’

‘Alright, good. Well, as you know, we did some scans last week to try and get a better idea of how things are progressing and to see where we go from here. The upshot of it is that there has been some progress, but not quite as much as we’d like. We’ve seen some shrinkage of the tumour, but it really is pretty minimal. To be honest, if we continued with the treatment as is, at best I’d predict little to no change over the coming months, with the distinct possibility that it could potentially grow or spread further, which of course is what we want to avoid.’

Caroline swallowed. ‘Right. What does that mean?’

‘Well, there’s no real way of knowing what damage the cancer could be doing to your ovaries in the long run. But, to be honest, the same could be said of the treatment. As things stand it’s been quite targeted. We’d hoped the paraplatin on its own would be enough, but I think now we need to think longer term. There are two potential routes here. We could look at a more generalised chemotherapy, which of course has its own worries and side effects. We’d be talking hair loss, more extreme nausea, exhaustion. Chemotherapy attacks all fast-growing cells, even the healthy ones. The other option, and if we go down this route we’ll need to move fast, is the surgical option. In my opinion, the tumour is small enough to operate on, but it’s marginal. We’d need to operate quickly, because if it were to grow any more, we’d need to go down the heavy chemotherapy route anyway to shrink the tumour enough to get it to an operable state again. Does that make sense?’

‘Yeah. I think so. To be honest, I’m struggling with the exhaustion as it is. What would the surgical route mean?’