The C-Word (30 page)

We’d spent a lovely girly morning at the salon, me and Tills. I’d treated her to a manicure by way of thanks for her
unending
support, we’d had a lovely lunch flicking through the weeklies for some fantasy clothes shopping, and we’d nattered all the way through my appointment, boring the arse off my colourist with daft stories about our cats. With Tills managing proceedings like some kind of bleaching invigilator, the colourist was careful to listen to everything I’d asked for and duly obliged. Things were going well. New Image Day was looking like a success, and with everyone around me being especially lovely and complimentary about the shock of short, platinum hair that was confidently contrasting with my black gown, there was no reason to feel anything other than chuffed. Finally, I had hair I’d
chosen
to have.

But, as the harsh light of day and several suspicious sideways glances expertly demonstrated, the hair I’d chosen didn’t suit me. I might have wanted a funky, punky, peroxide, statement ’do, but Lady Gaga I ain’t. And so my poker face lasted the distance from the hairdresser’s to the Topshop changing room, where Tills took a few photos of my new crop on her mobile phone, and I collapsed into sobs when I saw them, just as I had when looking at the photo of a fat lass in a wig that Ant had posted on Facebook.

The fault was entirely my own. I had got what I’d asked for: the trendy, relevant, never-would-have-tried-it-other-wise look that would tell the world how I’d changed; how I was on top of cancer; how I was ready to take on anything that life threw at me. But what I’d asked for wasn’t right. It wasn’t hair that I’d
chosen
to have – if I could have chosen hair, I’d have had it exactly the way it was pre-Bullshit, and not have cancer force me into a pixie crop. And I had to confront the fact that actually, I just wasn’t feeling feisty enough to carry off the look I’d thought I wanted. It was hair that stood out from the crowd – and, as it turned out, I
didn
’t want to stand out. It was hair that screamed confidence – and I didn’t have as much as I’d thought. It was hair that suggested its owner was cool, attractive, hot and edgy – and I’d never felt further from those things. I could talk the talk all I wanted, confidently proclaiming my new image to be the triumphant, cancer-beating look that was all mine, making me way cooler than the girl I was pre-Bullshit. But, having surrendered all the goods to back it up along with the hair I lost in the first place, this was categorically not the time to be cashing in on my confidence. It was the time to start slowly building it back up again.

Sobbing in a post-salon coffee stop with Tills and P either side of me, I kicked myself for learning nothing since the last time the three of us attempted to make the best of my hair-loss situation. ‘Here we are again,’ I thought, ‘back at my first wig-buying experience.’ Back then, I walked into the room expecting to skip out with something I loved as much as my original hair. And this time around, I’d expected exactly the same. Better yet, I wanted people to pass me in the street and think nothing of me. Not ‘ooh, is she wearing a wig?’ or ‘crikey, she’s young to be wearing a headscarf’. Not even ‘wow, look how confidently she’s carrying that crop’. Nothing. Because them thinking nothing would mean that I was no different to anyone else. And when it came down to it,
that
was the kind of normal I was after.

My problem wasn’t just in failing to realise that a freckly gal needs something a bit warmer than bright, white hair. It was in allowing my expectations to run away with me. In my mind, I was going to walk out of that salon the new Agyness Deyn. Better than that, actually – I was going to walk out of there the New Me. I had built up New Image Day to be a defining moment in my escape from cancer’s
grip
: the day on which I stopped being the girl with breast cancer, and started being the girl with the funky hair. The day on which I could stop hiding away, and return to the world with a bright, blonde bang. I’d even given it a name, for fuck’s sake. New Image Day was going to be as significant a turning point as the day of my diagnosis or my mastectomy or my final chemo.

Almost eleven months into my experience of The Bullshit, and I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that I wasn’t in control. Cancer was in control. And no amount of new clothes or hair colourant or New Image Days could change that. The reality is that the milestones aren’t the scripted occasions, but the seemingly insignificant rites of passage that you don’t notice until they’ve passed. Washing your hair for the first time after losing it. Walking the length of your street without having to stop for a rest. Falling asleep without the help of sleeping pills. Catching yourself saying ‘I’ve
had
cancer’ instead of ‘I’ve
got
cancer’.
These
are the things that matter. These are the things that make a difference. They’re the niggling, nil-nil away draws that guarantee your safety at the end of the season. They’re not pretty, they’re not memorable, and they’re definitely not going to make it onto
Match of the Day
, but they’re vital nonetheless. They’re the things I should have been blogging about, when instead I was more interested in the showy wonder-goals that would make for a better highlights package.

‘When am I going to learn my lesson?’ I asked Tills after we’d ditched my Topshop stylist for an emergency appointment with my second colourist of the day.

‘You weren’t to know how you’d feel, darling,’ she reassured me. ‘Besides, you wanted peroxide hair today, and you tried it. Now you can try something else too.’

The junior colourist looked at me as though I were a lunatic. ‘Hang on – you only had this colour done today?’

‘That’s right,’ snapped Tills, back in no-bullshit management mode. ‘And she’d like it to be a bit less harsh, and a bit more warm. Are you able to do that?’

‘Um, yeah. I s’pose so,’ she conceded, heading across the salon to mix some more colour.

‘Nobody talks about this part,’ I complained to Tills over a mug of tea. ‘People warn you how hard it is to get a diagnosis and go through chemo and lose your hair. But nobody ever warned me how hard it would be to get over treatment, or how long it takes to feel right after chemo, or how difficult it is to get your hair back. There isn’t a leaflet for this stuff.’

But, then, how could there be? Hell, even now I wouldn’t know how to tell someone who’d just been diagnosed that there’s so much more tricky stuff to negotiate once treatment has finished; that you’re suddenly left to deal with the gravity of what’s happened to you; that you’ve somehow got to alter all of your expectations.

But harder than even doing those things is accepting that you’ve got to do them in the first place. Cancer changed my life, but I didn’t want to have to change the way I lived to accommodate it. I didn’t
want
to lower my expectations. I wanted to get excited and look forward and face my future with optimism. I wanted to plan ahead. I wanted to feel normal. I wanted to stop seeing cancer when I looked in the mirror. I wanted to take the credit for my crop. I wanted to turn the things that cancer was making me do into significant, fun moments that I was in control of. I wanted to turn The Bullshit into something brilliant.

The following morning – at my third hair appointment in the space of twenty-four hours – I poured out my heart to
yet
another hair colourist, who couldn’t believe that I’d wanted such a drastic change of colour in the first place. ‘You’ve always had long hair before this, yes?’ he asked in his devastatingly sexy French accent.

‘Mm-hmm,’ I nodded.

‘Then suddenly having short hair is enough of a new image for you! You don’t need crazy blonde too,’ he advised, before turning my hair just a couple of shades lighter than its natural colour.

And so there was no New Me.

But nor was there an Old Me.

There was just Me. Albeit with a little less hair (and a little more tit).

CHAPTER 33

A change of season

May 2009

I’ve always wished I had the kind of local that you could walk into, know everyone at the bar and order ‘the usual’. I fear the closest I’ve ever come is sharing a bag of crisps and the latest on my love life with my favourite old fellas at the golf-club bar I once served behind. But, last week, I think I finally got the Cheers-like local of my dreams. Except the building is a hospital rather than a public house, the regulars are over-worked medical staff and my usual isn’t so much a G&T as a strip to the waist and a flash of my boobs.

With P away on business, Tills came along instead, remarking how funny it was that I didn’t have to check in at reception desks any more. And while treating hospital clinics like an office I’ve worked in for years could be seen as rather tragic, in fact it’s a thing I enjoy. In I stroll, impossibly chirpy, offering a nod of acknowledgement to the fellow patients I’ve seen before and skipping the usual formalities with receptionists to talk trashy gossip instead of appointment times. Doctors usher me in with ‘hi, Lisa’ instead of ‘Mrs Lynch please’, greeting me in a manner
that
suggests we’re about to catch up over a brew and biscuits, not discuss the scab on my left nipple.

‘So nice to see you! I’m just looking at your breasts …’ began Smiley Surgeon, in an opening line I’ll never get used to (nor learn to stifle my sniggers upon hearing). ‘… and the symmetry is looking much better than last time. And wow, your nipple is healing really well,’ he continued, promising to refer me to the nipple-tattooing nurse for an appointment in a couple of weeks’ time. He’s not wrong about the nupple – having now shrunk down to less grape-like levels, it’s looking pretty damn good. So good, in fact, that I’ve been known on occasion to inflict on P a game of Spot The Falsie whenever my nipples are visible through a top.

Not everyone’s so impressed with my new tit, mind you. Following a rather surreal conversation with Always-Right Breast Nurse about my post-treatment sex life and the best lubes on the market, she asked whether I’d be open to letting a recently diagnosed woman have a look at my surgery-sculpted bust. And since I’m so nonchalant about unbuttoning my shirt these days that I fear I’d remove my bra for the Sainsbury’s delivery man if he asked nicely enough, I agreed. My nonchalance speaks volumes about how proud I am of the boob Smiley Surgeon has created for me. Having loved and lost a much-valued left’un, I never imagined I’d be so pleased with its replacement, and so I’m as keen to boast about my new baby as any first-time mother. But when I walked confidently into the next consulting room, I was as unprepared for the look on the poor woman’s face as she was for the sight of my tit.

Was that the same terrified look I’d had in my eyes upon getting a similar world-changing diagnosis? I suspect so. She looked like she’d been hit by a train. Frightened, haunted, confused. Her tiny frame couldn’t hold the weight of the worries she had to carry, just as her eyes couldn’t hold back the tears she
was
trying to hide from her elderly mother. In her fifties and happily meandering through life until a week previous, she was due to undergo the same type of mastectomy with pre-reconstruction that I had (an LD-flap, fact-fans) and yet, with the gravity of the news she was still failing to compute, she couldn’t get her head around what she’d find beneath her gown when she awoke from the op. And while my almost-finished result is, admittedly, quite different to the immediate post-surgery sight she’ll be discovering any day now, Always-Right Breast Nurse figured that seeing Smiley Surgeon’s second-to-none needlework would, in part at least, put her mind at rest.

But when I removed my vest and stood half-naked before her, she recoiled in horror. Literally. She took an instinctive step away from me, covering her mouth with her hands. Eventually, she leaned forward ever so slightly without moving her feet, her index finger covering her lips, as though she were inspecting a newly laid cat shit on her pristine carpet. ‘Christ, woman. It’s not that bad,’ I thought, offended at her horrified reaction to my beautiful breast.

‘I have to say, it doesn’t look the same as your other one,’ she said. Which was the moment at which I realised how far away from reality her expectations were.

‘Well, no,’ I replied, trying to remain as upbeat as I could. ‘But you’d never be able to tell through my clothes. It’s just that the new nipple looks pretty different to my old one. But even that’s going to be tattooed.’

She inspected further, still a yard or two away. ‘So – hang on – what happened to your old nipple?’ she enquired.

‘Um. It went,’ I answered gingerly, looking over to Always-Right Breast Nurse in doubt about what to say next. She explained that the nipple has to be removed in order for the surgeon to work inside the breast, and that the replacement
nipple
she was looking at had been created with skin from my back.

‘Coof,’ she exhaled, correcting her posture and visibly shaking. ‘There’s just so much to take in.’

I grabbed her hand, telling her not to worry, then quickly realising what a pointless reassurance that was. ‘Look,’ I continued, ‘you’re right. There’s more to take in right now than you can possibly get your head around, but soon, when you’ve had your surgery and your treatment has begun, I promise you’ll feel a bit better because things will then be in hand. You’ll be taking steps to make all this better. And it WILL get better,’ I assured her, rather forcefully.

‘Oh, the treatment,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Did you lose your hair?’

For a second, I couldn’t understand her question. ‘Isn’t it bloody obvious I’ve lost my hair?’ I thought, then remembering that, in fact, I do have some hair now and that, to her, I was just a young lass with a short crop. I broke the news.

‘I can’t lose it,’ she said. ‘I just can’t.’ Hers was almost the same length that mine had been when I was in her shoes. ‘Did you buy a wig?’

I nodded.

‘And a headscarf?’

I nodded again, as she looked fit to puke. ‘But, look, it’s grown back,’ I said, tugging at a few short strands. ‘And I’ve had it cut and coloured since, too.’