Autobiography Of A Face

After her operation, Lucy begins travelling into New York with her mother for radiation and chemotherapy treatment, as she will “five days a week, every week, for two years” (69). They travel in silence, each “engulfed by [their] own private, inner travels,” something which feels “natural to both of [them]” (70). Lucy finds the radiation treatment to be “a breeze, about as complicated as an x-ray” (71). However, every Friday, she also has her “appointment with Dr. Woolf in the chemotherapy department” (72), and this is much more traumatic.

Able to “carry on a conversation with [her] mother, [Lucy], his nurse, his secretary down the hall, and someone on the phone simultaneously” (73), Dr. Woolf is “incredibly rude” (73) as well as “gruff and unempathetic” (74). During Lucy’s first appointment, Dr. Woolf applies the tourniquet so tightly that Lucy begins to cry. The treatment is deeply unpleasant. Lucy wants to “collapse, to fall back onto the table or, better yet, go head first down onto the cold floor” (75). She is repeatedly sick and carries on heaving long after her stomach is empty.

When she returns home, Lucy vomits again and begins to cry. Her mother tells her that “there [is] no need to cry, that everything [will] be alright, that [Lucy] mustn’t cry” (78).