The C-Word (14 page)

And then there’s the less wonderful stuff. For every few people in the office who smiled and winked and said hello, there seemed to be another who completely ignored me. One even stared straight through me when I looked him in the eye and said ‘hi’. I appreciate it’s difficult for some people to know what to say, knowing what they now know about me. And I’m definitely not expecting people I don’t know to suddenly start being all friendly because they feel they ought to. But being ignored by someone you’d normally talk to every day is a pretty shitty thing, and makes you feel a bit like a leper.

Then, after my cab ride back from the office, a similar thing happened – I arrived home at the same moment as my normally-very-chatty upstairs neighbour who, upon seeing me, couldn’t get away fast enough, using a poorly improvised cold as her excuse (which didn’t stop her going out for a jog later on).

Thankfully the people who matter still treat me exactly as they always did – actually, better than they always did, judging by this weekend’s barrage of birthday love. Which, of course,
had
me crying even more – several times, actually. Reading cards, opening presents (not least the scouse wig I was bought, but that may have been for different reasons), during a show at the theatre, when my family and friends left my flat after a lovely afternoon cake-fest … you name it, I cried at it. All my talk of booze-free, tame celebrations might have been true, but it didn’t make my twenty-ninth any less fantastic than any other birthday. In fact, I dare say it was better than my last few birthdays put together.

So why all the tears? Having spent most of today thinking about it (to the point where my brain hurts), I think the reasons are three-fold. (1) I’m overwhelmed. Since The Bullshit came along, my life has had to be a bit slower paced. So perhaps the emotion-packed excitement of the last few days was almost a bit too much to handle. (2) Tiredness. I’m like a baby at the moment – let me have the requisite sleep and food, and I’m a little angel. Allow me to get tired or hungry, and you’ll wish I’d never been born. (3) Fear. All these wonderful things and all these wonderful people … it’s something else, I tells ya. My life is the stuff that dreams are made of. And while I wouldn’t change any of it for the world (apart from the obvious), every now and then it reminds me how utterly, completely, wake-up-in-the-night
terrified
I am that The Bullshit has come along to put it all in jeopardy. How fucking dare it.

*

ONLY WHEN YOU’VE
got cancer and it’s your birthday is it acceptable for your friend’s husband to buy you knickers. It’s a little-known present-giving loophole that Tills’ husband Si took advantage of when they handed over my birthday gifts. And they weren’t just any old knickers, oh no. They were the Best Knickers In The World: a white
thong
with ‘Mrs Dave Grohl’ on the front. (P loves them, as you can imagine.)

The special treatment that had been threatening to wane post-diagnosis was suddenly back on my birthday, and a morning of call-taking, present-opening and bouquet-receiving left me exhausted. Tills suggested that a method of breast-cancer-payback would be to exploit people’s kindness for all it was worth, and start blogging about how Miu Miu shoes and Chloé handbags would really aid my recovery. She was right, of course, but not about the exploiting bit – recent studies have conclusively proved that being bought designer gear is the quickest way to stave off cancer cells, and you can’t argue with that.

It’s a dreadful thing to admit, but I was kind of getting used to all the thoughtfulness I was being shown. Not that the people around me aren’t normally kind to me, you understand (I think we’ve already established how fortunate I am on the friends-and-family front), but I feared that it was going to turn me into a horribly spoilt, me-me-me brat like one of those awful kids on MTV’s
My Super Sweet 16
.

Earlier in my birthday week I had spent a gloriously happy afternoon giggling on the sofa and watching that very show with my brilliant friend Busby. It inspired us. During the course of the show we devised a plan to make my birthday next year, well, super sweet. Party-wise, my twenty-ninth birthday celebrations had to be a little on the tame side (theatre, restaurant, tea and cake), but then, what was so special about turning twenty-nine anyway? Thirty is the big one. And in the hope that, by the time I hit the big 3–0, I’d have a lot more to celebrate than just a new decade, Busby and I stayed true to our Virgoan selves by planning my shindig WELL in advance. With a little help from the pampered princesses on MTV.

‘Right then,’ said Busby, ‘there are rules to adhere to if you’re having a Super Sweet birthday party.’

‘Do elaborate,’ I replied, dunking my ginger biscuit in my sixth brew of the day.

‘For starters, you’re going to have to look like
that
,’ she said, pointing at a house-sized teenager, bursting out of the seams of her hideous pink frock and whinging that she didn’t think her parents would buy her the right car.

‘Looks like my folks will need to remortgage their house to buy me a new Audi as well, then.’

‘Only if it comes wrapped in a huge pink bow,’ said Busby. ‘And at some point, it seems, you’ll need to have a massive strop at your mum.’

‘After which she’ll cancel my credit card and I’ll call her a bitch in front of a shop full of people,’ I concluded.

‘Oh, and your dad—’

‘You mean
Daddy
,’ I corrected.

‘Yes!
Daddy
. Well, he’ll be responsible for booking a performer – and, obviously, anyone less than P Diddy would just be, like, totally lame,’ continued Busby, now in an American accent. ‘And you’ll have to invite your school crush and give him access to the VIP area! But then he’ll make out with another girl and you’ll get security to throw her out.’

‘And he’ll come back grovelling when he catches sight of my super-fly Audi,’ I added.

I missed this type of daft banter that comes from idle Saturdays on a sofa with your mates or Friday afternoons in the office. It wasn’t that The Bullshit had put a stop to me acting up with the likes of Busby, but how much sweeter it would have been if I hadn’t been wearing pyjamas and a wig. The cancer-centred grind of the past couple of months
had
been enough to make me forget how good all of this stuff could be.

Not that it’s difficult for me to forget stuff at the best of times. I’m known among my family and friends for two things: always being late and having a terrible memory. I forget names and dates (an affliction I keep on top of with a ridiculously organised diary and a propensity to write lists), important tasks, whole conversations, nights out, childhood memories … you name it, I’ve forgotten it. I can barely remember anything I learned at school, college or uni. (Except to only use a colon after a complete statement. And never begin a sentence with ‘and’. Oh.)

Oddly, the same amnesia applied to chemo. Despite having been through it twice, I still couldn’t remember exactly what it was going to be like. So I was bricking it even more at the thought of Round Three, which was looming over me like an apocalyptic cloud.

CHAPTER 15

Old red eyes is back

In chemo on Friday, one of the nurses commented that I looked ‘very glam’. If only she could see me now: I look like a smackhead. The first couple of days post-chemo went pretty much as I’d come to expect. My folks may have hit it on the head when likening that first night to watching someone in torture – they’re now convinced that chemo drugs are used for that purpose, and I’m not going to disagree. Ask me what you like in the midst of those few hours and I’ll tell you
anything
to make it stop.

Anyway, I’m through the worst of it again now. Not that it’s made me feel any chirpier, mind. I’m three chemos down, which means I’ve got three to go. And while everyone keeps going on about how brilliant it is that I’m halfway through, what I can’t believe is that I’m ONLY halfway through, dammit. And by being ‘through the worst of it’, what I mean is that I feel a tiny, tiny fraction better than I did a couple of days ago. I don’t feel as sick now, I’ve stopped hallucinating (this time, as well as the now-standard feeling that my feet and hands are expanding, I was convinced I had a lump growing beneath my left nostril), and I’m definitely standing up straighter whenever I have to
move
anywhere (not that the being-accompanied-to-the-loo days have passed yet; I’m hoping that’s a treat I can look forward to tomorrow – that and a nice, private number two once my course of constipation-inducing pills is over).

But boy, they’re right about the tiredness symptoms being accumulative. I feel like a frail old woman. P ran me a lovely bath yesterday with posh Molton Brown bubbles and candles all around the tub, but all I found myself craving was one of those old-person baths with a door in the side that fills up around you and saves you collapsing on your husband when you climb out of it. Sheesh, it’s a good job we live in a ground-floor flat, or I’d be scouring the ads in the Sunday supplements for a Stannah stairlift too.

The best thing about getting past the first four days, though, is not having to sink a handful of pills every few hours. The steroids do their job (if ‘doing their job’ is not only to make me feel less sick, but to gain weight at a speed that would impress Mr Creosote), but they end up starving you of any decent sleep at a time when you’ve never needed it more. For me, that means lying awake and thinking about things that I wouldn’t normally consider. Like getting a tattoo, for instance.

A few days ago, I received a referral letter to see the radiotherapy department about the course of pain-in-the-arse sunburn (actually, make that pain-in-the-arm-and-tit sunburn) that I’ll be starting in December once the chemo is done with. And along with the letter came an information sheet telling me what radiotherapy is all about. It all seemed pretty standard – daily visits for six or so weeks, lying on a computer-operated bed, burned skin, feeling tired, yadda yadda – but there was one thing I hadn’t bargained for: the tattoos. Now there’s a thing I hadn’t realised you could get on the NHS.

Apparently, they give you three small tattoos (dark blue dots) to ensure the radiotherapy is beamed at exactly the same area
each
time, and to guarantee they don’t administer rays to the same place again in future, should The Bullshit come back. Granted, I’m hardly set to become the Amy Winehouse of breast cancer, but even so, I’m miffed. Because if I’ve got to have a tattoo, don’t you think I should be getting them out of choice, rather than stupid cancer-dictated necessity?

So, despite the fact that I’ve barely considered having one before, I’ve now started thinking I might get one done to celebrate getting through my treatment. Now’s probably not the time to be making these kind of decisions, but who knows, perhaps after I’m through with The Bullshit, I might go mental and get a topless girl drawn onto my upper arm. Or join up the blue dots into a pocket-style tattoo, à la Winehouse. Because if The Bullshit is ballsy enough to make a recurrence in the future, the radiographers can damn well work around my new body art. And, for the record, if it ever does come back again, I’m going all out and having ‘oh for fuck’s sake’ tattooed across my forehead. Once round The Bullshit is more than enough, ta very much.

*

AS AN ADDITION
to the lovely Jo Malone treats he’d bought me for my birthday, P also handed me a tiny parcel. ‘It’s just something daft,’ he explained. ‘But I want this to become your new mantra.’

I tore off the wrapping, and pulled out a fridge magnet upon which was a Winston Churchill quote:
Never, never, never give up
.

‘Promise me?’ asked P.

‘I promise, babe,’ I said. ‘Of course I promise.’

It was a promise that Dad reminded me of the morning after my third chemo.

‘I need you to do something for me,’ he said, curled up beside me as I lay in bed, a shivering, dejected mess ravaged by the treatment that was supposedly making me better. ‘I need you to take the advice on the fridge magnet that P got you. I know how difficult this is for you right now …’

‘No you don’t,’ I shot back.

‘You’re right, shitface. I don’t.’ (Even in chemo’s most miserable moments, Dad and I would still refer to each other with our usual, less-than-flattering terms of endearment.) ‘But you’ve come this far, Lis, and we’re all so proud of you for doing it. Just please –
please
– promise me you’ll keep on going.’

‘Oh-kay, doofus,’ I mumbled reluctantly.

Being halfway through my schedule of chemotherapy brought with it its own issues: on the one hand, everybody’s congratulations on how far I’d come allowed my mind to wander to what might happen afterwards, and how I might celebrate when The Bullshit was done (the getting-a-tattoo plan had not gone down all that well with my nearest and dearest). But on the other, being three chemos in meant that I was all too familiar with the drill – and the regular hospital trips were starting to piss me off as much as the treatment itself.

I’d begin each Chemo Friday by picking a fight with P out of sheer tantrum-inducing frustration. Yelling at him had become my coping strategy:

‘You’re seriously wearing
that
T-shirt?’

‘What do you mean you’re going to buy a paper? You’re supposed to talk to
me
, not gen up on the US Open.’

‘I left that light on for a
reason
– now just fucking leave everything alone, will you?’

‘Look, are you walking two steps behind me or
with
me?’

This time, I even stormed out of the flat and attempted to hail a taxi on the street, despite our minicab being scheduled to arrive a mere ten minutes later. It was mean and it was irrational, but it was my reaction to having to turn up to an appointment that I knew would later make me feel – and look – like death. By the time we’d reached the hospital, I’d have wiped away my tears, reapplied my mascara and apologised to P. I wanted him to see me the way the chemo nurses saw me – cheery and fearless and impossibly lovely, not some tetchy bitch who shouts at her husband.