The C-Word (29 page)

Everyone was quick to tell me that it would be okay, that
there
was nothing to worry about, that I should just focus on the end result. But, as well as trying to avoid the surgery-subject by snapping at people instead, I was actively trying
not
to think about the end result. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, like I did about the wig-buying. Back then, I wanted the perfect replica of my original hair. And now, I wanted the perfect replica of my original boob. But I’d learned my lesson; I knew I wasn’t going to get it. The wig may have been poker-straight and frizz-free and kink-proof, but it wasn’t
my
hair. And I was worried that I’d feel the same way about the specially constructed, all-singing, all-dancing Super Tit that Smiley Surgeon was going to spend his Saturday afternoon crafting. (Remember when Carrie Bradshaw lost her treasured ‘Carrie’ nameplate necklace and the little Russian dude bought her a diamond one to replace it? Now substitute the ‘Carrie’ necklace with my old tit, and the diamond necklace with my new tit, and you’ve got the idea. Note to self:
Sex and the City
= not real life.)

Before my surgery, though, was an operation for Sgt Pepper, when we took her to be spayed. And even that was traumatic. It was a window into what it must have been like for P and Jamie and my parents during my eight-hour mastectomy. I was a right bloody mess while she was at the vet’s – waiting nervously by the phone, trying to keep busy by writing a blog post (which I later binned, utter shit that it was), spilling my tea down the side of the sofa, chewing off what was left of my fingernails.

So, as I concluded last time, in many ways I was going to have the easy part: I’d be knocked out, none the wiser while my family counted the minutes, drank endless cups of tea and tried to busy themselves. Fortunately, unlike Sgt Pepper, I wouldn’t be coming round from my operation to find a plastic cone around my neck. Though, when I woke
up
after the op, I was relieved to discover something rather cone-shaped beneath the left side of my hospital gown.

Earlier that morning, I had taken a sneaky photo of my Old Tit on my iPhone. And even through my hospital gown I could see that the ‘after’ photo was going to be a hell of a lot more impressive.

‘So, what do you think of it?’ beamed a proud Smiley Surgeon, staring intently at my chest as I walked into his room for my post-op check-up a week later. (I had become so used to folk staring at my tits that I was becoming quite offended when people out in the Real World spoke to my face.) Carefully avoiding my usual levels of goondom but inexplicably turning scouse in the process, I replied in an oddly high-pitched voice. ‘I’m made up, la!’ (Okay, so I just added the ‘la’ for dramatic effect, but still. What was my problem?)

‘Oh-kaay. Let’s have a look,’ he replied, side-stepping my comedy accent and gesturing to the bed behind the curtain.

Always-Right Breast Nurse was on hand to remove my dressings and, for the first time since the sneaky look in my hospital bed, I got to see the full glory of my newly formed nupple. Not to mention the beautiful, perfectly round mound that it sat atop, like an especially delicious cherry bakewell or iced bun. While SS prodded at my new boob and I looked on admiringly (at him
and
the New Tit), I couldn’t help but think of the
Generation Game
. Believe me, if Brucie had handed you a lump of clay and a pottery wheel and given you sixty seconds to create a breast, Smiley Surgeon would have been the visiting expert whose model you had to copy. (Didn’t he do well?)

Undoubtedly the sweetest part of my check-up, however, was watching SS’s smiling face (P is convinced he only
smiles
for me, by the way, and that he’s more Serious Surgeon with his other patients) as he explained that, mid-surgery, he’d had a ‘good look around in there’. (That, rather flatteringly, makes my tit sound like Mary Poppins’ handbag, when I’m sure that a ‘good look around’ my B-cup is actually tantamount to a twenty-second shufty.) But he continued with a sentence that ended in those few little words that every girl dreams of hearing: ‘… no sign of cancer.’ I’d been too afraid to ask him what he’d discovered while inside my boob, for fear of letting slip my vision of an Alien-style tumour bursting out and creating havoc in the operating theatre, so I was as pleased that he’d picked up on my unspoken worry as I was about the words he’d said. No. Sign. Of. Cancer. Forget ‘cellar door’ –
these
are the most beautiful words in the English language.

But, beautiful as those words were, hearing them was strangely unsettling. I didn’t know what to say, plumping for a simple, ‘Phew,’ and heading out of my appointment in an uncharacteristically timid manner. You’d think that hearing the words ‘no sign of cancer’ would have you doing backflips across the kitchen. And beside the fact that (a) it would hurt too much, (b) I can’t do a backflip, and (c) even if I could, the size of our kitchen would mean me crashing into a wall mid-air, that’s oddly not how you feel you ought to react. It’s weirdly anticlimactic, which is a lesson you’d think I’d have learned, given the many stalling, false finishes I’d come to expect of The Bullshit.

So, despite his words, I worked myself up into a panic after recounting to my family and friends the words that Smiley Surgeon had told me. Was I speaking too soon? Should I shut up about it? I thought I was healthy once before – was The Bullshit going to come back to bite me on the ass again? I hated raining on my own parade in this way,
because
, hell, this was amazing news. Better than that – it was the best news in the history of the known world. But it was also just another false finish.

It’s a question of semantics – something in which the medical world is deviously skilled, and in which I was hurriedly having to coach other people.

‘Wow! You’re cancer free!’ they’d say.

‘Um, not exactly, no,’ I’d say.

‘But your surgeon said …?’

‘He said there was no sign of cancer in my left breast.’

‘And isn’t that the same thing?’

‘Unfortunately not, no.’

Bloody cancer. It’s a whole other language. And just as everyone around me figured they’d got the gist of it, in I’d swoop with my medical clarifications to hand them a D grade and put right their mistakes, like an annoying pedant who corrects everyone’s grammatical errors. (Oh, hang on, I’m that too.) I had no choice but to put them right, though. Because ‘no sign of cancer’ does not mean ‘cancer free’. Once you’ve had cancer, there is no ‘cancer free’.

But at the time, simply liking and lumping it fell disappointingly short of the mark. I wanted to scream, ‘I did it!’ I wanted to tell people that I ‘beat’ breast cancer. I wanted to refer to it in the past tense. But bloody, sodding, know-all medical science dictates that I can
never
say that. As I’ve said a hundred times before, there is no definite cure for breast cancer. There is no ‘all clear’. And so you’ve got to be happy with second place on the podium. (Kind of how I felt after Derby lost to Leicester in the play-off final of 1994, and I’ve still not got over that.)

That didn’t mean that there was nothing to celebrate, of course. The ‘it’ in ‘I did it’ just meant something different, is all. It meant that I’d seen off six successful sessions of
chemo
, twenty-eight successful sessions of radio, the first stage of a successful reconstruction, and that I was successfully edging ever closer to leading a more normal life. And since we all know from bitter experience that not everyone gets to celebrate those kind of successes, I decided that I was going to enjoy the moment as best I could. And so, from a lack of rooftops to scream from, I took to my blog and shouted it there instead: ‘I did it! I fucking did it!’

CHAPTER 32

Fitting image

April 2009

The last time I used my hair straighteners, I sat on them. Not with a quick glance of a jeans pocket, but flat onto bare skin, arse cheeks expertly manoeuvring themselves over the 100-degree aluminium, then lowering down carefully like a fairground grab-a-prize game. I dare say it was nature’s way of calling my hair-straightening proceedings to a halt. Because, in my quest to make good the hair that remained on my head, I wasn’t so much sleekening my locks as giving alopecia a helping hand.

Adding insult to balding injury was the corker of a burn it left on my right bum-cheek; a branding from the tribe of GHD. Two angry, parallel lines, each about three inches long, ensuring that the least attractive part of my body was granted another blemish to compete with my cellulite for unwanted beachside attention. I showed P and my folks the damage when my squeals beckoned them in. ‘You know what?’ said Mum, ever keen to find the bright side. ‘I’m sure it’ll have gone by the time you need to use those straighteners again.’ But, looking in the mirror when I got out of the shower last night, my short hair isn’t
the
only reminder of my Bobby Charlton period. My steroid-sculpted behind also tells a tale. Because, half-hidden by my knicker line but nevertheless visible, the bum-brand remains. Not quite as angry as before, but still obvious enough to demonstrate my idiocy to whoever’s on the next sunlounger.

Getting the straighteners out again turned out to be a tad premature, actually. It was a bit like the time I assured P I could rectify his short frizz after a ten-minute session with the appliance, but just ended up scalding his scalp. It’s not that I’m not happy to embrace my new curls (hell, any hair is better than no hair), but right now my ’do is more Brillo pad than brill. And so this week I’ll be spending the GDP of a small country on my first post-chemo cut and colour.

The advice is to wait six months after the date of your final chemo before putting any colour onto your hair. And although my appointment falls a fortnight short of that time, I’m hoping it won’t matter, since I’ve carefully chosen an environmentally aware (and therefore rinse-your-wallet-dry expensive) salon with 97 per cent natural hair colourants. Plus, since it’s been just shy of a year since I had a haircut I was happy with, I’m taking impatience to night-before-birthday levels and just. can’t. wait. any. longer. In hideous hair terms, two weeks feels like several millennia.

You’d think that I’d have got used to my short crop by now, but it still surprises me when I catch sight of my reflection. In my mind’s eye, I’ve still got hair like Jessica Rabbit. Not that I’d have admitted to that little boast before. Actually, ‘admitted to’ isn’t right – I’d never have believed it. But it’s funny how six sessions of chemo can change your mind. Now, when I look back at photos of Old Me, I realise that the ex-colleague I met in the pub not long before my diagnosis was right. Despite being perhaps the unlikeliest source of a compliment I’d ever known, he stood back and looked admiringly at my newly grown-out
fringe
. ‘Bloody hell, lass,’ he said, ‘Your hair’s looking gorgeous.’ And he wasn’t wrong.

My post-chemo hairdo comes as part of a carefully choreographed New Image Week, in which I’ll also be seeing a Topshop style advisor (I haven’t got a spring/summer stitch to wear, having thrown away much of last year’s wardrobe in that tearful, post-diagnosis rage), as well as investing in red lipstick for the first time, enrolling at the Alice Cooper School of Eye-liner and disguising my pasty pallor with enough St Tropez to make me look like the spawn of an Oompa Loompa. And then there’s some serious underwear shopping to be done, too. It’s going to be an expensive week. (Is it okay to use the L’Oreal excuse with your bank manager? ‘And why do you need this overdraft extension, Mrs Lynch?’ ‘Because I’m worth it.’)

I’d love to tell you that all of this is about making myself feel better. Something I’m doing just for me, because I’m long overdue some self-attention, because I’ve earned it and because it’s a damn good opportunity to test out all the looks I would never have been game enough to try pre-Bullshit. And while all of those things are indeed true, they’re not the only reasons behind the New Me. (Truth is, breast cancer or no breast cancer, I can a-l-w-a-y-s find an excuse to shop.) Just like my tattoo, New Image Week is my way of sending a message to all of the many people I’ll be seeing again in pubs and bars and cafés and restaurants and dining rooms and the office. It’s a statement: ‘Hello, I’ve changed.’ Because there’s no getting away from it. I
have
changed.

Not that the Old Me is completely dead and buried, mind. There might be a permanent star-shaped symbol of the New Me on the inside of my right wrist, but there’ll always be a reminder of the girl I once was on my right buttock.

*

MUCH TO MY
surprise, after ditching my headscarf, I wasn’t automatically sporting the kind of coiffured crop that Kylie carried off so expertly. Instead, I had the barnet of a six-month-old baby. My hair looked like something that had happened to me. And I wanted my hair to look like
I’d
happened to
it
. So, with the help of a newsagent’s worth of women’s magazines, I decided to go blonde. Not blonde like before. Stand-up-and-take-notice blonde. Think Marilyn Monroe, Agyness Deyn, Gwen Stefani, or Gary Barlow circa 1992. That way, I figured, it would look like a hairdo that was done out of choice; on purpose – and not because cancer had forced its hairdressing hand. But by, heck, did I get it wrong.

It’s funny what people say compared to what they mean. Whether it’s ‘we must catch up soon’ or ‘no, darling, your bum looks positively tiny’, common courtesy dictates that it’s better to avoid offending someone than it is to tell the truth. And it’s a bloody good job. Because, after what I had assumed was an expertly planned image change, there was one question I just wasn’t interested in the truthful answer to: ‘How’s my hair?’

‘I love it,’ said Tills. ‘It’s sexy.’

‘I think I’ve made a terrible mistake,’ I said as we drove from the hair appointment to my session with a Topshop style advisor.

‘Nah, no way,’ she said unconvincingly. ‘It’s just a massive change, that’s all. But that’s what you wanted, right?’

‘I thought I did,’ I replied, checking my bleached crop in the rear-view mirror. ‘But now I’ve got it, I don’t think I can carry it off.’