The C-Word (31 page)

She looked up and curiously inspected my head, with a defeated expression that said, ‘But I don’t want to look like that.’

‘Nor do I, love,’ I told her subliminally.

As I pulled my vest over my head, she went on to ask about the timescale of hair loss, how it felt to wear a wig and whether I kept my headscarf on in bed. Those odd little details that you must. know. now. despite the crash course in medical
terminology
, despite the bigger issues at hand, despite the realisation that you’ve got a life-threatening condition. (I remember obsessing over the minutiae of how to draw on eyebrows, whether false eyelashes could look real, and how to ensure my husband never saw my bald head.)

‘And chemo,’ asked the woman, bringing up the subject I hoped she’d avoid. ‘Were you very ill?’

I looked over at Always-Right Breast Nurse again, at a loss for what to say. How do you answer a question like that?

A-RBN chipped in: ‘Chemo wasn’t quite as bad as you’d expected it to be, was it, Lisa?’

Uncomfortable pause. I wanted to answer, ‘No, it was a damn fucking sight worse,’ but held back for the sake of the chemotherapy novice before me.

I was confused as to why Always-Right Breast Nurse had said that. Granted, I was hardly going to reel off the horrors of the hallucinations, the constipation, the bone aches or the looks on my parents’ faces as I swore my way through barf after barf. But nor did I think it right to polish the turd that is chemotherapy. After all, I’d been sternly warned about how the treatment might affect my health and, while all the leaflets in the world couldn’t have properly prepared me, at least I had some understanding that it was going to be pretty bloody shitty, thank you very much.

But then it dawned on me. For the first time I realised that, actually, I’d always made a point of playing down the effects of chemo to Smiley Surgeon and Always-Right Breast Nurse. I hadn’t lied about it per se; I’d just never given them the full picture. And, having only ever seen them in my chemo ‘good weeks’, I could get away with it, too. Not just get away with it – I could pretend otherwise. So I’d tell them nothing more than that I’d had a turbulent couple of weeks, but that everything was fine now. No details. Just vagaries. I guess, too, that in those ‘
good weeks
’, I just didn’t want to dredge it all up again. I was enjoying feeling more like a human being. Plus, of course, there’s the suck-up in me who clearly put impressing my two favourite medical professionals before telling the not-so-impressive truth, wanting them to think I was some sort of super-patient for remaining so positive throughout something so utterly shitty; and batting away breast cancer as though it were dirt on my shoulder.

In the end, in fairness to the newly diagnosed woman in the consulting room, I plumped for a more enigmatic answer to Always-Right Breast Nurse’s question. ‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ I half-lied. ‘At times, chemo was a bitch. So I’m not sure about it being worse or better than I’d imagined. It was just very different to what I’d expected. But then the experience of chemo is utterly different for everybody.’ I was still gripping her tiny hands. ‘Of course it’s not always easy. In fact, at times it’s really bloody difficult. But, shit, it works. It did for me, and it will for you.’

She hugged me, as I grimaced nervously over her shoulder, hoping that I’d said the right thing. Always-Right Breast Nurse winked in my direction. Perhaps she knew the truthful answer anyway, despite my reluctance to give it.

*

‘WHAT DO YOU
mean you haven’t got any summer clothes?’ asked Kath over our lunch hour.

‘Well, I threw them all away, didn’t I?’ I said. ‘Which, with hindsight, might not have been my smartest decision.’

‘Oh, and you were rocking such a good look before your diagnosis, too.’

‘Meh,’ I said, sipping my peppermint tea. ‘I’m not exactly ready for a new summer wardrobe yet anyway.’

‘What?’ squealed Kath. ‘You’re going to Madrid! One of the fashion capitals of the world! You simply cannot be walking around in jeans and T-shirts, lady.’

‘Well, I’ve got this,’ I said tugging at the hem of my old faithful, take-me-anywhere black dress.

‘And that’s not going to do you,’ warned Kath. ‘It’s all maxi dresses now, and cool shades and sassy handbags. Get yourself to Oxford Street, pronto.’

‘But that’s the end of our lunch hour!’ I conceded. ‘I’m flying tonight!’

‘Then I’m ordering you to leave early today,’ she insisted.

‘Eh?’

‘Consider it work. Your task for this afternoon is to get summer-ready.’

‘If you say so, boss,’ I relented, never one to stare into the gob of a gift horse.

‘And while you’re at it, sort yourself out with some Glasto clobber, too. Lisa Lynch, your summer of fun starts here.’

Kath wasn’t the only one concerned with my summertime preparation – there was another fairy godmother waiting for me
en España
. In her forties and before she met P’s eldest brother Terry, my Spanish sister-in-law Paloma discovered that she had breast cancer. That diagnosis was more than eight years ago and today she’s doing great. Better than great. She’s a breezy, happy, no-messing, fun-seeking, beer-drinking, chain-smoking, newly retired heroine, and she was on brilliant form when we flew over to visit. ‘You get the hot flushes, yes?’ she said, thrusting a fan into my hand moments after we landed. She winked at me knowingly, smoothly opening her own fan and delicately waving it in front of her face in a single, seamless flick of the wrist. I returned the wink, trying to mimic her super-cool fanning manoeuvre but instead getting one of
the
prongs caught in my little finger and only extending it to what looked like a lacy, black slice of pizza. I was nervous; the clumsy Jedi Cancer Youngling to her Jedi Cancer Master.

It was a daft moment, really, but in that simple exchange of winks, I knew that she understood everything I’d felt over the past year; all the stuff I’d kept between me and Mr Marbles; all the feelings I’d not been able to explain to my family; all the things I’d not quite managed to describe on my blog. She just got it. No deep conversations, no tears, no confused Spanglish. Just a wink and a smile and a flick of a fan that said, ‘Yep, I know.’ (Or perhaps, ‘The force is strong with you’. Whatever.)

The Spanglish route, however, was admittedly a more fun method of sharing our cancer stories, particularly since our respective Lynch boys have peskily ensured that the best we know of each other’s languages is ‘are you stupid or what?’ (Paloma) and ‘
Cariño, he encogido a los niños
’ (me).

‘So, cheemoferathy,’ she said, gallantly pronouncing the word better than I dare say I can in my mother tongue. ‘Awful?’ I raised my eyebrows in confirmation. ‘Yep. Hell.’ She agreed. ‘Depression too, no?’ We bobbed our heads like a pair of nodding dogs after three too many
cervezas
. ‘And children? Is not possible?’ (Insert obligatory nobody-expects-the-Spanish-inquisition gag here.) I shrugged, trotting out my now-standard line that P and I are happy enough, actually, and that life’s just taken us down a different path, is all.

‘Yes, we are lucky to have these men. I never really want to be a mother anyway,’ said Paloma, as I caught our boys eavesdropping from the other side of the table, each with what looked suspiciously like an adoring glint in their eye. ‘But you are okay,’ she continued, in what I think was a
statement
rather than a question. ‘When you arrive in the airport, I see your skin and I see your hair and I think, yes, you are fine; you are brave.’ (See, the force is strong with me.) I gave her a cuddle, opting to swerve the mention of my hair and rest my usual routine of inflicting the hairdryer treatment on anyone who dared mention it.

As our conversation went on, though, it became eerily clear how similar our stories were, despite the almost-twenty-year gap in our ages at diagnosis. Left breast? Check. Stage three? Check. Oestrogen receptive? Check. No family history? Check. We talked of finding the lumps we each assumed were cysts; hers in the shower, mine in bed with P. I talked about Smiley Surgeon and his early advice to eat watercress and cherries. Paloma talked about her oncologist and his insistence that she should only eat red meat once in a while, drink a glass of red wine every day, have regular massages and to keep herself stress-free.

‘Ah, that’s my favourite piece of advice,’ I said; though, oddly, it was my local shopkeeper rather than my oncologist who offered it to me. ‘What you need to do, dear,’ she insisted to me and Mum when I first made it the twenty yards to her store after Chemo 1, ‘is remove all stress from your life. Work, money, worries, everything. Let everyone else take care of that. You just concentrate on you.’

It’s fortunate that I was in a position to do that. My super-supportive company signed me off immediately, P took all the financial stuff in hand (not altogether a bad thing for a girl with an iTunes-and-handbag habit like mine), and my folks looked after the running of the flat whenever they were here. Everything just got done. The only stress I had was the one the tumour inflicted on me, which, frankly, was rather enough worry in the first place. Pre-cancer, however, my sister-in-law and I shared another similarity.
Around
a year before we happened upon the evil activity beneath our left nipples, we both experienced a pretty rough ride in our jobs – the kind that finds you tetchy and sleep-deprived and makes you row with your husband for forcing you out of bed in the mornings.

‘That kind of stress causes the cancer,’ asserted my sister-in-law. I found myself half-heartedly agreeing out of politeness. She saw straight through me. ‘No, no, it’s true,’ she assured me. ‘My oncologist says it.’ Now I’d only had a handful of sessions with my oncologist, but there was no way I could imagine Glamorous Assistant telling me that stress caused cancer any more than I could imagine her telling me to have a G&T every morning or that a diet of chocolate fondue would be a fast-track to better health. But Paloma’s clearly believed it. As did she. And that’s where our stories differed.

It’s funny how a bit of sea can separate two countries’ conclusions about The Bullshit. On this side of the Channel, it seems, we’re far more careful about the semantics. Just as ‘no trace of cancer’ is acceptable where ‘cancer free’ isn’t, I’m sure most British-based doctors would tap-dance around the statement that stress ‘causes’ cancer. And, from what I’ve gathered from my sister-in-law, Spanish oncologists place much more emphasis than their British counterparts on lifestyle and stress and attitude and positive thinking – those strange unquantifiables that can’t be measured through a blood test. And though I didn’t admit it in the course of that conversation, to my mind, that is a bloody risky strategy. We’re supposed to be able to control stress, aren’t we, lowering it as we would our cholesterol. So if stress leads to cancer, does that make those of us who’ve had it responsible? If we can’t maintain a positive attitude, does that mean we’re making things worse?

It’s a funny one, this stress lark. Though I think there’s only a very tenuous medical connection between stress and good health (in that some say it can weaken the immune system), I don’t doubt that it plays a part. I have no basis to back it up but, at the risk of getting all new-age on you, I’ve always been a big believer in the link between the mental and the physical. Even at a simple level – blushing when you’re embarrassed, shaking when you’re nervous, working yourself up to the point of puke on the morning of your driving test, getting butterflies in your stomach before a first date. But suggesting that stress causes cancer? Sheesh. If that were the case, there’d be a chemo carriage on every underground train.

The problem, I think, is that it’s human nature to search for answers. Why did this happen to me? Is it something I did wrong? What could I have done differently? So attributing stress to cancer might just be a case of finding an answer where there isn’t one. And granted, in occasional moments of rage, I’ve blamed The Bullshit on my getting wound up by everything from shouty bosses to estate agents to bad referees to James Blunt. But in reality, I can’t believe that. I can’t believe it because that would make the cancer my fault. And there are plenty of things I’ll take responsibility for – the pink nail varnish on our white bed linen, clogging up the Sky+ with episodes of
Hollyoaks
, having once had a crush on Mick Hucknall – but The Bullshit just ain’t one of them. And tough as it is to come to terms with having nothing to blame it all on but a crappy combination of oestrogen and shit luck, that’s just the way it’s going to have to be.
Que sera sera
.

CHAPTER 34

Happy birthday

June 2009

‘Oh, just be calm,’ said the seen-it-all-before technician as I zipped up my dress after last week’s yearly mammogram. ‘Try to relax.’ I turned green, bursting out of the seams of my frock.

‘Relax?’ I roared. ‘RELAX?!’ (I fear I became Brian Blessed for a moment.) ‘How can I possibly relax? The last time I had one of these things,’ I said, disdainfully pointing to the machine that had just squashed my right breast like a stress ball, ‘it wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, and I ended up with BREAST CANCER. I’m assuming it says that on your clipboard there?’ I think she actually found my reaction funny, and sneaked out a little half-grin, demonstrably not believing that I was every bit as serious as the illness I’d been diagnosed with.

My last mammogram was done at Smiley Surgeon’s clinic, mere minutes before my diagnosis. I hadn’t even realised I’d be having one that day – as far as I was concerned, I was just going to the hospital to get the results of a ‘routine biopsy’ on my ‘cyst’. And, given that I’d paid for that consultation in order to have it eight weeks sooner than I would have done on the NHS,
it
could all be done – the test, the results, the lot – in one day. By the time I’d re-dressed after my mammogram, the X-ray scans were already being printed out. And so, with this as my only melon-squeezing experience, I was optimistic that I’d know again this time – despite being in a different hospital – whether anything was awry on the day of my mammogram.