The C-Word (6 page)

P furrowed his brow to match mine. ‘Sorry, um, I’m not – we’re not …’ he began, in a purposeful, alien voice that disguised his Liverpool roots. (The question in his head, I assumed, was, ‘What the frig are you on about, la?’)

‘Depending on the histology results, the professor may decide, for instance, that it’s safe to delay your chemotherapy by a few weeks in order to have this course of hormones,’ continued the Egg Man, unconsciously marking dots on his notepad with a Biro. ‘That’s assuming the tumour is only where we believe it to be. And then there’s the matter of whether or not the tumour is hormone receptive. If so, it might not be sensible to pump you full of
oestrogen
if that’s what’s caused the problem in the first place.’

‘Well, no,’ I agreed. ‘So, then – let me get this straight. If my cancer is oestrogen receptive, I shouldn’t have the hormone treatment. And if it isn’t, we can go ahead with it.’

‘Provided the tumour is only where we believe it to be,’ he repeated.

‘Well, yes. Right,’ I said, superstitiously tapping his wooden desk. ‘And how will you find this out?’ I asked, more concerned about inter-hospital administration than the actual histology report.

‘The professor will ring me with the result.’

‘That’s okay then,’ I concluded, satisfied that the critical details of my tumour weren’t being sent to him via carrier pigeon or telepathy or somesuch.

‘I can’t think about any of that shit right now,’ I said to P as we made our way from the fertility clinic to the hospital. ‘There’s just no room in my head.’

He moved his hand from around my waist to the small of my back – as he did on the day of my diagnosis, as he always does when trying to protect me – and said, ‘That’s fine, babe. One thing at a time, eh?’ I grabbed his hand tightly as we walked up the ramp to the hospital entrance, wheeling behind us the suitcase that we’d normally take on romantic weekend escapes.

Before showing me to my room, my professor’s nurse introduced me to the sister on my ward. ‘This is Lisa,’ she said. ‘She’s here for her mastectomy.’

A frown appeared over the top of her spectacles as Sister looked suspiciously from my face to my bust, as though we might have been having her on about the breast cancer. I knew the look in her eye. The ‘but she’s so young’ look. I’d later come to see that same look in the oncology clinic and
the
chemo room and the wig shop. ‘Oh,’ she said, devoid of emotion. ‘I see.’

Clocking the potential awkwardness of the situation, my nurse quickly led me away, changing the subject with talk of how, prior to my op, she’d be accompanying me and Prof – I loved how she called him ‘Prof’ – to a clinic round the corner so that I could be injected with the radioactive dye that would determine whether the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes (known in the trade as a ‘sentinel node biopsy’, fact-fans).

‘So how are you feeling?’ Prof asked, as the three of us climbed into a people carrier that was parked outside the front of the hospital.

‘Oh, y’know.’ I grinned. ‘I’m fine. Great.’ I smiled a little wider, wondering whether it was the dread that was forcing me into being so cheery, or the fact that this man was about to remove from my body the tumour that was threatening to see me off before I’d even hit thirty. Probably the latter, I figured. (Hell, if you can’t be nice to the man who’s about to save your life, you’ve got to wonder whether your life is worth saving at all.) ‘How’s
your
week been, anyway?’ I asked, keen both to force normal conversation and to suck up to my surgeon. ‘Have you been working every day?’

‘Oh, not every day,’ he said. ‘I had a day at Wimbledon this week.’

‘Ooh! Me too! I went yesterday!’ I squealed. ‘Who did you see?’

‘Ladies.’ He paused. ‘I can’t understand why they grunt like that,’ he said, as I basked in the appreciation of being able to enjoy a chat about grunting tennis players immediately before the most worrying event of my life. ‘There
really
is no anatomical reason why they need to do it,’ he continued. ‘It’s off-putting, don’t you think?’

I nodded emphatically. ‘Absolutely,’ I concurred. ‘Ab. So. Lutely.’ (I suspected I’d have been agreeing with him just as forcefully if he’d suggested removing my breast with an ice-cream scoop, or that chopping off my left leg would improve my chance of survival.)

‘And you? Who did you see?’ he asked, turning his head to acknowledge me on the back seat.

‘I saw Nadal,’ I told him. ‘It was brilliant. We had such a fantastic time. My old boss gave us the tickets in the hope that it would take our minds off today.’

‘And did it?’ he wondered, raising his eyebrows.

‘Definitely,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s good.’ He smiled. ‘And have you felt okay for the rest of the week?’

I glossed over the tears and the tapas and the terror, instead telling him that the past few days had been ‘weird’. I joked that breast cancer had so far felt like having a
Groundhog Day
birthday, complete with wonderful gestures, breakfast in bed, cards, calls, letters, gifts, flowers, vouchers, cakes, visitors, chocolates, drawings from kids and a seahorse-shaped helium balloon.

‘You’ve got a good team around you, then,’ he replied, still smiling.

‘Yep. At home
and
at the hospital,’ I said, narrowly resisting the urge to wink.

The three of us continued to exchange beams and banter at the clinic as the professor drew markings on me in blue pen – one circling my soon-to-be-deceased nipple where he’d be accessing the inside of my breast, another underneath my armpit where he’d be collecting the sample of lymph nodes for my mid-op biopsy, and a final six-inch-
long
oval on my back, where he’d be taking some muscle that would form the basis of my new surgery-crafted tit.

‘You’re doing really well,’ he said as he injected my underarm with radioactive dye.

I blushed, making as many dumb jokes as the situation allowed in the hope of coming across as girly and grateful rather than terse and terrified. The nurse gave me a caring rub on the shoulder as she helped me into my dress before we headed back to the hospital. ‘Here we go, then,’ I said with a shrug as we waited for the lift, the nurse and professor both staring at me with what I could only assume was compassion in their eyes.

‘We were talking about you yesterday,’ said my professor in his surgery gear, gesturing to the nurse as he pushed the button to the ground floor. ‘And I have to say, I’m so impressed with how you’ve handled all of this so far.’ My eyes widened and tears took their cue to form as he continued, ‘I wish I could be more like you.’

Astonished by his compliment, I lost the power of speech. ‘Pfah!’ I exhaled, incomprehensibly. ‘Wha … well, hah.’ He continued to smile at me as I made a prize twat of myself. ‘Crikey, well, I don’t know about that,’ I eventually retorted, my inability to know what to do with a compliment showing no signs of improving. I shuffled about uncomfortably, muttering ‘thank you’ and feeling grateful when the lift doors opened. Every time I’ve since relived that moment in my head – which is, at the last count, precisely 693, 821 times – I’m far cooler than I was in reality, playfully nudging his shoulder with a wink and an, ‘Aw, I bet you say that to all your patients.’ But, goofy as I was at the time, I couldn’t escape the feeling of smugness that the man I was fast coming to hold in such sky-high esteem had said that
he
wanted to be more like
me
. It was like getting a report card
filled
with As, and I make no apologies for lapping up my opportunity to become teacher’s pet.

Back on the ward, P, my folks and Jamie were waiting around the bed that was to become my base for the next five days, doing what they could to make my room feel less like a hospital and more like a student dorm: P tucking in a teddy bear, Mum tending to flowers, Dad setting up an iPod docking station, and Jamie blu-tacking a Foo Fighters greeting card that opened out into a phwoar-tastic poster of Dave Grohl. I changed into my gown and squeezed my calves into DVT socks, recommending some swanky local shops they might like to visit during the six hours I was expected to be in theatre. It was stupid, really – pretending that they’d be out on a jolly shopping trip rather than biting their nails to the bone until such a time as I was wheeled back to them – each of them was as frightened as me, and avoidance of the issue seemed like the best – if not the only – tactic.

‘Are you ready to go then, darlin’?’ asked a head that popped round the door.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’ I shrugged. ‘Come on, then,’ I said, glancing over to my fraught-looking parents. ‘Let’s do this thing.’ My bravado didn’t last long – barely enough time for Mum, Dad and Jamie to kiss me and tell me that they loved me – for by the time I was wheeled out to the lift, gripping P’s hand all the while, I was already in tears. My eyes burned with pure fear as I begged a higher force to let me wake up with this
thing
– this
bastard thing
– successfully removed from my body, never to return again. I looked nowhere other than into P’s beautiful eyes – even as I was introduced to the anaesthetist – thinking that, if I wasn’t going to survive this, they would be the last thing I’d wish to see.

‘Have you had a general anaesthetic before?’ asked the anaesthetist. I shook my head, still weeping. ‘Well, there’s nothing to worry about,’ he continued. ‘It’ll just be like having a few G&Ts.’

My head answered, ‘I could do with one of those,’ but I didn’t have the energy to articulate the thought, so fixated was I on my husband’s loving face as the needle entered the back of my hand.

And then, with one too many shots of Gordon’s, I was asleep.

CHAPTER 6

The equaliser

Ah, morphine. I’m whizzed off my tits.

I mean tit.

And, in the drug-induced spirit of everything being lovely, here’s a thing to melt your heart. I just found the following text on my husband’s phone (I may be flat out in a hospital bed, but I’m still sneaky enough to check people’s phones when they’re not looking): ‘I know this is a strange message to send to my mother-in-law, but I’ve just seen your daughter’s left breast and it looks amazing.’ And I thought the morphine was good.

I might have a discoloured, odd-looking, wonky mound of flesh for a left tit, a strapless-top-restricting scar on my back and a catheter full of green wee (it’s the dye, not the asparagus) but it’s all for good reason: ding dong, the lump is dead!

But, in the bonfire-pissing spirit of cancer, there’s bad news, too: accompanying my left tit in a hospital waste bin (I’m assuming) are the lymph nodes from my left armpit. The lot of them. That big bad bitch of a tumour had crept up a considerable way into my underarm (we’ll find out how far later after some careful tracking on Google Maps or whatever it is they use), but thankfully my smiley, sent-from-heaven,
super-hero
surgeon whipped them all out in one go. So, despite the setback, I reckon I can justifiably report that, in this match, I’ve just come from behind to score a wonder-goal of an equaliser (Smiley Surgeon with the blinding assist).

Lisa 1, The Bullshit 1. I’d do a celebratory Klinsmann dive, but I fear it might smart a bit.

*

‘STILL MILKING THIS
breast cancer lark, then?’ asked Jamie as he walked into my room the morning after my mastectomy.

‘Piss off,’ I retorted, grinning at him as he removed his jacket. ‘Actually, J, Mum and Dad wanted me to keep this a secret from you, but I really think you ought to know that you were a mistake.’ He winked at me as I beckoned him round to the other side of the bed. ‘Seriously though, mate, just check this for me, will you?’ I asked, pointing down towards the swamp-coloured catheter that was out of his line of sight.

‘Sure, sis, what’s th …? Oh jeez, you bitch,’ he said in disgust upon seeing my bag of green piss. Jamie might be a big, manly, sport-obsessed geezer, but he’s a squeamish one at that. I laughed as much as my painful chest would allow, threatening to show him my bloody wound if he continued to rib his sick sibling.

I’m always excited to see Jamie, but especially so on this day. Because, when you’re bedridden and bruised, wearing this season’s über-chic hospital gown in unfamiliar, worrying surroundings, with tubes seemingly coming out of every orifice, there is genuinely no better person to enforce some normality on the situation than Jamie. He really ought to hire himself out to people in these circum-stances. Either that, or he should be on hospital radio. ‘Suck
it
up, whingers,’ he’d chirp, before playing ‘Everybody Hurts’, ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ or – for added shock-jock emphasis – ‘Another One Bites The Dust’.

Our telephone call outside the tapas restaurant was the last serious talk Jamie and I had about cancer. To this day, every conversation between us that’s involved The Bullshit has never been more than two strides away from humour. Even in the darkest moments of chemo, he’d delight in teasing me for being a hypochondriac, call me ‘tit face’ and insist to anyone who’d listen that the breast cancer was just another one of my attention-seeking tactics – all of which I’d let him get away with. For a famously close brother and sister like me and Jamie, not having a laugh with each other would have been as much of a tragedy as the breast cancer itself. Not just a tragedy, but plain
weird
. This wonderfully welcome piss-taking precedent was set the moment I was wheeled out from the theatre recovery room. Despite the expected post-op lethargy, when I first opened my eyes to see P and my family lining up outside my room, I found enough energy to give Jamie the middle finger before falling back into my morphine-assisted slumber.

What I didn’t notice in that bird-flipping moment, however, was the relief etched on my family’s faces, nor the tears that fell as I was being lifted from the trolley to my hospital bed. Because, while I was being unconsciously operated on, they had been busy tying themselves in worried knots. So in many ways, I had the easy job. After all, they were the ones who had to wander aimlessly around Central London as Smiley Surgeon cut around the outline of my nipple to access the tumour he spent an afternoon removing. They were the ones who forced themselves into time-occupying shopping missions (flowers, cards, a new charm for my bracelet, a lavender pillow to help me sleep)
while
my breast was replaced with a deflated, tissue-expanding temporary implant. And they were the ones who waited anxiously at the hospital, jumping at every noise, as my scheduled six-hour surgery sailed past the eight-hour mark. Sometimes, I guess, it’s better to be the one in the shit than the one worrying about whoever’s covered in it.