The C-Word (26 page)

The busy thing was key. Pre-Bullshit, I used to love doing nothing. I’d spend many a contented hour lying on my
back
, happy with my thoughts. I once lived on my own, too, and loved every second. I was always good in my own company, doing sod all. But suddenly, I was never doing nothing, and never on my own (at the risk of sounding like Liz Jones, I consider Sgt Pepper company). Even when I was silent, my mind would be plugging away at something or other. Just as there’s always a song in my head, at that point there was always a job to be done, an email to be sent, a Facebook status to update, a tweet to post, a list to write … for an inherently lazy lass, I was doing a damn good job of keeping myself busy. And it was a state I was keen to keep myself in, purely because I couldn’t afford
not
to be busy. Because that was when the panic attacks would come.

The problem, of course, was that the more I sat on the shit stuff by staying distracted, the more it would come back to bite me on the ass. The anxiety remained, bubbling under the surface, forcing its way out like angry steam from a boiling pan in 101 unhelpful ‘what ifs’. What if the cancer came back? What if the treatment hadn’t worked? What if there was another tumour I didn’t know about? What if there were cancer cells I wasn’t aware of? What if I only had a short time left? Which was how I ended up making an idiot of myself at the hospital later that week.

The Friday following the end of my radiotherapy had been a red X on my calendar for months: the day on which the end of my active treatment would be neatly bookended with a final visit to the Curly Professor’s Glamorous Assistant. In my wildest dreams (and I’m just the kind of idiot who believes their wildest dreams), I was going to walk out of that appointment having heard a joyous clasp of hands and a sentence that began, ‘Well, your treatment was a resounding success …’ and perhaps even the word ‘remission’. Idiot indeed. Instead, the information I was left
with
proved a sledgehammer of a reminder of how serious my diagnosis was.

‘So, can we say I’m in remission now?’ I asked Glamorous Assistant, while tearing holes in a tissue with one hand and gripping onto P with the other (he’d had holes torn into him that morning with the kind of narky, fret-induced nagging that he used to endure each Chemo Friday).

‘No no no, not yet,’ she said, as though I’d asked whether she might be able to create a French plait from my cropped locks. ‘The problem with the word remission is that it applies to a time when treatment has ended, and since you’ll be taking Tamoxifen for five years, your active treatment won’t have finished until you’ve stopped taking that.’

‘Great,’ I spat, trying to force back my tears with attitude.’ I just thought you’d be telling me I was in remission today.’

‘I’m sorry; I can’t yet,’ she said, demonstrably sympathetic to my disappointment. ‘The discourse around cancer is really problematic. The media doesn’t help, of course. All this “Kylie gets the all clear” stuff. In truth, I’m afraid, with this kind of cancer there simply is no all clear.’

‘So it’s five years until remission,’ I repeated, crestfallen.

‘Let me fetch you a box of tissues,’ said Glamorous Assistant. I hadn’t realised my tears were falling until she made the suggestion.

P and I said nothing while she nipped into the room next door. We didn’t even look at each other; just tightened our grip while my mind wandered sarcastically to all the things that would happen before I could be moved from red to amber alert. There’d be a General Election. The London-hosted Olympic Games. Jamie’s thirtieth. ‘Christ,’ I thought, ‘Miley Cyrus will have done a stint in rehab, made
a
sex tape, squeezed out an illegitimate baby and written her memoirs by the time I’m in remission. This fucking thing goes on for ever.’

‘Are you okay?’ asked Glamorous Assistant, handing me a box of Kleenex.

‘Not really, no.’

‘It’s just never ending,’ added P, taking the words out of my mouth. ‘We hoped there’d be some closure from today.’

‘A lot of patients find this one of the hardest parts,’ she said, which was simultaneously true and unhelpful, rather like being told, ‘Well, you’ve got breast cancer. But so have loads of other people.’

‘It’s not hard,’ I wept, now bawling uncontrollably. ‘It’s TORTUROUS. I can’t sleep, I can’t think straight, I can’t get on with my life. And it’s all I want to do.’

P slipped his arm around me. I suspected he was crying too, but I didn’t look up to check.

‘IT’S ALL I WANT TO DO!’ I wailed again, suddenly realising how loud I had become. ‘And it won’t let me do it!’

‘Believe me,’ said Glamorous Assistant, pulling her chair closer towards us, ‘there’s nothing I’d like more than to tell you that everything is fine now, and to pack you off and say there’s no need for you to come back. But it just doesn’t work like that. And I wish for your sake that it did.’ There was no doubting her compassion, and I wondered for a moment why she’d ever decided to go into a job like this. ‘But I want to be able to help you in any way I can,’ she continued. ‘So perhaps I can help you with your sleeping, and then things might get easier?’

‘What do you think, babe?’ asked P.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I repeated, all in the same breath. ‘I’m just continually paranoid that there’s more cancer I don’t know about. I have to know for sure that
there
’s nothing else there. You need to tell me for certain that the treatment has worked.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said a puzzled Glamorous Assistant.

‘Can I have another CT scan?’ I asked, fixing her with my eyes to demonstrate my seriousness.

‘But why would you want another one?’ she asked. ‘Your pre-chemo scan was clear, was it not?’

‘Yes, but what if something else has happened in the meantime?’ I said, making less sense with every snivelled word. ‘What if there’s another tumour? What if there are more cells? I need to know. I can’t relax until I know. It’s imperative that I find out.’

I didn’t like being reduced to this, and it wasn’t pretty. I had assumed that a clear CT scan would be the little bit of finality I’d earned after the last few months. But, as it turned out, it wouldn’t tell me a sodding thing.

‘A CT scan can’t pick up random cancer cells,’ explained Glamorous Assistant. ‘And it would be pointless to give you another CT scan now when your previous one was clear.’

‘Can I pay for one?’ I asked, though I wasn’t entirely sure what with. ‘Because if it comes back I want to know immediately so I can do something about it before it gets to this stage again.’

‘Okay, let’s talk this through,’ she continued with calm in her voice which, I assumed, she wanted me to emulate. ‘Even if a future CT scan were to pick up on a recurrence of this cancer, I’m afraid it wouldn’t affect the outcome.’

This was the point at which P and I finally met eyes. Despite being seven arduous months into our encounter with The Bullshit, in that moment it hit us that we still knew a pitiful amount about how it worked. Because, as Glamorous Assistant explained, if there ever was a relapse of The Bullshit in my breast, there wouldn’t be a damn
thing
they could do to cure it. They could manage it, and hopefully slow its progress – but never cure it.

With little regard for the other patients who were waiting to see her, we stayed with Glamorous Assistant for another half-hour or so, as she took us through the characteristics of grade-three cancer, what having had it would mean for me and what I’d need to do to manage the situation for the rest of my life. I’m sure it was exactly the same stuff that Smiley Surgeon had told us at a different hospital on the day we learned I had a tumour in my breast, but back then neither of us were in a position to take it in. Now, we were seeing the picture in full Technicolor, and having been through the treatment didn’t make the reality any easier to stomach.

If only cancer were just a disease that you discover, get upset about, treat, then get over. Someone once told me that, upon her diagnosis, her consultant said, ‘I don’t want to frighten you, but you need to understand that your life will never be the same again.’ And yet here we were, gunning for the finish-line, eager to get back to the lovely life we once knew. But we couldn’t, because life had changed.

Up until that day, I had been careful of how I came across in front of the medical professionals who were charged with nursing me back to post-cancer fitness. But that Friday afternoon, I lost not just my patience, but also my ability to give a shit – so rather than the cheery, polite (or brown-nosing, in Smiley Surgeon’s case) young woman that usually turned up to these appointments, Glamorous Assistant got her prickly, distraught, screw-up sister. And given that, I suppose it’s no surprise that she chose to send me home with a prescription for antidepressants: another thing in my long list of Things I Said I’d Never Do.

I took the pill as soon as I got home from the hospital that
evening
, and then settled down with a cup of tea to write a cathartic blog post about the hospital visit that was already making me wince in shame at my angry, ranting, mentally unstable behaviour. But by the time I’d finished writing, I was seeing the world through a Chemical Brothers video, watching as my slippers doubled up, bouncing off the walls on my way to be sick and struggling to recognise my husband (who had to type up the remainder of the drafted blog post when I zonked out). What began as unpleasant quickly turned into something much scarier. If the drugs were supposed to calm my nerves and keep me from panicking, they were about as effective as a fart in a tornado.

The following morning, anxiously trying to hold myself together for my mate Jonze’s wedding, I handed over the car keys to P who, strictly speaking, should have been on a drinking green card for the day. But even some twelve hours after taking the antidepressant, I was shaky, struggling to focus and generally a bit on the loopy side. Needless to say, the remainder of pills found their way into London’s sewerage system. I had hated having to take one in the first place. But now I knew how they were capable of making me feel, I hated the thought of taking another one even more. But more than that – with a clearer head the following morning, I was as sure as I could be that I simply didn’t need them.

Given that just eight months previous, I was having a lovely, carefree, Corona-filled time in Mexico, and I was now flat out in pyjamas on my sofa, recovering from some pretty hardcore cancer treatment, I think a few flip-outs can be forgiven. But after hearing about my new kind of prescription, people were suddenly over-concerned about me – not least my folks. (‘How are
you
today? Really? But
how
are you in
yourself
?’) Clearly, the word ‘anti-depressant’ set off the same alarms in their heads as it did in mine, and I could see them making all the wrong conclusions. ‘Is she depressed? Should we go easy on her? Do you think we ought to say that?’ When Mum and Dad visited us the following week, I made some God-awful low-fat cookies that were tantamount to eating chocolate-chip jiffy-bags, and yet nobody dared admit how bad they were. It infuriated me. What made me even tetchier were the presumptions about my mental state, and my crabbiness was giving people even more reason to think that I was depressed.

And so, with the knowledge that my family were more likely to believe what I wrote than what I said, I took to my blog. ‘Let me say this for the record,’ I announced. ‘I. Am. Not. Depressed. What I
am
is shell-shocked and pissed off and actually pretty angry (still) that The Bullshit chose me from its one-in-three line-up. And, I’ll admit, all of those crappy feelings have made me prone to the occasional mood swing. But I’m not suddenly teetering on the brink of despair. Of course there’s nothing wrong with being depressed; there’s no shame in it. I’m just not, is all. I’d be equally narked if you tried to tell me I preferred The Stones to The Beatles, that I was bad at spelling or that I was a Nottingham Forest fan. Now there’s a thing to send a girl to the brink.’

CHAPTER 29

Restoration

February 2009

The last time we saw Smiley Surgeon it was snowing, and Central London looked as beautiful as I’d ever seen it. The usually busy waiting room at the hospital was deserted thanks to cancelled appointments, and the reception staff were giddy with the work-light excitement of two kids who’d been snowed out of school. P and I arrived early (only the second time in my life I’ve managed this; the first being our wedding day) and bagged the best seats directly outside the door to Smiley Surgeon’s consultation room.

He’s got a tough job, old SS. In one appointment he’s telling someone they have breast cancer, the next he’s congratulating them on getting so far through it (or, better still, letting them know there’s nothing to worry about). And, from the looks on the faces of the couple who saw him immediately before us, that woman had clearly been thrown down the rabbit-hole of the former category.

She stared straight ahead as she walked out of the room on auto-pilot, subconsciously tearing the edges off a crumpled
tissue
. Her husband followed close behind, his hand resting helplessly in the small of her back, carrying his wife’s coat and handbag because it was the only helpful thing he could do. And, just as we did after hearing the same news, they turned left out of SS’s door and walked towards a room down the corridor where a core biopsy would be done to assess the extent of her tumour. As I wondered whether the woman would also come to loathe watercolour paintings as a result of the artwork on the wall of that room, I tutted, shook my head and turned to P. ‘Poor sods,’ I whispered. ‘They won’t be able to enjoy the snow now.’

But, for P and me at least, London looked even more beautiful when we came out of our appointment, having heard from Smiley Surgeon that he was impressed with my attitude throughout treatment (I didn’t reveal the extent of my rant last week) and that my radiated skin was healing well enough for him to book in a date for my first reconstructive surgery. A vote of confidence from SS is like getting a gold star from the teacher you’ve been busting your gut to suck up to all term. And since it’s no secret how much I adore the man, I’m not embarrassed to boast about it. (Ner ner ner ner ner.)