The C-Word (20 page)

‘You’re not kidding,’ I replied.

‘Honestly, don’t worry. You’ll be pleased you did it,’ she said.

And so, in typical, prematurely panicking fashion, I immediately brushed aside any hope of end-of-chemo celebrations and set to fretting about therapy instead, even before I’d made an appointment.

‘Why can’t I just enjoy the moment?’ I said to P in bed that night. ‘I thought we’d be cracking open the champagne tonight, but instead I’m worrying about what’s next.’

‘That’s pretty much your nature though, isn’t it, babe?’ he said, correctly.

‘But it’s like I’m a masochist or something. It’s like I’m dead-set on pissing on my own bonfire.’

‘Can you stop being so hard on yourself please?’ P pleaded. ‘I mean, let’s be honest – there’s a shit few days coming up, but after that things are going to get better.’

‘Hmpf,’ I exhaled.

‘Come off it. They
are
. And going to therapy is a step in the right direction. It’s a good thing. It’s all part of the cure.’

‘You’re always the sodding voice of reason, aren’t you?’ I whinged, approaching my descent into the bitch-mode that came with feeling so depressingly unwell.

‘I am, yeah,’ he said. ‘So you’d better bloody listen to me.’

The subsequent few days were predictably hellish. The accumulative build-up of the drugs in my body had
restricted
my movement so much that I was confined to my bedroom, feeling like more of a cancer patient than ever with P and my folks again peering down at me with pity in their eyes, and Mum having to help me to the toilet every time I needed to go. With little voice to shout with and zero energy to make my own way out of bed, I’d knock on the wall above the headboard or the door beside the bed whenever I needed something, and someone would come skipping in.

‘We should have got you a bell to ring,’ Mum said.

‘You’d have been sick of the sound of it,’ I whimpered.

Dad adopted his usual position, curled up beside me for our now-routine private father-daughter chats and as much of a cuddle as I could manage, and we’d natter into the night about family and football and whatever we could think of that was a world away from The Bullshit. ‘Can we still do this even when you’re not ill, doofus?’ he asked.

‘Damn right. I’ll be sitting on your knee even when I’m fifty,’ I promised him.

Physically, Chemo 6 was undoubtedly worse than Chemo 5 had been. The accrued level of toxic liquids pumping their way around my useless limbs made even the simplest movement – turning over in bed, lifting a cup of tea – feel like a punishing endurance test. But this round, at least, the realisation that I wouldn’t be having to endure it all over again in three weeks’ time made it infinitely easier to deal with mentally. So even though it felt like my legs were breaking and I was looking progressively more like Fester Addams, in a funny way, it didn’t matter half as much. Because, as I said to Mum, Dad and Jamie in a triumphant text message on my way home from the hospital: CHEMO IS OVER.

CHAPTER 22

I got my head checked

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve crossed the line. Turned to the dark side. I am now a woman in therapy. Actually, they don’t call it ‘therapy’ at my hospital. It’s ‘counselling’. But since I’m not fond of either of those words, I’m going to call it Brain Training instead. A bit like on the Nintendo DS, but in this version they don’t make you do maths, count syllables or draw kangaroos.

Clearly, I went into this with very little knowledge of therapy. The little I do know I’ve learned from Tony Soprano, and I’m not convinced he’s the best example of how to act. Even after this week’s session, I’m still not sure how much I know about therapy. But now, at least, I don’t think it really matters. Because what is there to know, other than whether or not you like it, and whether or not you think it can do you any good? As it goes, I’m sold already. Although I must admit that while I was sitting in the waiting room, any excuse to do a runner would have done: I was having a bad wig day; I didn’t have any tissues; my chipped nails would give the wrong impression. In the end I took my mind off it by reading the posters in the waiting room and, just as I spotted one calling for patients to judge a poetry competition and not-so-surreptitiously balanced on my chair to
take
a photo of the contact details (i.e., just as I reached new lows of spoddy and uncool), in walked my therapist. Let’s call him Mr Marbles, since it’s his job to find them.

Mr Marbles steadfastly ignored my pleasantries about what kind of week he’d had as we walked along the oddly familiar corridor to his office. This déjà vu suddenly made sense when I heard the instantly recognisable sound of Crap FM coming from the cupboard-like room several doors down. A sneaky look as I walked by left me surprised to discover that the figure in there, surrounded by boxes of grey syrups and tapping her feet to Destiny’s Child, was not, in fact, Wig Man, but an equally bored-looking and lacking-in-job-satisfaction Wig Woman. I giggled on my way into the Brain Training room, then stopped when I realised it might make me look too jovial and unworthy of free NHS therapy.

The next thing I knew it was fifty minutes later, I had a handful of crumpled tissues, redder eyes than I went in with and was listening to Mr Marbles read out the notes he’d written throughout the seemingly lightning-speed session. By heck, you don’t half get going when someone gives you the opportunity to talk about yourself. Poor sod could hardly get a peep in. When I did finally give him the chance to speak, though, every single thing he said further convinced me that the Brain Training is a good idea.

Just like everyone else I’ve encountered at the hospital, Mr Marbles is brilliant. Again, I felt that now-familiar, wonderful, über-professional mix of total understanding and a means-business determination to help. He’s sensible and serious, but not to the point of being unable to crack a smile. He puts you at immediate ease, doesn’t pass judgement and never lets his face give away what he’s thinking. Plus he wears corduroy slacks. Of course he wears corduroy slacks. I’d have been disappointed if he didn’t wear corduroy slacks.

During the session, we spoke about survival instincts and concerns and expectations and outlooks and fears. I talked endlessly, sobbed and apologised a fair bit. He nodded, scribbled notes in an orange file and revealed that the best-known way to feel instantly better is to make sure your husband buys you a pair of Louboutins. (He also identified humour as one of my coping strategies. I suspect it’s more sarcasm.) The whole coping-strategy shizzle is a funny one, though. Not least because the words ‘coping strategy’ sound like something David Brent would say. But, semantics aside, I reckon that, in a roundabout way, I’d already realised that I had a few coping strategies up my sleeve. I’d just been calling them ‘projects’, is all. (Yep, we’re back to the old blogging/baking/kitten equation.)

Naturally, that conversation backed me into a better-tell-him-about-the-blog corner. And so I did. I told him how often I posted, the kind of things I blog about, what writing it has meant to me, how it’s helped my family and friends understand my experience of breast cancer and how it’s made me realise that I want to keep writing, even when The Bullshit is a distant memory. (I didn’t call it The Bullshit, by the way. Probably best to save the expletives until session three or four.) Mr Marbles asked how people had responded to the blog, whether I’d ever reread it from the beginning (I haven’t) and how I think it’d make me feel if I were reading, as opposed to writing, it. I started to worry that he’d ask for the web address, too, but (a) I’m sure that’d be against some sort of Counsellor’s Code and (b) after spending all day listening to people’s neuroses, the last thing he’ll want to do when he gets home is read 60,000 words of the same. The man’s got telly to watch and wine to drink and slacks to iron.

*

AS I’D MOANED
to P before my therapy appointment, my frustration was growing over my inability to stop peering round corners, trying to guess when the next shit-pie would come hurtling towards me. I simply couldn’t – or wouldn’t allow myself to – pause for a moment to bask in the glorious achievement of having seen off an almost impossibly traumatic, exhausting, immune-system-destroying, tumour-killing, total git of a course of chemo. Because, God knows, that was my time to lap it up. Instead, I brushed all of that aside in favour of fretting about another issue altogether, and forcing my husband to stay up until 2.30 a.m. the night before therapy so we could talk it out.

One of the main reasons (
the
main reason?) I asked for a therapy referral was that I was worrying about the process of moving into a life of non-treatment and eventual remission; specifically, a life that was very different from the one I left behind when I heard the words ‘signs consistent with breast cancer’. A significant concern stemmed from the fact that, pre-Bullshit, everything for P and I was geared towards having a baby. But suddenly, thanks to the cancer-creating effects of oestrogen on my body, everything was geared towards us
not
having a baby. As I’ve mentioned before, it wasn’t as though P and I had never before been forced to consider a childless life; it’s something we’ve given more thought to than most. But now, knowing that the no-kids issue would no longer be an ‘if’, it created another hurdle for us to negotiate, and I spent more time than I care to admit worrying about what to do next.

I know it was rather a daft thing to be fretting about given the circumstances, but I bemoaned the deviation from my carefully scripted Grand Life Plan. And, in turn, I was frustrated with myself for allowing such a ridiculous thing to bother me so much when, surely, the bigger worry at
hand
should have been the fertility issue itself? My tendency to plan had gone too far. I mean, hell, not even getting breast cancer could teach me that it was impossible to map out my life – which was why I needed a therapist to kick me up the arse instead.

As I explained to Mr Marbles, I wasn’t worried about whether or not I’d be content and fulfilled in the future – once the health stuff fell into place, I knew I’d have all the right ingredients for a very happy life. It was more a case of worrying that, if P and I weren’t going to have kids (and with adoption agencies hardly gasping to add a cancer patient to their books), then what, exactly,
were
we going to do? What was in the Grand Life Plan now? And I wasn’t alone in thinking like this. In our 2.30 a.m. talk-athon, P revealed that he had been having much the same thoughts (match made in heaven or what?).

‘It’s not just about us though, is it?’ I said to P.

‘How do you mean?’ he replied, puzzled.

‘Well, your mum and dad,’ I continued. ‘
My
mum and dad! Maybe it’s more of a shame for them than it is for us? They must have expected grandchildren, right?’

‘God, yeah, of course. And our mates will have expected it from us, too. They’re all at it, after all.’

We were in that happy stage of our lives where the people around us were endlessly announcing engagements, weddings, pregnancies and christenings, and P and I are very good at the business of being genuinely interested, enthusiastic and delighted on their behalves. (Yeah, we’re lovely like that. We should hire ourselves out. Rent-a-Reaction.)

But now there were no kids on the table, we didn’t want people to be anxiously anticipating how we’d react to their news, or for them to feel they had to water down their joy
because
of us. Yes, with every pregnancy that was announced there might be a wistful window into what could have been. Yes, it might hurt and we might shed a few tears over it behind closed doors. But we’re not the kind of people who’d ruin anyone’s fun with the unfortunate reality of our situation. So, to prepare ourselves and be ready at a moment’s notice to dish out all the right handshakes, back-slaps, hugs and congratulations, we set to making a mental list of all the friends and family we were expecting to announce baby news over the next few years, and in what order. It may have been crazy, but it made us feel better in that moment. Because, when you’ve had as huge a shock in your lives as P and I had, it’s an instinctive reaction to anticipate where the next one’s coming from.

I wish I could tell you that our worrying stopped there, at the impending few years. But I’m assuming you know me better than that by now, so I might as well admit to the following conversation.

‘It’s the dinner parties I worry about,’ said P, now breaking into our stash of emergency Maltesers. ‘When all of our mates have kids and we don’t, will we have nothing to add to the conversation?’

‘You’re right, yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Like childcare and tuition fees and the latest toys.’

‘I just don’t want to stop being part of their lives because of this, you know? Because some people are defined by their children – like your parents and my parents. So I don’t want us to be defined by
not
having had them.’

‘And I don’t want anyone to patronise us because of it, either. I don’t want people to tilt their heads and say, “Ah. P and Lisa. Lovely couple. Couldn’t have kids. Shame.” Like that awful dinner party in
Bridget Jones’s Diary
or something.’

‘You know what pisses me off?’ continued P, his cheeks puffed out with honeycomb balls. ‘How some people used to say to me, “Oh you wouldn’t understand until you were married” – that kind of stuff. What? So I wouldn’t understand what it’s like to love someone so much that they’re your whole world, and you’d be completely devastated by their loss? It’s fucking ridiculous.’

‘But nobody would say that to us about kids, surely?’

‘Hmpf, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve heard that sentence a couple of times before,’ continued P, increasingly agitated. ‘And I never –
never
– want to hear it again.’

To put it simply, we just didn’t want people feeling sorry for us. Because there was nothing to feel sorry for and because, despite everything, I don’t know many people with as happy a relationship as me and P. And, kids or no kids, that’s quite the lucky break.