The C-Word (18 page)

I can hear what you’re thinking. I’m almost there … nearly done it … just one more chemo to go. But that’s not just easy for you to say, it’s also no comfort whatsoever. It just serves as a reminder that I’ve got to endure this hell again. ‘You’re almost there’ is indeed a nice thing to say, but it’s also the wrong thing to say. I’m aware how much of a bitch that makes me sound, particularly to all the many people who’ve said that very thing to me lately. (At the expense of whinging even more, this warts-and-all honesty is difficult when you have a compulsive need to
feel
liked. Last night, unable to sleep, I lay awake drafting letters in my head to all the people I’ve liked but, I suspect, didn’t like me back, asking them what it was about me that made them keep their distance. Does everyone who has a life-threatening illness do this kind of soppy, confessional soul-searching, I wonder?)

But on with the bitchiness. I’ve had a similar problem with all the messages I’ve received while I’ve been laid up this past week. It’s a damn good job I was too sick to pick up my phone until last night because, in my state of mind over the last few days, I don’t think anyone would have liked the sarcastic replies. (‘You’ve been quiet lately, how’s things?’ ‘How’s things? Well, I’ve still got cancer, I’m in such excruciating pain that I can barely move, I’m suffocating from constant hot flushes, I can’t swallow for lumps all over my tongue and, despite being twenty-nine, my mum is having to take me to the loo, which I’m going to pretty often thanks to the fact that I’ve got the raging shits. So, yeah, things are pretty peachy, thanks.’)

I don’t like reacting like this, I don’t like P and my folks seeing me react like this, and I don’t like you reading about me reacting like this. I like to keep as many people as possible sheltered from this stuff, in just the same way that I don’t let anyone other than my immediate family see me during my sickest weeks. I’m worried that the sight of me looking like a cross between Voldemort and the Albino Monk will taint people’s perception of me in the future, however better I manage to make myself look after The Bullshit is over. My folks have no choice about whether or not they see me that way because, well, they made me. And P signed up for it with the ‘support and comfort each other through good times and through troubled times’ vow (more fool him). But nobody else should have to be around me when I’m in that state, be it the bitchiness or the sarcasm or the assisted toilet trips or the rotten way I look. So, in weeks like the
last
one, I tend to hide myself away. And, given my aforementioned reaction to innocent ‘How are you doing?’ messages and ‘You’re almost there’ encouragements, you’re probably relieved that I do.

*

OF ALL THE
cancer side-effects I’d expected, what I hadn’t bargained for was it turning me into a horrible person. But by the time I’d done with Chemo 5, it was more than just the
sight
of myself that I couldn’t stand. Ordinarily, I like to think I’m a rather chirpy girl. I smile a lot, I have good manners, I’m nice to people and I avoid confrontation at all costs. But, just as it had ripped the locks from my follicles, chemo seemed to be shredding my good nature, and my mounting frustration with The Bullshit wasn’t just being taken out on my pillow – now, other people were getting the brunt of it, too.

Perhaps I’d just run out of cancer pleasantries, and reached the end of my tether when it came to glib conversations. Perhaps I’d maxed out on them at the wedding. Whatever it was, I no longer had even the tiniest speck of tolerance for anything that had even the slightest whiff of it’ll-be-okay about it. It might be okay in the end, but it wasn’t okay now, dammit. I didn’t want to be told that there was just one chemo to go. I didn’t want to be told how far I’d come, or how well I’d done. All I wanted was to let the world know how shit all of this had been, and how hard done by I was feeling.

On top of all that, it was just starting to dawn on me that a lot of people I knew remained pretty ignorant about what having breast cancer meant for me. I’d had inklings before, after receiving a handful of puzzling, fancy-coming-out-
this
-weekend texts, but a conversation with Lil finally confirmed it.

‘So how was the launch party?’ I asked her about some boozy industry do that I’d also received an invitation to. ‘See any old faces?’

‘Yeah, a few,’ she replied. ‘It was pretty busy for a school night.’

‘Ooh, who?’ I asked, after which she reeled off a register-like list of ex-colleagues’ names. ‘Crikey, I’ve not seen any of them for ages. So what did you talk about?’

Knowing me as well as she does, Lil knew better than to assume my question meant anything other than ‘Did you talk about me?’, and she didn’t even flinch in giving me my answer.

‘Well, that’s weird actually,’ she began. ‘Everyone asked after you, of course, but I couldn’t believe how many of them were surprised when I told them you weren’t coming to the party.’

‘
What
?’ I gurned.

‘I know, right?’

‘But I’m an invalid! A
bald
invalid,’ I screeched, tugging at my wig for confirmation and getting agitated beneath my blanket. ‘Of course I’m not going to be at the bloody party – I only had chemo last week! Don’t they understand?’

With hindsight, I’d later come to realise that of course people didn’t understand. Why should they? After all, some folk can lead near-to-normal lives with The Bullshit. But I just wasn’t one of them, due to the highly aggressive nature of my Rich-Tea-biscuit-sized tumour that was
this
close to spreading further than my lymph nodes, and the Master Blaster of cancer treatments I was having to kick the shit out of its traces. (I still can’t quite believe, by the way, that the biscuit managed to wreak such undetected havoc for so
long
beneath my left nipple. Because, if my modest tits can disguise that, what the hell else is hidden in my body that I don’t know about? Spare change? An old boot? A family of refugees?) But in the heat of that conversation, I was just plain livid. Livid that I’d missed the party and – rather unfairly – livid that not everyone appreciated what that immediate post-chemo week involved.

‘They’re on another planet,’ said Lil, indulging me in my rage by playing along. ‘I wanted to say “don’t you get it?” but I didn’t bother. I mean, where do you start?’

And she was right. Where
do
you start? Because, despite my willingness to write chapter and verse of my cancer story online (which, of course, was hardly compulsory reading for anyone who’d ever come into contact with me), I actually didn’t talk about the details with very many people outside of my blog. I guess it was a combination of not wanting them to always equate me with cancer, and wondering whether they really wanted to hear about it in the first place. It’s that age-old thing of folk never really being interested in the answer to innocent, throw-away questions like ‘how’s things?’ or ‘how was your weekend?’

P, it turned out, was having precisely the same issues with the people around him. Throwing his bag onto the sofa in frustration after work one Monday, he let it be known. ‘I’m sick of getting into work on a Monday morning and having to lie about what kind of weekend I’ve had,’ he said. ‘I’m losing my patience with it. I always have to say “great, thanks” because nobody wants to hear “oh, I’ve been nursing my ill wife all weekend”, do they?’ The majority of P’s weekends (and weekdays, for that matter) had, of course, been every bit as shit as mine since The Bullshit chose to trespass on our lovely lives. (With the notable exception of Jamie and Leanne’s wedding, obviously. That
was
worth a hundred weekends.) P wasn’t being mean by lying to his colleagues; quite the opposite. Because he, like me, knew better than to tell people the real truth about how our weekend had been. Nobody wants that kind of answer.

As the kind of couple whose diaries used to be packed, it was pretty depressing for us to have had so little fun for so damn long. P and I had always thrived on our dinner meet-ups with mates, pub visits with colleagues and weekends with our family and, as much as we’re able to please ourselves without them, doing that with the added weight of The Bullshit does not a memorable few months make. I got pretty tearful about it one Friday night, sparked by my reply of ‘April, probably’ to an email that asked when I might next be out on the town.

‘Where has my normal life gone?’ I wailed to P. ‘It’s like a distant memory. I can’t even remember what it’s like to feel healthy.’

‘I know, darling,’ he said, cradling my bald head against his chest. ‘We used to have such wonderful weekends.’

‘And now you’ve got to go to work and lie about this one, too.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said P. ‘It is only Friday, after all.’

I craned my neck to look up at his face.

‘We could do this weekend
our
way,’ he suggested. ‘You know, with papers and telly and breakfast in bed. A lovely, quiet, normal weekend.’

‘You’re on,’ I said, shaking his hand to seal the deal. ‘We can call round at Tills and Si’s too.’

‘Absolutely,’ P said.

‘And then on Sunday let’s watch a film and order a curry.’

‘Perfect,’ he agreed.

‘And I’ll bake us a cake.’

‘Hang on, love,’ said P, taken aback by me apparently
volunteering
to set foot in the kitchen. ‘Let’s not get too carried away, eh?’

‘Oi,’ I shot back, slapping him on the arm. ‘I’m going to bake a cake this weekend – and you’re going to like it.’

I had been toying with the idea of baking for a few days, keen as I was to find something new to take my mind off the obvious. My nan had baked, and Mum too, but I’d always let the side down with my why-make-what-you-can-buy-in-M&S defence, and the London-specific excuses of being home later than everyone else. But now, with time on my hands and an appetite newly enhanced by steroids, baking seemed as good an option as any.

The newly domesticated me came as something of a surprise to everyone – not least P. The Old Me was happy to tell anyone who’d listen that our kitchen was purely P’s territory; New Me was emailing her mates for icing recipes and sending her husband to work with a different Tupperware (
Tupperware!
) of cakes every morning. But I guess a sudden change in the way you spend your time is pretty inevitable in light of a life-altering illness. A friend of Mum’s told me that, once her chemo had finished, she took up gardening, having spent her life swerving it – and stunned everyone in the process. But, she said, it just felt natural to her – as baking did to me.

One thing I could never have imagined feeling natural about, however, was the decision that P and I came to later that weekend. At no other time would he have let me get away with it, I’m sure, but with him at work the following Monday, I made a phone call that set in motion a plan to do something so completely out of character that I was certain it would freak out my friends even more than the breast cancer: I was going to get a kitten.

CHAPTER 20

Lonely hearts club

Well, I didn’t get a kitten, but I did get a bigger boob. An RSPCA Cat Woman (thankfully no PVC) came round to check out the flat and gave me the go-ahead to pick up my rescue kitten, but the little tyke’s gone and got a cold so it looks like the vet’s got to hang onto her until she’s had her treatment and I’ve had my final chemo. (And yes, thank you very much, I do see the irony in me having chosen a sick cat.)

Still, after this week’s hospital visit for the final part of my implant inflation, it might not be altogether a bad thing that I didn’t have a kitten crawling all over me and my painful left boob. And if you believe that, you’ve not been reading my blog long enough. In truth, the kitten – just like the baking and the blogging – has been a cheerful distraction from just how panicked, worried and want-to-run-away scared I am about the next chemo. And now she’s not able to come home yet, I’m back to fretting and crying uncontrollably. So that ‘might not be altogether a bad thing’ line is, of course, a load of toot. I’d much rather be crying about a kitten having jumped on my sore tit than the prospect of another horrific chemo, and facing up to the reality of the damage
it
’s done to me so far, physically and emotionally.

But back to business. The falsie is actually more tender than painful now, and no bloody wonder considering what it’s been put through. To compensate for the implant-shrinking effects of radiotherapy, Smiley Surgeon inflated it to a size slightly larger than my right one. Not to the point where anyone other than me, P and Smiley Surgeon (the only other man allowed to mess with my boobs) would notice, mind, but it still feels like I’ve got a bowling ball stuffed down the left side of my T-shirt.

This implant, however, won’t be sticking around for much longer and, to be honest, I’m glad. As brilliant as it is to have a lovely round boob and a killer cleavage again, it’s not at all comfortable. I can feel the plastic edge of the implant underneath my skin, and the valve attached to it that Smiley Surgeon uses for inflation doesn’t just dig in, but can be easily located by an ugly-looking bruise. But thankfully all of that will be a thing of the past in April when I have my next lot of surgery. At the same time as creating a new nipple, Smiley Surgeon will also replace my plastic boob with the Gold Standard of falsies: a silicone implant.

I was hoping it could all be done a bit sooner than April, but apparently I’m underestimating the effects of radiotherapy and how long it’ll take for me to recover from it. Smiley Surgeon has clearly been trying to make me realise this for the last three or four appointments I’ve had with him but, frankly, I’ve just not had the space in my head to deal with it. But with my final chemo tomorrow and radiotherapy not far off, I finally took in all the things he was saying about how tired, queasy and sore it was going to make me feel, and how it was going to take a fair few weeks of getting over before I’d be surgery-ready again.

I adore Smiley Surgeon. I’m so eager to please that I save my best brave face for my appointments with him, I look up to him as though he were a rock star and I hang on every last word he says. I love him. Not like
that
. It’s not a crush. I’m much more
goofy
than flirty when I’m around him – actually, I’m an embarrassing suck-up. And anyway, the love’s not just reserved for Smiley Surgeon, but also for his sidekick, Always-Right Breast Nurse. Batman and Robin have got nothing on these two – holy smoke, they’re incredible. So often, medical professionals know all the facts of a condition, but lack the emotional understanding of how to deal with their patients. Not these two. They’re the perfect mix of matter-of-fact and caring, and they always –
always
– hit the right note.