The C-Word (11 page)

‘Are you okay, love?’ asked P from the other side of our locked bathroom door. ‘You’ve been in there ages.’

‘Fucking cancer,’ I whinged from the loo seat. ‘This sodding illness just gets more glamorous by the day, doesn’t it?’

The hair loss, they tell you about. And the sickness, and the pain, and the depressing effect on your taste buds. But nobody warned me about the toll that cancer treatment was going to take on my arse. First the constipation, then the painful ‘relief’, then getting the runs … and then back to the start of the crappy cycle again. There on the toilet, squeezing my chest to my knees, I finally understood why, right back as early as my diagnosis, every cancer-experienced person I came across recommended that I keep a constant supply of Sudocrem. Bloody good advice – it’s the single most brilliant gift you can buy a cancer patient. (Well, that and Louboutins.)

‘P! Help!’ I screeched from the loo seat, to the sound of hurried footsteps running down our hallway.

‘I’m here, babe, what is it? Shall I come in?’

‘God, no, don’t come in,’ I shot back in a single breath. (At this stage I was still fooling myself that I’d never allow P to see my bald head, so I’d have rather done an Elvis and popped my clogs there on the loo than have my husband see me as I was.) ‘Just, erm, bring me something from the kitchen, will you?’

P’s silence was deafeningly embarrassing.

‘The olive oil, okay? Bring the olive oil.’

‘Riiiight,’ he said, scampering off to the cupboard.

‘Don’t look at me, okay?’ I mumbled into my dressing gown while P held open the bedroom door for me after Sainsbury’s best lubrication had done the trick. ‘It’s completely bloody humiliating.’

‘Okay, beautiful,’ said P – sensitive as ever – though I’d never felt further from beautiful. ‘I’ll leave you alone for a bit.’

Sitting on a travel neck pillow because I wasn’t able to put any pressure on my damaged
derrière
, I figured things couldn’t get much worse. But, looking up into the mirror opposite our bed to scowl at my reflection, I noticed that, in fact, it had.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I said, peering at the acne-ridden mess before me. Equally as startling as the nineteen spots I counted was just how quickly they’d appeared. ‘Great,’ I said, squeezing a zit on the end of my nose. ‘That’s just great. Because the puking and shitting wasn’t quite enough. Now I’m getting uglier by the day.’

‘Sort it out, scientists,’ I wrote on my blog. ‘What the hell is keeping you? You can send tourists to space, you can clone sheep … hell, you can make Posh Spice’s tits stand up like
that
(thanks, Isaac Newton, your work here is done). So tell me, boffins, whose idea was it exactly to skip past the Making Chemo Bearable module and instead goof around growing human ears on the backs of mice? Or is this some sort of reverse-
Weird Science
experiment to create a hideous troll of a woman who’ll actually consider getting off with one of you geeks? Because, well done, it looks like it’s working. Get your lab coat. You’ve pulled.’

CHAPTER 11

Getting wiggy with it

August 2008

As cancer experiences go, I’m not convinced I’ll have one quite as memorable as my first wig fitting. I’m rather entertained by the fact that I keep calling it a wig ‘fitting’, actually. That makes it sound like buying a wedding dress, when actually the two experiences couldn’t be more different. In one, your mum cries while you spend an hour trying on a frock you’ll wear for twelve hours. In the other, you cry with laughter while you spend fifteen minutes trying on a wig that you might have to wear for twelve months. The only similarity is showing off in front of a mirror although, again, in one experience your reflection looks as good as it ever will, and in the other your’re staring back at Rod Stewart.

On the NHS, you’re entitled to an acrylic wig, paying a prescription fee of about £60 (human-hair wigs bought privately can cost anything upwards of £1,000). It was never really my intention to go down the acrylic route, but I figured I’d take what I’m entitled to and see how I get on with it. Plus there’s a tiny, foolishly optimistic part of me that thinks that
since
I’ve not lost any hair yet, it might just hang on in there, and that I’ll never need a wig. Probably the same part of my brain that thought they’d got it wrong about the breast cancer. If needs be, though, I’m perfectly prepared to throw some money at the problem (the Louboutins can wait) and buy myself a real hair wig from a specialist shop, but for now I’d rather not have to think about it.

The NHS being the NHS, there was zero sense of style in the process. Instead, P and I were ushered into a hospital back room the size of a stationery cupboard by a disapproving little man with surprisingly small feet. The stationery cupboard had very high shelves displaying mannequin heads with truly awful hairdos that Wig Man had to stand on a chair to reach. (Wig Man is, by the way, completely bald – I wonder if he tries on the wigs when nobody’s looking?) The lower shelves were home to an ancient-looking radio buried among lots of boxes containing wigs that had been ordered for other patients. I had a sneaky look and noticed that most of them were grey – another reminder of the lottery-winning odds of getting The Bullshit at my age.

Wig Man handed me a catalogue and told me to point out the styles that appealed to me most. I was tempted to show him a curly black wig reminiscent of The Scousers, but I feared this wasn’t a man to be joking with. (Which, of course, made it even more impossible for P and me to stifle our laughter when ‘Getting Jiggy With It’ came on the radio.) I pointed out a couple of bobs and one or two longer styles to give him an idea of what I would be after, and he pulled down a handful of wigs from the top shelf, sat me in front of the mirror and combed back my hair so it wouldn’t show beneath the wigs I was trying on.

Oddly, Wig Man referred to each wig as though it were an actual person (‘She’s too square for you, try this – her style is
much
more suited to your face shape’), but then I guess a little craziness is permitted when you spend your life in a hospital cupboard listening to Crap FM with only mannequin heads for company. Anyway, after quickly realising that the longer wigs made me look a bit like the lead singer from The Darkness, I tried a bob with a parting and fringe a bit like my usual hair, only fuller. And, to be fair, I was pleasantly surprised at how natural it (sorry,
she
) felt for an acrylic wig. But – let’s be frank, here – I was still staring back at me in a wig.

Once you’ve chosen your design, you fiddle about with swatches until you’ve found the colour that most resembles your own, then go back in again once your order has arrived. If you like it (sorry, I mean
her
) you hand over your £60, then take your wig to a hairdresser who’ll hopefully be able to cut it into a style that’s a bit more contemporary. I’m hoping that, when I finally settle on a wig I like (and, let’s be honest, I’m not going to find it on the NHS) I can persuade a fabulous Covent Garden hairdresser to style it, so I can avoid going to some dreadful wig-cutting-for-the-over-fifties place called ‘Hair To Stay’ or ‘Curl Up & Dye’.

*

IT STARTED WITH
the pubes.

And, in cancer’s trademark spoilsport fashion, it happened on an otherwise glorious day. Finally able to be left on my own after the first batch of chemo, I was basking in the emancipation of feeling even slightly better after having been so ill. (Just to clarify, feeling good when you’re having cancer treatment is different to the normal feeling good. You’re not up for the usual nights in the pub, you don’t look so hot and you get pretty knackered after, well, most things. But none of that makes it any less brilliant.)

So I took my chirpy self out for a walk up the road to buy
a
Frappuccino, wearing my look-at-me Mickey Mouse-emblazoned hoodie. Even walking along my street felt better than it ever had. There I was, walking to the local café like a normal person, having seen off Chemo 1 and looking ahead to the next cycle knowing exactly what was in store. I must have looked like the local crazy, thinking about it. Your average Londoner isn’t that comfortable with the sight of a wonky-boobed, grinning idiot with a spring in her step, as one woman demonstrated by looking me up and down in horror as we passed on the street. ‘What you don’t realise, love,’ I thought to myself, ‘is that the fool you’ve just walked past is actually an amazing woman.’ Then I quickly chastised myself for being so damn cocky and empowered. Apparently cancer was turning me into Germaine Greer.

The shitty thing about cancer (not the only shitty thing, obviously, but it’s pretty shitty nonetheless) is that it’ll sneak up on you and piss all over your chips the precise moment you think you’re finally in control of it. And so, later that same day, I found myself lying in bed with an embarrassingly musical arse and nagging constipation pains (a problem resolved by breaking the World Prune Eating record), and wondering just how long it would be before I felt sexy again. And then I went to the toilet and (cue chip-pissing) looked down to discover that a handful of pubes had come out on the loo roll.

‘Shit,’ I exclaimed, startled at the discovery. ‘And so it begins.’

I had read that pubes are often the first hairs to go and, in all truth, their falling out was hardly an unwelcome side-effect. It was just what the pube-shedding symbolised: next, it would be the hair on my head. I dragged myself back to bed and told P the news. ‘Why do these things have to
happen
?’ I whinged, and promptly burst into tears. And, to my surprise, so did he.

It might have been my hair there on the Andrex, but that didn’t mean that cancer’s uninvited consequences were only having an impact on one person. Because once again I was reminded that this wasn’t just happening to me; it was happening to
us
. P may not have been wired up to the drugs or experiencing the side-effects or seeing his pubes come out in clumps, but it was clear that he was feeling every bit of it. Arguably more so, thanks to the added frustration of being forced to play spectator, unable to do a single sodding thing about it. Having to watch the person you love go through that kind of stuff must be a horrible, helpless position to be in. But being married to a man who not only understood The Bullshit but felt it all too and, better still, didn’t treat me any differently because of it was a pretty special thing.

It’s an unusual position to find yourself in, lurching between Major Cancer Event and vapid nothingness. It’s like lying on your back in a field, trying to catch sight of a shooting star – for ages, it’s agonisingly dull, but then along comes a dazzling streak of light and then there you are again, without a schedule, waiting around for who knows how long. And that’s another of the shitty things about cancer (expect to read that sentence a lot): just how utterly boring it can get. As small mercies go, at least my tumour had the good sense to show up in time for Wimbledon, a summer of cricket, the Olympics and the start of the football season.

On one otherwise dull weekday while P and Dad watched golf on TV, I stood eating lemon curd from the jar and staring out of the kitchen window, worrying that, with so little going on, I’d never again have anything interesting to
blog
about. I found myself willing something to happen – and there’s the fatal error. Because, when I went into the bedroom to change out of my hooded sweater, I pulled it over my head and with it came a clump of my hair.

Despite my optimistic hope that my hair would stick around, deep down I guess I always knew that this day would come. But that doesn’t mean it came as any less of a shock. Cue hysterical crying. P and Dad ran in to see what was up – how lucky that two of my favourite boys were around to give me a cuddle (Dad) and instinctively prise the hair from my hands and flush it down the loo (P). The tears continued for a long time, but once I’d got over the shock, I realised that it wasn’t so much the hair loss I was crying about, but more the fact that I could have been so bloody cretinous to think there might be a chance – however small – of getting away with it; of this not happening to me. I hate being wrong at the best of times, but that dumb denial really took the cake.

So there it was. The hair loss had begun. And while it wasn’t a horribly massive – or even noticeable – clump of hair that came out, it was still enough to know for certain that this was the beginning of the part I had feared most. Declaring my head out of bounds to anyone around me, I was overly cautious for the remainder of the week, desperate to retain as much hair as possible before my next chemo session. No longer would I rub my hair with a towel, or comb through conditioner in the bath. Where I’d usually have washed it most days, now I was letting my hair go without its usual application of shampoo. To my mind, greasy locks were infinitely preferable to a Bobby Charlton comb-over.

But even comb-overs need washing occasionally and so, three days before my second chemo, I gave it a go. I ran a
bath
, lit a few candles, put on some chirpy tunes and set to it. I stuck to all the cancer hair-care rules (super-gentle massaging, pH-balanced shampoo, lukewarm water). I even allowed myself to think for a second that I’d got away with it. But when it came to the drying (low temperature, slow speed, wide-tooth comb, yadda yadda), that was where it all unravelled. Literally.

Even when drying without the necessary combing (if I’d have left my hair to dry on its own I’d have ended up looking like Gene Wilder, and that’s worse than bald), hairs were flying right off my head. Run a comb through it, and they were coming out even easier. Foolish as it may now seem, I carried on drying and combing as little as I could get away with, figuring that for as long as I had hair, I wanted it to look as good as it could. But still it thinned and thinned, covering my back, my shoulders, the floor, the bedspread and filling the baggy left cup of my bra. It was e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.

Imagining P’s reaction to our new bedroom carpet, I set about scooping it up and, despite having watched as it all fell out, I couldn’t get over the amount I collected. In fact, I was so surprised by it, that I saved the shotput-sized hairball and put it on the bathroom window-sill so I could later show it to P. Just a couple of days previous I could get away with running a comb through my hair. Now, I could barely stand in a breeze.