The C-Word (23 page)

When Pepsi & Shirlie come back, we fill our thirty-second conversation window with utter fluff, as they unstrap me from the leather bed (don’t get excited) and move the machines back to a position where I won’t headbutt them on the way out. I really like Pepsi & Shirlie. They’re young, spritely, up for a giggle and constantly taking the piss out of each other. But it isn’t like chemo, where you’ve got all day to natter with the nurses. With radio, you’re not in there long enough for a proper chat, so instead you end up with scattered nuggets of random information about each other. What I know about Pepsi & Shirlie so far is that they like to ask about the weather, that Shirlie’s going ice skating this week, that Pepsi prefers Gary but thinks Jason’s been looking hot recently, and that they both use their later shifts as an excuse to go late-night shopping. And in return, they know that my kitten scratched the hell out of my left hand when I tried to wet-wipe her, that I’d bought and wrapped all my Christmas presents by mid-November, that I agree on the Gary/Jason front and that I’ve ditched my wig in favour of headscarves.

That’s right, people. I’m scrapping the syrup. Or at least for the most part. You might think this an odd decision, but if I’ve learned one thing from having cancer it’s that you can’t always trust your opinions (hell, I’ve gone from animal-hater to cat-owner in the space of six months). It was all a bit of an accident, really, but by Monday it was clear that my wig needed washing (it only needs doing every three weeks, but then takes twenty-four to forty-eight hours to dry), so I had no choice but to go
without
it for the day. And, as I was pleasantly surprised to discover, I felt
far
less self-conscious wearing a headscarf than I ever had in my wig.

Actually I fibbed a bit back there. I did have a choice other than the headscarf: Wig 2 (aka Erika). I don’t think I’ve ever communicated just how much I’ve
loathed
wearing a wig. (See,
loathed.
In bold and everything.) I hate that wig every bit as much as I hate the cancer that necessitated it. Aside from the fact that it’s hugely unflattering, it’s also itchy, annoying, I’m constantly aware of it, it embarrasses me and, frankly, in certain lights it’s a bit on the ginger side. It’s like carrying Geri Halliwell around on my head all day. And imagine having to prop her up on your bathroom window-sill every evening, where she’ll freak you out when you get up in the night and be the first in-focus thing you see every morning. I’ve even stopped closing our bathroom door in the hope that Sgt Pepper might find it and claw it to pieces while I’m out.

Part of the reason I took the wig route in the first place was that I still wanted to feel desired. Early on in my wig-wearing days, I remember how chuffed I was when a man in the street appeared to check me out. Five months on, I fear I’ve even lost the desire to be desired, which is saying something given the fit boy on reception in radiotherapy. But oddly – when you consider the obvious, cancer-cards-on-the-table effects – there are vanity reasons behind the headscarf-wearing, too.

For one, I’m soon going to have short enough (or should that be long enough?) hair to be able to go without a wig or headscarf. And since I’ve had long locks all my life, I’ve got to learn to stop hiding behind my hair. (Translation: before I unveil my newborn-baby-chic hairdo, I need to get people used to seeing my moon face.) Then there’s the paranoia it’ll spare me: I’d rather people came to the cancer conclusion after thinking, ‘That girl’s wearing a headscarf’ than, ‘Do you reckon that’s a wig?’

So I’m giving up the ghost (well, except for special occasions, perhaps: weddings, parties, posh restaurants, the football …). I’m coming out of the cancer closet. And, to paraphrase George Michael, the game that I’m giving away just isn’t worth playing. Freedom!

*

OVER CHRISTMAS DINNER
one year, Nan pointed to the scarf I was using as a headband and noted, ‘That thing makes you look like a gypsy.’ She wasn’t one to mince her words, was Nan, but despite most of the things she said to me being unnecessarily flattering, this comment has stayed with me ever since. And, whether or not I admitted it at the time, it was also the reason I chose the wig route rather than the headscarf one.

For a while, it was the right thing to do. When it comes to The Bullshit, you’ve got to accept pretty early on that the best way to play it is to do whatever feels right at the time – and sod any consequences or previously rigid opinions you may have held. The beauty is, at least, that nobody’s going to question you on it. Hate animals but want a cat? Go for it, let’s call the RSPCA. Ask for salmon for dinner but then gag at the smell from the kitchen? No problem, there’s pasta in the cupboard. Insist on spending £400 on wigs then ditch the lot? Whatever makes you happy. And so, within five months, I’d gone from insisting on disguising my cancer from the world with wigs, eyebrow pencils and fake tan, to completely giving up the ghost with headscarves and a take-me-as-you-find-me attitude. Aside from that, though, it made radiotherapy easier to negotiate. The daily routine of a morning hospital visit on which I had to lie in the same uncomfortable position wasn’t exactly
conducive
to wig-wearing, and with my cancer-specialist hospital being the only place I was ever seen in public, I was hardly doing a wonderful impression of a healthy average Joe anyway.

Pitiful as it was when compared to the chemo-ills, the burn-like pain that came with radiotherapy was beginning to wind me up as much as the monotonous routine. I’d somehow managed to get away with its annoying effects after the first week but, after the second, the radio-targeted cross-section of my body had become burned, painful, itchy and achy. It was starting to give my left arm jip, too, to the point where my fingers repeatedly swelled up like one of those giant foam hands you get at the baseball or in the audience on
Gladiators
. And so, with primary lymphoedema seemingly causing the trouble, I was referred to the lymphoedema clinic, where they fitted me for the best, hi-tech, swelling-solving device that contemporary medical science has to offer: a stretchy glove. It wasn’t even a nice-looking glove, either. It was cut-off-your-circulation tight, skin coloured (well, it is if you’re Nancy Dell’Olio) and fingerless, with messy-looking seams on the outside. But even that wasn’t credibility-destroying enough for the nurses in the clinic, who also taught me some daily physiotherapy exercises that were basically tantamount to doing the ‘Birdie Song’. (Add that to the ‘YMCA’ and I’m practically ready to audition for a place in The Nolans.)

The absurdity didn’t stop there. There was the sunburnt skin, too. Actually, that I had accounted for, but not the swelling. Overnight, it seemed, my left boob had grown a cup size bigger than my right, and my saline implant was hardening with every treatment. It was the first side-effect I’d felt in my breast since the mastectomy, and it brought home to me yet again how I kept forgetting the
still-unfathomable
fact that all of this began with a tumour in my boob. My lovely boob. One of the few parts of my body that I’d always said I wouldn’t change (just like I always said that alopecia was among my biggest fears – seems you don’t have to be careful what you wish for; more what you’re afraid of). But that was six months ago – now it had become a huge, round lump of hardened, red Play-Doh, without even the crowning glory of a nipple.

My boob had only ever had what I consider a modest number of public outings and a tiny part of me wished that I’d let it have its day – a page-three photo shoot, some topless sunbathing, or a cheeky chavvy flash on someone’s shoulders in the crowd of an Oasis gig. But that number wouldn’t be increasing now, and not just because there was a ring on my finger. I wondered what I’d do in the future sex-wise if I weren’t married. I was – and still am – intrigued to know what single, Bullshit-befallen women do when they’re recovered and having fun and ready to get back on the horse? Because how do you broach the subject? The I’ve-had-breast-cancer line is something of a turn-off, no? Or is it the ultimate test of a man, to see whether or not he’s bothered by it? Does it make you a bra-on girl for evermore? Should you even mention it beforehand, or just crack on and see whether he notices?

At the current stage of my reconstruction, there was no hiding the fact. With a Toffee Penny for a left nipple, my bust was hardly the stuff that wet dreams are made of. And, as I discovered in my second week of radiotherapy – when, due to the pre-Christmas schedule of shifts, Pepsi & Shirlie were joined by two male nurses in the treatment room and became Bucks Fizz – P was no longer the only bloke who had to look me in the nipple and keep a straight face. So far, all but two of the medical professionals I’d seen had been
women
, and the male ones had been considerably older than me. But now, all of a sudden, there were two lads my age charged with the task of radiating my bust (and neck and shoulder and armpit, but I was less bothered about those bits), and I couldn’t help but wonder what they thought of me and my bizarre bosom.

Not that the opinion of other men should matter, of course. Luckily, all I really needed to concern myself with was whether or not P could stand the sight of a naked new-me, and experience suggested that it wasn’t going to be a problem. But that didn’t stop me worrying about it. And so one day, I decided to test the water with the radio boys, and do my best to judge whether I completely grossed them out.

‘You’re a bit glammed up for radio, aren’t you?’ asked P.

‘Good, I’m glad you noticed,’ I answered, trying to find a pair of earrings to match my most glamorous headscarf.

‘Yeah, but why?’

‘It’s an experiment,’ I said. ‘There’s a couple of lads my age doing my radio this week and I need to know whether they’re repulsed by me.’

P rolled his eyes. After two years of marriage, he knew better than to question another of my typically trivial trials that, more often than not, would be more at home in a Scooby Doo cartoon than real life.

‘Well, I just hope it’s got nothing to do with the boy on reception, is all,’ he continued, shooting me an accusatory look. ‘I read on your blog that you fancy him.’

‘Oh, God, hardly,’ I retorted. ‘Besides, giving him a wink every day is just a bit of fun to liven up the monotony. You’ll be coming next week, anyway, and you can see for yourself that he’s no P Lynch.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ he said. ‘But if the boot was on the other foot …’

‘I know, I know,’ I admitted. ‘Still, nobody’s really going to be lusting after your cancer-patient wife, are they?’

And so into the radiotherapy floor I strutted, all headscarf, heels and lip gloss, indulging in a morning mini-flirt with the boy on reception, and extending it a bit further down the corridor to try my luck in the treatment room, too. Radio Boy 1 was Play-Doh in my hands: one highly unoriginal comment about being topless in a dark room, and we were bang into the banter. Radio Boy 2 proved harder to break. I threw everything at it, from the local drinking holes to their Christmas-party scandal, but nothing doing. And just when I gave up and resorted to my usual inane gossip-column chatter – this time about Rihanna, how I was making her my hair muse and how I thought it a pity that she and Chris Brown clearly weren’t right for each other when they look so cute together in photos – I finally got my answer. Radio Boy 2 was, indeed, appalled by the sight of my tits. But it turned out that not even Rihanna was his thing – he much preferred her fella. So I was happy to admit defeat on those grounds. And anyway, much like my status quo on the nipple front, one out of two wasn’t bad.

CHAPTER 26

And never brought to mind

I’ll make no bones about it: I’m struggling to deal with The Bullshit as much now as I was mid-chemo. I may have got my head around the physical effects and the things I need to do in response to them (nothing, mostly – radio is making me more exhausted by the day), but the myriad mental matters are tying me in knots.

Mid-sprout during my Christmas dinner, I found myself
this
close to throwing down my knife and fork, chucking my plate at the wall (like they do in the soaps) and screaming ‘what the hell are we doing?’ at P and my folks. In that moment, I simply could not believe that, regardless of what had happened this year, there we were, eating turkey and wearing paper hats as though it were a perfectly average 25 December. (My suspicion that a paper hat would substitute nicely for a headscarf was quickly quashed – from the shoulders up, I looked like a novelty eggcup.) The simple act of ‘getting on with it’ sometimes seems so preposterous in light of having been diagnosed with breast cancer, and every now and then I find myself irrationally angry with the rest of the world for going about its business as normal. EVERYTHING has changed for me, so why is
everyone
else carrying on as though nothing has happened?

Part of me wants to have a word with myself. ‘For fuck’s sake, you’ve got cancer. So what? Get over it.’ And admittedly, most of the time (this blog excepted) I’m pretty flippant about having breast cancer – in public at least – preferring to make glib jokes, trivialise it and avoid giving it the grim respect it craves by smiling my way through as much as possible. But the other half of me appreciates – and is completely panicked by – the weight of this shitty episode, and wants to do something equally absurd in response. I sometimes feel like I’m perched on top of a volcano, and that at some point I’m going to do a Cameron Frye and completely flip out. I think it’d be only fair. Something as momentous as breast cancer in your twenties deserves a freak-out as big as Jacko’s skin-colour-change or Britney’s head-shave (insert obvious joke here). Drug dependency is out – I’ve had enough drugs to last me a lifetime this past few months – and I dare say I’ve already gone down the Elvis-inspired weight-gain route (Operation Elfin begins in earnest tomorrow). So maybe now’s the time to get the tattoo, then?

I do have a few New Year resolutions, though, and one of them is that next year, I’d like
Alright Tit
to go from being about living with The Bullshit to being about wrestling my way out of it. I’m done with breast cancer and what it’s done to me, the way it’s made me look, the issues it’s made me confront, the effect it’s had on my life and the lives of my family and friends. Never before have I needed a new start as much as I do now. From this point on,
Alright Tit
is about getting
over
breast cancer, rather than getting
through
it.