The C-Word (32 page)

‘I’ll level with you,’ I said to the technician as I unhooked my bra before she set the machine working. ‘I’m really bloody frightened about this.’ She half-grinned, in what was clearly her default unhelpful reaction to everything. ‘And so I really want you to tell me if you see anything untoward,’ I pleaded.

‘I can’t do that,’ she snapped. ‘I can’t say anything; I’m not allowed. You have to wait to hear from the doctors.’

Tears fell from my eyes onto the edge of the machine before me. ‘And how long is that going to be?’ I whimpered.

‘I’d say two to three weeks. They’ll write to you. Or call. Sometimes they call.’ I assumed ‘sometimes’ meant ‘if there’s a problem’.

I continued to cry as the machine did its thing, both from the pain of my flattened bust, and the pain of a protracted wait for my results. ‘Okay, good,’ said the technician as the whirring eventually ground to a halt. My head spun round in her direction. Was that ‘good’ as in there’s nothing showing up, or good as in we’re done? I daren’t ask, for fear of the same I’m-not-telling-you reaction, and concern that my increasingly wounded-child-spliced-with-the-Incredible-Hulk demeanour would have seen me grab hold of her head and ram it between the same metal plates that had just turned my right tit to mincemeat.

And so now, we wait.

Again.

A-fucking-gain.

I’m holding it together as best I can, keeping as busy as my tiredness allows, and pretending I can ignore every sound from
my
phone or rattle of the letterbox. I’m trying to change any subject that relates to The Bullshit, push all negative thought to the back of my mind and work through all the anxiety-calming Q&A tactics Mr Marbles taught me to use whenever my worries find a way of surfacing. (Is this a rational thought? Do I have any reason to believe it’s true? Can I back it up?) The trouble with that, though, is that my mind sometimes likes to play smartarse and think it’s too clever for that kind of therapy malarkey. ‘Well, yes, actually,’ it’ll say, sarcastically. ‘That worry
is
rational and, yes, you do have reason to believe it and, yes, you can even back it up – hell, the last time you assumed your boobs were cancer-free, it came back to bite you on the ass good and proper, so screw Marbles and his calming tactics and keep tucking into those biscuits.’

But rational thought, of course, isn’t necessarily about making yourself feel better. Ultimately, you’ve got to deal in fact. And so people can say ‘you’ll be okay’ and ‘there won’t be a problem’ and ‘I just know it’ll be fine’ as much as they want, but do they really know that everything’s going to be okay? Can they really feel it in their water? Of course not. No more than I can or the doctors can or The Piss-Taking God Of Cancer Fuck-Ups can. And so much of my focus at the moment is going into nodding politely whenever somebody does say something like that, and biting my lip to stop myself launching into a monologue about how I have to be open to receiving bad news, how I’m trying to prepare myself for the worst and how I’d hate to say I told you so if I got the kind of diagnosis that would satisfy nothing but my fondness for symmetry.

The shit truth here is that there’s not a single sodding thing I can do about those unknown results either way. If there’s cancer in my right boob (having had everything scooped out of the left, there was no reason to scan that side), then I’m just going to have to scream a few expletives, accept it, hitch up my
skirt
and wade through the swamp of whatever treatment they can give me for a second time.

And if there isn’t any sign of further Bullshit then it’s going to be one hell of a Glastonbury.

*

A YEAR TO
the day that I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was due to have my new nipple tattooed. I had been offered a couple of appointment slots that week, but figured that heading to the Nipple Clinic (how I wish it were really called that) on the day of my Bullshit anniversary was rather poetic and so, ever one to find the romance in a situation, I chose 17 June as the day on which I could replace the nipple that Smiley Surgeon suggested removing a year ago.

Even twelve months down the line I remained every bit as freaked out by my diagnosis as I was upon hearing it.
What, me? Breast cancer? Are you sure?
It still felt like I was talking about someone else – some poor sod I’d read about in a first-person magazine feature, or heard about in an eavesdropped conversation on the bus. It hadn’t sunk in. It still hasn’t sunk in. It may never sink in.

Having been for my mammogram a week previous, P and I had spent several days calling the hospital at least twice every twenty-four hours to check on the arrival of my results. The pair of us were as jumpy as kangaroos on a trampoline, and almost leapt out of our skins when a high-pitched voice called my name in the waiting room. I looked up to see who’d chirped so cheerily, and there stood a bubbly blonde burst of energy, all impressive eyeshadow and bright pink cardigan. Everything about her – her clothes, her make-up, her hair, her shoes – screamed ‘colour is what I do’. The Pink Lady, as it turned out, was a
breast
care nurse by trade, but took additional training to become a nipple colour specialist who helps women replace the areolas that were lost as part of their mastectomies. I expect ‘colour specialist’ is the wrong title. It’s bound to be something more medically impressive than that. Substitute Areola Consultant, perhaps, or Professor of Nipular Restoration.

At the beginning of my appointment, The Pink Lady passed me a photo album that filled my head with more images of boobs than a year’s subscription to
Playboy
. As I flicked through the pages, I marvelled at ‘before’ pictures of one-nipple busts alongside ‘after’ photographs showing proud, completed racks of double-nippled glory. I tried to make all the right noises that suggested applause rather than arousal, but I dare say it was all a bit
Kinky Changing Rooms
, with tattooed areolas as
trompe l’œil
(Laurence Llewellyn Bowen would be proud), and with my tit as the next candidate for a makeover. And so The Pink Lady took out a Polaroid camera (I assumed she had to use an instant camera – I couldn’t see the Boots processing counter turning a blind eye to a film full of tits) and took a photograph of my ‘before’ boob. During which, of course, I giggled like an idiot.

As I lay back on the bed, The Pink Lady leaned over me and inspected my non-nipple against my right one. ‘Hmm,’ she pondered. ‘They’re a lovely pale rose pink, aren’t they?’ I could have kissed her. What a wonderful compliment. It may have been the loveliest I’d ever had, and so I overlooked her use of the plural when I was demonstrably singular in the nipple department. ‘I think we’re going to need a very pale pink with a hint of fawn or brown,’ she continued. As she buzzed away at my breast with exactly the same kind of tattoo-machine that had created the star
on
my wrist, I tried to think back to my days in interiors magazines, frantically attempting to recall the names of pink paints with a hint of fawn so I could freak her out with my own colour knowledge. ‘Hm, yes, I imagine it’s a good match for Farrow & Ball’s Ointment Pink, wouldn’t you say? Or Dulux Strawberries ’n’ Cream, perhaps?’ Thankfully, I stopped short of being such a smartarse, which is probably wise given my cheeks’ tendency to turn Cinder Rose.

But, pleased as I was to have an optical illusion of a nupple whose colour almost resembled its mirror image, I couldn’t help but be a teensy bit disappointed. With my new boob, the replacement silicone implant didn’t just make up for the one that was taken away, but positively pissed on its bonfire with its perky, shapely, roundness. The replacement nipple, however, seemed to be merely the poor cousin to my right nipple. Because, as impressive as The Pink Lady’s tattooing obviously is, it’s not
that
good. And so I dare say that colouring in the twisted bit of skin that I call a nupple was a bit like putting Mac lipstick on a pig.

It might have been my attitude on that day, of course. Perhaps if I’d been for my nipple tattooing a week later, say, or even before my yearly mammogram, I’d have been in an altogether different frame of mind.

‘How is it?’ enquired P as I returned from the consultation room.

‘It’s, um, it’s just meh,’ I answered, unhelpfully.

‘Meh?’ repeated P.

‘Meh. Just meh. You’ll see,’ I said.

‘Okay, babe,’ he said, carrying my handbag as we walked out of the clinic. ‘So what now, then? Shall we head home and chill out?’

‘Yeah, okay,’ I agreed. ‘But there’s something I have to do first.’

Without needing clarification, P reached into my bag for the phone.

It wasn’t just my desire for a happy cancerversary that led me to hope for news of a clear mammogram result on 17 June. For starters, I dreaded the thought of getting my results mid-Glastonbury, and learning half-cut in front of the Pyramid stage that my festival was being brought to an abrupt halt by yet more unwanted activity beneath my bra. By getting a clear result today, I thought, I could declare this Glastonbury
mine
, and enjoy it in the way I had intended since buying my tickets on that gloomy mid-chemo day in October. But bigger even than my hopes for a fun festival was my desire for a neat finish to this book. As I’ve revealed in the course of these pages, I’m a sucker for a clearly defined finish, and the thought of having to end this story on a cancer recurrence – or, worse still, an inconclusive result – worried me as much as the return of a tumour. I wanted this book to end tidily and exactly: A Year In The Life Of The Bullshit. I wanted to mark my first cancer anniversary like a particularly poignant birthday, and proudly declare the previous 365 days The Year I Wrote A Book – and not The Year I Had Cancer.

But, clear result or no clear result, even this foolish optimist knew that 17 June 2009 would not be the end of the road. There was plenty more to do. Because as much as the more hardcore phase of my Bullshit experience had tied itself up in a neat twelve months, the bigger battle was going to last a lifetime. And whether it was a year on from my diagnosis or thirty years on, I suspected the nervous, looming feeling I had in my belly as I called the hospital for my mammogram result would be exactly the same year upon year.

‘Fuck, P, she’s calling me back in a minute. That can’t be good, can it?’

‘What the? No. NO,’ snapped P from the steering-wheel, his voice raising with every syllable. ‘Tell me EXACTLY what she said.’

‘She said she had my results in front of her but needed to talk to a doctor before she could tell me what they were.’

‘Is that definitely what she told you?’ bawled P accusatorily.

‘Yes. Definitely … I think so. SHIT, P, I CAN’T THINK!’

‘Why would she say that?’ he screamed directly at the stream of tourists ignoring his right of way at Marble Arch. ‘WHY THE FUCK WOULD SHE SAY THAT?’

‘Ohgodohgodohgodohgod,’ I mumbled, digging my nails into my thighs as I sat on my hands, rocking in the passenger seat.

When we got home, P and I tossed our bags into the living room and ourselves on the bed, lying back beside each other, staring up at the white ceiling in petrified silence. The phone rang.

‘Sis! Fo shizzle ma nizzle,’ sang Jamie from the other end of the receiver. ‘What’s goin’ dow—’

‘No-J-can’t-now-waiting-for-mammogram-result,’ I mumbled, turning my sentence into a single, unidentifiable word.

‘Shit, okay. Laters,’ he said, hanging up – turning from rapper to rapped in a nanosecond.

‘Just Jamie,’ I said to P, confirming what he already knew.

‘Why does that always happen?’ P whined. ‘You can go a whole day without the sodding phone ringing and then just when you’re expecting a big one …’

‘Like buses,’ I mumbled, too preoccupied to reply with anything other than the obvious cliché.

We resumed our position, side by side on the bed, with a couple of inches of white cotton separating us, too nervous even to allow our fingers to touch; inspecting the imperfections on a ceiling I’d come to know as well as the face in my mirror.

And then it came. ‘This is it,’ I said, recognising the caller ID. P sat upright and crossed his legs, holding his head in his hands in the same way he had after we’d discovered the severity of my diagnosis.

‘Hi, this is Lisa, hi,’ I answered, hurriedly. ‘Can you tell me now?’

‘Lisa, yes, sorry about that,’ came the nurse’s voice, pausing for a dramatic emphasis I didn’t appreciate. ‘It’s clear.’

CHAPTER 35

Best foot forward

July 2009

During the Top 40 culmination of the tabloid-fest that was The Battle of Britpop, I was hanging by the scruff of my Fred Perry T-shirt off the railings at the back of my family’s rented beach chalet, trying to get a radio signal to determine whether Blur or Oasis had come in at number one. I fear ‘beach chalet’ paints something of a misleading picture, actually – in truth it was a yellow, wasp-attracting wood-hut protecting the sleepy (nay, comatose) town of Sutton-on-Sea from the bitingly harsh (and, let’s be honest, probably radioactive) Lincolnshire tide. It was where my family spent the same two weeks every summer and, in 1995, the soundtrack to my fortnight was Blur’s ‘Country House’.

Fast forward fourteen years to last Sunday night, somewhere halfway back in the crowd of Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage and, as a newly reformed Blur played the same song, thoughts of wasp stings, chips with scraps and shaking sand out of my Adidas Sambas immediately filled my head. ‘Country House’ is by no means a terrific record, granted (and wasn’t that just the
irony
of The Battle of Britpop?), but in a couple of bars’ worth of oompah-ing brass, I was back in Sutton-on-Sea.

Given the link between pop songs and old memories, then, it’s probably no coincidence that I’ve bought more albums in the last three months than I have in the entirety of the past year. You might consider that an odd decision, given that I’ve had so much time on my hands over the last twelve months that I could have easily reached recognising-songs-backwards familiarity with the combined back catalogues of everyone from Pink Floyd to Elvis Presley. But in truth, I didn’t really pay much attention to music during my Bullshit year. It left an undisputed gap, I’ll admit, but I put my indifference down to a simple lack of anything bordering on interest, energy or drive.