Gooseberries don't grow in winter E-Book

Sabine Mayr

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 178

Beschreibung

I imagine: In the end, you look at your life like an X-ray image. The places where the radioactive rays are not absorbed by something substantial appear black. When is it too late to fill the black holes? Life ends unexpectedly early for Sonja and Ronja. The diagnosis of cancer hits them both like a blow and causes them to look back on what they have experienced, what they have achieved and what they have missed. Sonja gives up her career as an architect to keep the family together in her role as a mother. Ronja, on the other hand, goes to extremes for her career as a successful architect. Is it even possible to live your life wrong? An exciting question that every reader can decide for themselves. There are no more gooseberries in winter ...

Leseprobe

Prologue

I imagine: In the end, you look at your life like an X-ray. Where the radioactive rays are not absorbed by something essential, something dense, appears black on the film print.

Ultimately, I think the question isn’t what have I achieved, but rather, what have I not dared to do?

And when is it too late to fill the black holes?

Gooseberries don’t grow in winter…

Insight

A bright glare like the headlights of an oncoming car, from which there is no dodging. Like a knife, the glaring photon bombardment fires right into my eye, causing me to instinctively close for protection.

Instead, I obediently force myself to follow the doctor's instructions: "Please look up, to the right top, to the right, down to the right, down to the left ..."

As we part, I feel that familiar weak handshake again, which causes me a great deal of physical pain, but this time I can't put any more pressure on it.

All the doctors I know seem to have this weak, not uncommonly wet, handshake. Is it perhaps an occupational disease? Like a kind of paralysis, a fainting due to what they have to endure when they look into our bodies?

Outside the practice door, acute, stinging blindness sets in again. This time due to the sun's heartless rays into my dilated pupils. Cleopatra supposedly dripped belladonna extract into her eyes to achieve a beguiling deep black gaze through the dilated pupils.

I stagger back. As if the floor is being pulled out from under my feet. I hold on to the cold metal door handle of the ophthalmologist's surgery for a second. The people around me must think I'm drunk.

I slowly creep through the crammed streets of Munich's noisy, vibrant city center, feeling my way cautiously over the pavement with the tip of my foot. It's still a long way to home, but under the influence of the atropine eye drops, I can't decipher the U- train map anyway.

I go by foot. Alone. Among a humongous crowd of people.

The roaring engines of the cars and buses, the piercing ringing of the city-bikes, the hurried footsteps full of purpose and the senseless chatter of the crowd around me begin to fade into a murmur.

Like a tinnitus or being under the influence of drugs, the familiar melody of "Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk to you again" sounds softly in my head out of nowhere, without me wanting it to...

they say that blind people learn to sharpen the rest of their senses.

All of a sudden, I loose visual control of the world around me and am thrown back into looking inside myself alone.

All I see there is fear.

Review I

Mom with the long, silky-smooth blonde hair, the porcelain face, a soft smile around her lips, denim jacket unbuttoned at the front, underneath the delicate breast appendages in the middle, naked under the open jacket. In the background, the deep blue-green waters of Lake Ammer reflect the golden sunset, making her shine like Botticelli's Venus. Is it just the memory of the Polaroid photo Dad took of her, or her own true memory of this vacation evening together?

My own childish howling: "Stop it! Mom, close your jacket, get dressed, I don't want this!" My father's laughter as he continues to take pictures of his wife with his Polaroid camera, ignoring his daughters crying.

Until Mom, looking at me shamefully, buttons up her tight jacket over her chest, kneels down to me, tries to take me in her arms and laughs sheepishly. "No one will see that except you and Dad."

I defiantly squirm out of her embrace, which is suddenly too intimate for me. Foreign, not my mom. A stranger, woman, object of love, shameful, threatening, impressive ... envied?

Jealousy. Mom and Dad a couple. A love that has nothing to do with me. Breasts that I never drank from, but he kisses.

Sports day

In vain, I stand in the very back row, hoping that they will have already left by the time I get there. But no, I hoped wrong, I have to go to the start and it feels like even more boys are craning their necks at the edge of the 100- meter track hoping to get a better look.

Knees down, feet in the starting blocks, hands on the red track.

Mrs. H. commands: "Three, two, one", the starting pistol fires.

Slow, stiff, glued to the ground like honey. The backs and soles of the others in front of me. My limbs, heavy, seem to stick to the ground, I desperately try to push them off and move forward. My breasts weigh even heavier, jiggling with every step, in the cheap bra, clearly visible under the old cotton T- shirt. They bob up and down, back and forth, synchronized with my panting.

13.9 seconds. The very last not only in my starting line, but as always, of the entire class. The boys stand whistling at the edge of the track, grinning loudly, and only slowly and hesitantly allow Mr. S. to call them back to the long jump pit. They turn around several times to glance back at me, laughing outrageously.

My head flaming red with shame and exertion. Shame more than anything else, the breasts, the looks.

"Sonja, do you have chewing gum on your soles? You run like an elephant, you have to run forward and not stomp holes in the ground. A four!"

My worst grade, always.

Pain I

Fibrocystic mastopathy. In plain English, this means regularly having thick, hot, swollen breasts for at least two to sometimes even three weeks a month before my period, worse than postpartum milk engorgement. I had that years ago, so much milk that Florence couldn't cope with it. It squirted into her mouth so quickly and so much that she choked. My maternal milk reflex was working in excess.

The curious looks of my southern roommate’s family members. Their daily caring visits on the postpartum ward. Just like the high-school during P.E.. Even the half pulled curtain in front of my maternity bed doesn’t help. I felt like a fat cow in a shed that the farmer had forgotten to milk, with bursting udders, the skin above covered in thick, meandering veins with a bluish tinge.

The midwife first tried sage tea - ridiculous, even more fluid. Then half a tablet of Dostinex, next a whole one, also without effect. She said I should take a maximum of two so I don’t stop breastfeeding completely. In the end, I got myself another pack of eight tablets at home, which I simply swallowed in one go, I was so fed up with the circus. Finally, it got better.

In the end, there was enough milk for her to thrive until Florence was 14 months old. Then I had to leave her at daycare for good because I finally wanted to go back to work and have a proper grown-up conversation. It was only then that Florence accepted an alternative form of nutrition and switched from strictly breast milk and directly to pasta with Parmesan cheese from one day to the next. She, who previously wouldn't tolerate a spoonful of yogurt or even pumped breast milk from a bottle offered by Egon.

Innsbruck

"It would be the chance for me to do research under Alois Zielbauer. And you can also work as an architect in Innsbruck."

What we couldn't have known at the time was that Egon would congratulate Professor Zielbauer on being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics over the phone years later.

But my plan to find a job as an architect in Innsbruck came to nothing. In truth, I'm not really looking at all.

My excuse: Florence, ten years old, doesn't want to move. She plays the lead role in the musical "The Little Day" at school in Munich, which is fighting to be placed in the front row of the big and important days.

My role is to keep the family together. I tell myself that I have to stay at home for the time being for this reason.

In the end Florence was the only one of the three of us to quickly learn the Austrian dialect, translating for me when I couldn't understand someone in the store around the corner or on the phone. She also found a musical group at the new school and quickly made new friends.

I'm making friends with Austrian cuisine. I follow the recipes for Topfenpalatschinken, Kaiserschmarrn, Apfelstrudel, Kaspressknödel, Schlutzkrapfen ... Only the Wiener Schnitzel is better in the University canteen than to the one I make, says Egon.

As well as cooking, I sign up for a French course to brush up on what has been rusty since school. At one point in the lesson, we are asked to describe people's appearance: "J'ai les cheveux longs."

I realize I've had long hair all my life, like my mother, like Florence.

Losing my hair would be an inconsolable misfortune. A complete breast removal, on the other hand, I decide would not be a problem if necessary ...

Grandmothers

My grandmas. One fat with huge breasts, on which she dripped her food every lunchtime. The other was gaunt like my mom, with a pinched expression on her face, perhaps only because of this gauntness, or because of her experiences during and after the war.

While my mom worked as a sales clerk in the hat store, I was with fat grandma. My youngest aunt was only seven when I was born and my youngest uncle was only five years older than me. I was allowed to borrow books from her. I built Lego with him.

I wasn't an only child there.

Whenever I was with skinny granny, I was always allowed to have her flowered hairdresser's shoulder cape with the pretty lace hem to play with. It became my skirt, my princess dress, my wedding veil.

Under the small kitchen table with the long tablecloth hanging down was my house, my castle. Waiting for Prince Charming on a white horse.

She also regularly had dry, hard, stale bread rolls or white bread soaked in sweet, sugary milk coffee. I loved spooning up this bread soup. When I was six.

The caffeine content was certainly not so high - if it was real coffee at all and not so-called Muckefuck, a coffee substitute made from malt - that it could have done too much damage to my brain development.

At least I managed to finish High school. I was the first in the family.

On Sundays, my skinny grandma always bought ugly cream cake with cherries from the pastry shop in town, because her homemade apple pie with apples from the garden ”didn’t cut it”". But I much preferred the old apple pie, my mom had to eat the cream cake alone.

Every Sunday afternoon we walked the two kilometers to grandma's house in the neighboring town for coffee.

"Mom, how much longer? I’m tired”.

"You can get a chewing gum from the vending machine at the corner of the street."

Back then, there were plastic vending machines with a glass window at the front so you could see what was inside. There were some containing chewing gum and some with little bouncy rubber balls to play with, called Flummis. If you wanted to buy the contents, you had to insert coins into a slot, either ten or fifty Pfennigs, and then you could turn the metal lever. If you were lucky, a round, colorful, more or less old chewing gum would come out from behind the metal flap. You could judge the age and edibility of it by how faded the blue, red or yellow layer of color looked.

Back to Sunday afternoon. A few steps further.

"Mom, tell me a story, I'm so bored."

"Once upon a time, there was a mom who had a daughter who said, 'Mom, I'm bored, tell me a story,' so the mom started: Once upon a time, there was a mom who had a daughter who said, 'Mom, I'm bored, tell me a story.' So the mom began ..."

"Sto-op! Stupid story, it's always the same, it's boring."

How fitting, always the same, from mother to daughter, to mother, to daughter ...

The fat granny had a big chest in the truest sense of the word, eight children and a grandchild and a large, well-tended garden. She was in charge of the whole extended family, house and home, just like in the TV series "The Waltons". Taking care of them was her whole purpose in life. Only poor Grandpa, who had diabetes and soon couldn't see a thing, was harassed by her from morning till night.

He was my favorite grandpa. Gentle and kind. Never a bad word to me or his wife. We played cards together. When he wasn't working in the accountant's office of the only company in town.

Early in the morning before school, I heard his razor whirring through the open bathroom door and smelled his Tabac Original, 1959 (Eau de Cologne). Then the scent of fresh toast, on which he would spread a thick layer of butter so that it melted, and then my grandmother's homemade jam with strawberries from the garden.

I wasn't allowed to get caught picking and snacking on them. I was allowed to help harvest all the fruit and vegetables under supervision, but not just from the bed into my mouth. I loved picking peas with Grandpa more than anything. Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would stuff one into my mouth at lightning speed. Much better raw. I still can't stand cooked carrots today.

Woe betide me if I picked an apple from the tree to bite into. The apples had to fall to the ground first, and then it was off with the trailer full of the bumpy, wormy ones to the juice maker. The raw juice made me disappear behind the bushes on the spot, because there was no toilet there.

Mom didn't like the juice, she wanted to be vegan ahead of her time, and she dreaded the crushed worms. She didn't like cheese either, only jam sandwiches. And coffee. And Marlboro. To keep her slim.

When she was 40, she suddenly became so thin that I said: "Mom, go to the doctor, I'm afraid you have breast cancer." Her diagnosis was ulcerative colitis then.

Naked

Looking back, you could say that I was rather early mature as a child. I was called "precocious".

As long as I can remember, I've always enjoyed painting and was supposedly very good at it from an early age. People, animals, houses, all sorts of things.

I must have been in first grade when one afternoon, while Grandma was doing the dishes, I drew a woman without any bad thoughts. And this time, for some reason, without the tutu-lace-lined princess dress. Bare as a rag. Like Eve from the Bible, but without the leafy covering. With two naked round breasts with brown warts and thick black pubic hair in the vulva area.

My parents were very open in their 70s ABBA-and-Santana-style upbringing and thought it was natural for me to see them naked in the bathroom. So I knew my way around the external anatomy.

Unfortunately, my grandma was not so open-minded about the subject. I remember it like it was yesterday. She pulls open the rattling wooden rings of the curtain to the narrow kitchen niche that separates the cooking area from the dining area. She wants to put the plates away in the wood-worm glass dresser. A fleeting glance in passing at my latest work of art. It literally pulls her back. A shrill outcry. She almost drops the Meissen porcelain on the floor. She puts the pile down on the dining table with a clatter, right next to my sheet and the wood paints. Tears the sheet from under my pen. One falls to the floor. But that's where they become piece lead.

"How dare you? To paint something so dirty. Shame on you!"

The picture is torn apart.

The topic is no longer addressed.

The shame buried deep inside me.

I'm sure today that if I'd had communion back then, she would have dragged me straight into the church and the nearest confessional.

And the moral of the story: the female sexuality is not appropriate.

Pain II

Not only do my fucking breasts hurt with every movement, that's why I only wear sports bras. Even at rest, without any movement, they pulsate, boiling with crackling skin, sending off an electric shock from the lightest touch just from the fabric of the clothes. They seem to be bursting, even though you can hardly see any swelling in the mirror.

The gynecologist's ultrasound reveals many small and larger cysts, fortunately none with a suspicious solid part inside.

Constant pain and subliminal fear that keeps welling up.

Fear of the lumps. Avoiding touch, which is barely possible even on the few pain-free days.

Phone call with mom, who tries to comfort me with the fact that no women in the family have had neither mastopathy nor breast cancer. So far ...

Research into possible causes remain unsuccessful: my prolactin blood level is in the non-pregnant and non-postnatal normal range, so no need to look for a prolactinoma in my head.

Over the years I have tried all kinds of tips and therapies: consuming less coffee, less salt, progesterone gel to apply (which I kept in the fridge, so at least it had a cooling effect), hormone tablets, estrogen, progestogen, a combination of both, herbal substances. Nothing with success.

Painkillers only ever brought short-term relief. I can't keep taking pills for years, where does that leave my kidneys? The only positive influence I figured out was that it always got better when I had one or two pounds less on my ribs.

A companion for years.

What was worse: the chronic pain or the fear that this chronic inflammation could increase the risk of breast cancer after all ...?

Starting signal

The lump. It’s in my breast but somehow I feel it in my throat. For years, the many cysts that feel like lumps and then disappear again.

This one not disappearing.

Doctors’ appointment in eight weeks.

Maybe it’ll be gone by then.

First the gynecologist feels both breasts. Her hands are pleasantly cold.

This is followed by a special high-resolution ultrasound to better assess the tissue. Smack, the cool gel on the breasts is also welcome. But even the slight pressure of the ultrasound reminds me of the pain.

I can see the ultrasound screen from the side. I am neither stupid nor blind. Black means fluid-filled cyst. White means dense tissue. The lighter, denser, the more suspicious.

Perhaps the bright spot, about the size of a quarter, is just severely inflamed glandular tissue ...

Why the mammogram, which hurts like a bitch because the breast is squeezed between two sheets of Plexiglas like apple pomace during juicing, still has to be done, is unclear to me.

You can see calcifications more precisely.

What good will that do me if I end up having to have a biopsy anyway?

It probably helps the doctors to earn money.

Now I'm being unfair, sorry. It’s not my expertise.

The biopsy takes place eight weeks later. The findings come back after three days.

"Positive evidence of invasive ductal carcinoma".

Surely they are joking.

With a pregnancy test, the "positive” at least stands true to its meaning.

I can't imagine what is positive about the fact that the cells in my milk ducts have degenerated into cancer.

Was the mixed up with that of another patient? It is said to happen ...

No, that can't be the case.

I'm sure I'll wake up soon.

But deep down I know that I have breast cancer.

How long will it take me to acknowledge my diagnosis and stop lying to myself?

I don't remember exactly.

Marathon I

The young doctor adjusts her glasses. The massive mahogany desk acts as a barrier between us. She looks so small and helpless in her leather executive chair. She keeps glancing nervously at the screen in front of her so that she doesn't have to look into our eyes. Egon insisted on coming with us. Took the extra half-day off at the institute.

"So, you need to know that chemotherapy is given for at least 24 weeks if everything goes well. After that, due to your favorable prescription constellation, you have the option of continuing treatment with tamoxifen to reduce the risk of relapse, preferably for at least another 10 years."

Then I would be 55. At the end. If everything works out. I’ll be just fine.

The side effects of chemotherapy are well known. Tamoxifen causes symptoms comparable to the menopause.

"Breast cancer treatment is not a sprint, it's a marathon," the doctor adds a meaningful nod to her words.

"My wife is used to marathons," Egon puts his hand on my shoulder and looks at me bravely. His hand weighs heavily on me. I resist the impulse to avoid it.

No longer in the here and now, I can see the scene two years ago in Santa Fe before my eyes: Egon on the side of the road behind the colorful plastic barriers along the race line together with Florence, cheering me on, motivating me to keep going. I can just make them out as they run past among the endless crowds of marathon spectators. At the end, they both proudly greet me at the finish line.

And now?

How often have I seen Egon cry?

Dad