The C-Word
Authors: Lisa Lynch
Contents
Chapter 3: Let me get this off my chest
Chapter 11: Getting wiggy with it
Chapter 13: Does my bum look big in this?
Chapter 14: My Super Sweet 29th
Chapter 15: Old red eyes is back
Chapter 16: I’ll be there for you
Chapter 17: I shall be released
Chapter 18: Pull out the stopper
Chapter 20: Lonely hearts club
Chapter 22: I got my head checked
Chapter 24: Escape to the country
Chapter 26: And never brought to mind
Chapter 30: What’s my age again?
Chapter 33: A change of season
About the Book
‘The frustrating, life-altering, sheer bloody pain-in-the-arse inconvenience of getting breast cancer at 28’ laid bare.
What do you do when you discover you have advanced breast cancer in your twenties? Well, after throwing more than a few (justified) tantrums, dissolving over the prospect of losing your hair and saying goodbye to your left boob, you might just blog about it. Well, you certainly do if you’ve a gob as big as Lisa’s.
The last thing Lisa had expected to cross off her ‘things to do before you’re 30’ list was beating breast cancer, but that’s what she’s stuck doing. So while she had to park her life, blogging about dealing with the crap of cancer became an outlet that helped her to cope and keep friends and family updated.
Lisa’s raw emotion and dark humour combined to make for very compelling reading. And now, in this brilliant, brave and insightful book, Lisa tells her whole story as it really was. Whatever you face in life, whatever the curveball you’ve been dealt, reading this will make you laugh, cry and feel hopeful again.
About the Author
Lisa Lynch is a journalist and magazine editor. At the age of 28, while editing her second interiors title, Lisa discovered a lump in her breast – a lump that spawned not just cancer, but a blog (
www.alrighttit.com
), this book and a writing career. Talk about milking it.
For Cyril and Jean
Introduction
On my lengthy ‘Things To Do Before I’m Thirty’ list (see Northern Lights, get pregnant, write book, lose stone, own Christian Louboutins), I hadn’t factored in beating breast cancer. But them’s the breaks.
The ball-ache was less about having to add such a hefty task to my list than it was about the sheer bloody inconvenience of it taking precious time out of my late twenties. I had lots of very serious business to attend to, thank you very much, like shopping sprees and Wonderbra-wearing and romantic weekends away and getting drunk over dinner with mates (not that that’d help on the losing-a-stone front, mind). But while I had to concede that The Bullshit (as I’ve come to refer to it) would have to come first for a while, I was determined to get the good times back, and not allow it to take away anything more than my hair. (And let’s be honest, that was pissing on my chips quite enough.)
I’ve always worked on the assumption that, whatever it is, it’s better to know about it. (The truth may hurt, but it’s always preferable to know when your skirt is tucked into
your
knickers, right?) Nor have I ever been one for keeping my mouth shut. So I started a blog,
Alright Tit
, on which I kept a journal of my cancer experience. And writing while fighting is a strategy that’s worked – not only have my friends and family been kept informed on all the stuff they’d never hear from Kylie (or Brave Kylie, to give her her full name), but it’s also been a cathartic method of keeping me out of the therapist’s chair (for the most part).
I’m not pretending to be the only twenty-something in the world who’s had a breast cancer diagnosis. I’m just probably the one with the biggest gob. But everyone needs a strategy, and mine has been to write my way through The Bullshit (and come out the other side walking taller in a fabulous pair of Louboutins).
*
Carrie Bradshaw fell in Dior, I fell in Debenhams. It was May 2008, and it was spectacular. Uncomfortable heels + slippy floor + head turned by a cocktail dress =
thwack
. Arms stretched overhead, teeth cracking on floor tiles, chest and knees breaking the fall, legs flailing about like a mid-tantrum toddler. It was theatrical, exaggerated, a perfect 6.0. And it was Significant Moment #1 in discovering that I had grade-three breast cancer.
Significant Moment #2 came a month later, when my husband and I were play-fighting. On the outside, we’re a professional London-based couple with mortgage protection, a cafetiere and one eye on our Air Miles. Behind closed doors, we draw on one another’s foreheads, have noisy Beatles-album sing-offs and tickle each other until we can’t breathe for laughing. Attempting to fight back while slowly losing each of my nerve endings and trying to hang
onto
a full bladder, I thought I’d buy myself some time by adding ‘and remember I’m still in pain from my fall’ to the ‘I’m a girl, go easy on me’ card I’d already played. But when you’re married to The Most Competitive Man In The World, such pathetic excuses mean nothing, and he went in for the kill by holding my arms behind my back and reaching for my Debenhams-bruised left boob. When P called time on our scrap because the playful boob-grab had hurt me more than it ought to, and he’d copped a feel of more than his usual handful, I knew something was wrong. (P never gives up first.) And that was precisely the moment at which the fun stopped, and my cancer journey began.
Actually, that’s an odd choice of words, since I loathe the term ‘journey’ when applied to cancer. Journey implies a pleasant trip to the seaside, a magical mystery tour or an epiphany during some life-changing experience. Cancer isn’t a journey. Cancer is a nuclear bomb dropped in the centre of your lovely world – in this case with sod all warning. There’s nothing liberating or celebratory or enlightening about it.
Being diagnosed with cancer is like being told you’ve got twenty minutes to revise for an A level in a language you’ve never learned. (
Parlez-vous chemo?
) You walk into your appointment assuming your cramming days are behind you, and come out blinded by need-to-know, baffling terminology that’s as unfamiliar as a snowman to a Fijian. The literature is all so delicately written; packed with noncommittal information (‘you might find …’, ‘there’s a possibility that …’, ‘you may discover …’, ‘if you feel …’), and a sugary, hey-it’s-really-not-so-bad attitude, like a flimsy net curtain attempting to disguise a bloody great elephant.
I don’t want to be told that losing my hair will give me
extra
time in bed in the morning where I’d otherwise have been blow-drying, or that buying a range of wigs will give me the chance to try out different personalities in the bedroom (both of which I read in an ‘uplifting compilation of quotes’ from breast cancer survivors). Nor do I want to give anyone else that impression. It’s irresponsible and, frankly, it’s complete crap – even before I’d experienced any of the things the contributors were talking about, I knew that wasn’t how it was going to be. I’d have given up all the lie-ins in the world to keep my lovely locks. And not only do chemo drugs tend to starve you of a sex life, but breast cancer treatment hardly does wonders for your body image either. (I don’t recall ever seeing a twenty-something lass with a bald head and missing boob on
FHM’s
‘100 Sexiest Women’ list.)
So stuff the clichéd, just-not-fucking-funny cancer quips (‘think of all the money/time/effort you’ll save on mascara/your hair/shaving your legs’), the saccharine, truth-masking ‘information’ sheets and the earnest, life-improving self-help books. It’s time someone told it how it
really
is.
And that’s precisely what I’ve done.
CHAPTER 1
An apology
June 2008
From a lack of decent conversation and a tendency to curiosity, my first (unsuitable) boyfriend and I fell into a routine of rarely speaking and instead used each other for experimentation. It didn’t always feel good and wasn’t always done right, but we were fifteen and fed up and keen to impress our mates. One over-enthusiastic afternoon in an otherwise empty house, I somehow ended up with a hurt right nipple. How? God knows. But the subsequent few weeks were experimentation-free, while the boob-scab healed and my unsuitable boyfriend found someone else to experiment with.
Thirteen years on, and I still silently blame this episode for my right boob being my least favourite. Not by a long chalk, mind – I’ve always been happy with my lot boobs-wise, and reckon that the few people who’ve seen them have been bloody lucky to do so – but we all play favourites, right? (Or left?)
And so today, I’d like to make an apology to my right breast. First off, for calling it a ‘breast’ just then. ‘Breast’ is just one of those words that I inexplicably hate, hence the inverted commas.
But mostly, I’d like to apologise to my right boob (ah, infinitely better) for always preferring the left, when that’s the one that’s gone and got cancer.
Is it too late to switch sides?
*
‘ANOTHER G&T, LIS?’
Me and my mates had met up for a swift half (translation: three hours’ worth of booze on an empty stomach) outside our favourite London pub. It was that glorious, once-a-year evening when the weather was finally good enough to swap leggings and boots for bare legs and open-toed wedges, and I was feeling good. I was wearing my first summer dress of the season, had covered my pins in suspiciously gravy-like fake tan and had just styled my newly grown-out fringe into the kind of sweeping side parting that makes you feel like Jessica Rabbit (but actually makes you look like you’ve only got one eye).
‘Better not,’ I answered to a jury of baffled looks. ‘Seriously. I’m at the doctors in the morning. I’ve got a cyst that’s giving me gyp in my tit, here.’ For some reason I pointed to the offending boob; one too many G&Ts insisting that I give my friends a biology lesson. Nobody seemed the least bit concerned. I wasn’t either. Because a lump in your tit at my age is
obviously
a cyst, right? And anyway, I was much more perturbed that my early appointment was putting paid to me pushing on till last orders. ‘Let’s catch up when I’m back from my hols, eh? When I’ve got a
real
tan to show off,’ I said, kicking out a streaky orange leg and slinging my bag over my shoulder while zigzagging my way to the nearest available taxi.