The C-Word (7 page)

I don’t remember a lot about the next few days in hospital, which is either to do with the on-tap morphine or the fact that it was so mind-numbingly boring – BBC Glastonbury coverage aside – that my brain immediately erased the lot, but what I do recall are the looks on the faces of my visitors as they sheepishly peered around my hospital door. It became clear that Jamie’s teasing tactics weren’t going to be everyone’s style, and I could see that I was going to have to become skilled in figuring out within fifteen seconds of a visit how other people would want to play it. One friend immediately burst into tears, so I comforted her as best I could. Another’s face drained of colour, so I offered him some of my many chocolates. Another was a terrifyingly animated version of her usual chirpy self. One mate’s opening line was, ‘Crikey, your hair looks good.’ Another’s was, ‘All right, sicknote.’ And another threw a packet of Monster Munch at me as he walked into the room.

Lovely as it was to be so inundated with well-wishers, it was my first taste of feeling like a museum exhibit; a freak-show to be viewed in single-file. (Roll up, roll up, for the one-breasted woman!) But rather than play the part of the ill person or feel conscious about my new, wonky-looking chest, I gave the people what they wanted, patting my non-tit whenever it was mentioned, waving around the drainage bottles that were collecting the excess blood from my wounds, and cracking as many cancer jokes as I could (the aforementioned ‘whizzed off my tit’ became my personal
favourite
). It made me feel better. It made them feel better. And it was the best weapon I had in my cancer-beating arsenal.

During one visit, though, the jolly stuff didn’t come quite so easily. It was the afternoon after my surgery when Smiley Surgeon first came to see me, and it was Mum’s turn to be on keeping-me-company duty. In walked my hero, all beaming pleasantries and ear-wide smile, demonstrably pleased with his work.

‘You look really well,’ he said cheerily as he greeted me and Mum.

‘Ha, cheers,’ I blushed as Mum moved to stand beside my bed, offering him a captive audience for whatever it was he was about to say.

‘So the operation went well,’ he continued as we nodded along like two plastic dogs in a rear windscreen. ‘However, the sentinel node biopsy showed a spread to your lymph nodes, so I removed them immediately,’ he revealed.

I gulped, shooting a sideways glance at Mum, who was equally stumped for words. I wasn’t shocked, necessarily. Hell, I was maxed out on shock – I reckon if he’d revealed that a blind work-experience volunteer had operated on me, I’d have stayed reasonably unruffled. Perhaps it was more disappointment. ‘So it
did
spread,’ I conceded calmly, though I’m not sure to whom.

‘It did, yes.’ He nodded. ‘But I’m very optimistic. Remember, it has all gone now; it has all been removed. And the chemotherapy will mop up any rogue cells that are too small to operate on.’

As was fast becoming the case during these bombshell moments, I stopped listening, leaving it to Mum to ask questions and talk prognosis and histology reports (thanks
to
working in a hospital, she’s down with that kind of language). While they talked, I tried to reason with the news in my mind. ‘Let’s look at the facts,’ I told myself. ‘First it was in my tit. Then it crept into my lymph system. But it’s out now. It’s gone. He’s got rid of it. So yes, it’s a bigger deal than you thought it was, but has it really made any difference? Did you even know what lymph nodes were before all of this? Would you be able to draw them in a game of Pictionary? No. So what the hell can they have been doing that’s so vital to your well-being? Come on, now, people live perfectly long and fulfilled lives without a kidney, and you know what they’re for. So what’s a few lymph nodes between friends?’ I dare say the industrial-strength painkillers helped with my sober reasoning, and Mum’s relaxed insistence that it didn’t matter to the outcome as long as the nodes had been removed freaked me out more for her enforced calmness than the news itself.

I appreciate that this is yet another stoically British way of looking at things, but, really, when the worst has happened, what does another setback matter? It’s like getting soaked in the rain on your way home and then stepping in a puddle. Yes, it’s a pisser, but can you really be arsed getting that worked up about it? I spoke about this with Ant recently, after which she likened me to one of those battleaxes that French and Saunders used to play – chopping off a finger by accident and feeding it to the dog, then slicing off another when the other dog looked hungry. ‘Ah well, love, what’s another finger?’ she mocked.

The thing is, in the series of mini-battles that characterised my first few days in hospital, to me, the grade-three reality of my cancer was just another hurdle to jump. In the situation I found myself – with even sitting up straight or drinking a cup of tea seeming like a huge deal – all sense of
perspective
was launching itself out of my fourth-floor window.

For example, the day I managed to put on my pyjamas was a huge deal to me. This sounds pretty daft now I see it written down, but at the time, with the pain in my chest and back that I couldn’t precisely locate and the stiffness that prevented me from moving my left arm properly, even bending my elbow to reach inside my pyjama sleeve was quite the achievement. (Not least because they won the prize for The World’s Least Attractive Sleepwear. I’d only let Mum buy them because it made her feel better.) It was so much of an achievement, in fact, that it became the first in a series of triumphant cancer-milestone photos sent via media message from my mum to my brother, in which I’m giving him yet another middle finger. It’s not your average family album, granted, but it’s cherished nonetheless. (‘There’s Lisa in hospital, giving Jamie the middle finger. That’s Lisa again, with the first meal she ate after chemo, giving Jamie the middle finger. And there’s Lisa in her headscarf, giving Jamie the middle finger …’)

Another goal was achieved the first time I walked down the ward corridor. Actually, waddled is a more accurate description. In fact, my first few steps were as far removed from a confident catwalk strut as you’re likely to get, thanks to a baggier-on-the-left pyjama top and my having to shuffle about with a bag of drainage tubes on one side and a bag of piss on the other (Mulberry eat your heart out). You’d think it would have been the hospital-issue handbags that would have embarrassed me the most, and yet, when I spotted Tills and her husband Si at the other end of the corridor, my strange combination of joy at seeing them and shame at them seeing me was more down to my grandma-chic spotty pyjamas than the bottle of urine in my right hand.

But the biggest fence to jump came in an even more unsavoury form – and equally unsavoury surroundings: the toilet. The cancer, I was just about getting my head around. But the constipation? Shit! (Or no shit, as the case may be.) Sheesh, those leaflets they hand over on diagnosis should read, ‘Welcome to breast cancer. Leave your vanity at the door and let’s crack on, shall we?’

It’s a simple equation, really. General anaesthetic + loads of drugs = an arse that’s as tough to crack as the Enigma Code. And so, on my penultimate afternoon in hospital, I put a nurse through the unenviable task of shoving a suppository up my jacksie (at the end of her shift, poor cow!), and later watched P’s best man wince as he was uncomfortably sandwiched in the middle of a mid-visit medical conversation about the softness of my stools. (Vanity? What vanity?) It’s a good job P and I had married already, or that could have been some serious ammunition for his speech.

But after hardship, of course, comes relief. And later that evening, to the televised sound of 15,000 Wimbledon tennis fans on my hospital TV (and a coach-like husband willing me on from the other side of the toilet door), I produced my own Murray-esque fightback. ‘Thank you, Wimbledon,’ I said to myself in the mirror as I washed my hands. ‘You were a wonderful crowd. I couldn’t have done it without you.’

CHAPTER 7

Save Ferris

July 2008

Nobody ever enjoyed ill health (in particular the attention it brings) quite like my grandad. After having heart surgery, he spent the subsequent few years sitting in his chair breathing loudly, with a hand placed purposefully over his heart, just itching for someone to acknowledge it.

After my diagnosis, I joked that perhaps I could attract the same kind of attention by walking about with my hand constantly on my left tit. And ta-dah! Here I am, sitting in the chair beside my hospital bed, typing with my right hand while grabbing my prosthetic boob with my left. My left arm remains pretty screwed – to the point of not being able to tie my hair back and needing someone to dress me – so holding onto my prosthetic tit is as good a use as any for it, eh? Call it physiotherapy.

But yes, the falsie. Cancer really does get more glamorous by the day, I tells ya. Just as I was enjoying the joyful moment of being unplugged from my various wound drains before being discharged from my five-day hospital stay, in comes my very lovely (and always-bloody-right-about-everything) breast nurse
to
fit me for the bra that I must wear, day and night, until someone tells me otherwise. Believe me, this brassiere is no Agent Provocateur contender. But more of that later.

What the bra does have, however, is a handy little pocket to house the prosthetic boob that I’m currently sporting (keep an eye out for them next Fashion Week). It’s round and foamy and stuffed with lambswool, and it feels a bit like a novelty clown’s nose (honk honk). And while I’m thankful for it in the meantime so I don’t have to look all wonky-chested in my high-necked clothes, I’ll be more enthusiastic when we can eventually get round to the fun of inflating my currently flat saline implant. (That said, it’ll be limited fun – it’s only got my usual B-cup level to imitate, so we’ll hardly be putting it to the Dolly Parton test.)

Speaking of inflation, there’s been a weird side-effect on that front that I hadn’t really bargained for. You’ve seen
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
, right? (The kinda crap ’70s one, not the trippy Johnny Depp one.) Well, think of Violet Beauregarde filling with blueberry juice after eating that dodgy chewing-gum, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how my left side has felt since my wound drains were taken out. Always-Right Breast Nurse warned that my skin ‘might begin to feel like a filled-up hot-water bottle’ and, true to form, she’s not wrong. Fortunately Smiley Surgeon has got the Oompa Loompas on hand to drain me next week. And hopefully after that, this damn bra will become a bit more comfortable. Not that my newly deflated left side will make my cancer-patient lingerie look any more passable in the fashion stakes, you understand.

From a distance (the other side of a football field, let’s say) it looks a bit like a training bra, or a cropped gym top (the really show-offy kind that you see those leathery women in their sixties wearing while jogging over Chelsea Bridge in rush hour). Up close, mind, it looks like something that could have had a previous life on my nan’s washing-line. It’s off-white (naturally,
it
doesn’t come in any other colours) with wide straps and nondescript flowers embroidered onto it, the like of which you’d normally see on a naff B & B bedspread. This bra is all the proof you need that the medical world just ain’t used to dealing with breast cancer in twenty-somethings. It is the anti-sexy. Poor P’s already got bollocks like cricket balls and, with this lingerie look, it doesn’t look like being remedied any time soon.

*

‘BLIMEY, YOU’RE POPULAR,
ain’tcha?’ said my cheery postie, handing over a wedding-day-worthy pile of mail at my front door as she had done most days since people started hearing about The Bullshit. The recurring birthday I’d joked about with Smiley Surgeon was showing no signs of slowing, particularly since I’d been home from hospital, and I struggled to keep up with the baffling tidal wave of niceness that was heading my way.

I couldn’t believe the kind of things people were doing for me. Sending huge packages filled with things that might help, flying from abroad to visit, sorting out a car service to take me to and from my hospital appointments, calling Charles Worthington’s PA to find out who he’d recommend to be entrusted with my pre-chemo, lop-off-the-length haircut …
ah-may-zing
stuff. I was half expecting to see my name on a blimp, in a newspaper headline or on a scoreboard at the baseball, Ferris Bueller-style.

It was all so staggeringly lovely – and a massive help to boot – but I struggled to figure out up to what point should I accept it? It’s not like I wasn’t milking my position when I had the chance, mind you. In fact, I was fast coming to realise that this illness seemed like the perfect excuse for absolutely any kind of behaviour whatsoever – and I was
going
to use it. Someone reluctant to give way on the road? I’d pull out first anyway: ‘Fuck it, I’ve got cancer.’ One slice of pizza left? ‘Fuck you lot, I’m having it – I’ve got cancer.’ It may have been a hopeless case of sifting for gold in a pile of dog poo but you’ve got to grab your fun where you can in times like these. But sometimes, even despite my enthusiasm to exploit cancer for all it was worth, the treatment I was receiving from other people was just so overwhelming that I felt compelled to make it stop.

When I’d question their kindness, they’d tell me that they were doing it because they loved me and that, if I weren’t so nice in the first place, they wouldn’t want to bother. But I worried that, actually, they’d got it all wrong, and that their spectacular efforts were wasted. Because the thing is, I’m really not always that nice.

I can be a real grumpy/selfish/bitchy/lazy/stubborn/sensitive/manipulative/cheeky cow when I want to. I got the hump when Princess Diana died and ruined my eighteenth birthday. I hardly ever make a brew for my colleagues. I once used someone’s office for a purpose other than work. I’m late for EVERYTHING. I’ve taken refunds on clothes that I’ve worn. I’ve cadged more fags than I’ve bought. I bunked more uni lectures than I went to, and made up poor excuses to get my deadlines extended. I continually correct people’s grammar, and carry around a red pen to scrub out rogue apostrophes on posters/menus/birthday cards.