Lady Gregory's journal

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)

Typed journal entry

September 2, 1926

After discovering a lump in one breast, Gregory underwent a mastectomy in June 1923. She had only local anesthesia and during the procedure managed to converse with her surgeon (poet Oliver St. John Gogarty, who was the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) until she fainted. “Yeats so good to me through the bad days,” she noted in her journal. During a second surgery in 1926, again without chloroform, she noted, “the knife working about made me feel queer,” and she fixed her mind on the flow of the river joining her childhood home and Coole, like the arterial flow of her own blood. A third operation in 1929 failed to halt the spread of the cancer that killed her, though publicly she complained only of rheumatism.