The C-Word (8 page)

I lie as well. I’ve been known to do it on my CV, but it’s mostly in situations where I know it’ll embarrass the arse off someone. Like the time I told P that OutKast were from Pontypridd, not Georgia, then watched as he tried to persuade other people of the same. Or when I called my brother in a rage, incensed that the New Year Honours list
included
a knighthood for Vernon Kay, in recognition of his charity work. (Sir Vernon Kay! I ask you! Apparently the more ludicrous the lie, the better the result.) Or in Freshers’ Week when I began a rumour that I’d turned down a place in the Spice Girls to study for a degree. Or the day I told some kids at school that my dad was an ex-Derby County player. And then there was the night when my brother was having a house party, so I got my mate to call him up, pretending to be the police reporting a noise complaint. The result was magnificent: Jamie’s mates have never let him forget it, and it still makes me feel fantastic. With a piss-taking history like that, it was a wonder anyone even believed the earth-shattering news from the girl who cried cancer.

It was a strange old time, the week after getting out of hospital. Suddenly, it seemed, The Bullshit wasn’t a mere news story any more, but an actual, live-feed, twenty-four-hour event that everybody wanted to get in on. And it couldn’t have felt more surreal. Back in my pre-cancer life, I’d hear the word ‘cancer’ and leap to all the assumptions that such an ugly word carries – that it must be excruciating; that it must make you feel horrific; that you’d obviously know you had it before you were even told. But, of course, it doesn’t work like that. And, in the early stages at least, it’s not the cancer that makes you feel so dreadful, but the treatment. And the treatment was what I had in store next.

The trouble was, I didn’t
feel
like I had cancer. If anything, I felt like I’d had a bit of cosmetic surgery and, stitches and swelling and stiffness aside, I felt oddly fine. So, despite the fact that I had a disease that could kill me before I was thirty, I was queuing up episodes of
Coronation Street
on Sky+. And despite the fact that I’d had a life-threatening
tumour
growing beneath my nipple mere days before, I was busy filling my diary with pre-chemo lunches, pub visits and dinner parties with my mates. In fact, I was more popular than I’d ever been. Breast cancer, it seemed, had made me interesting.

Which was strange, because I’d always felt rather uninteresting. If my school had created a yearbook, I’d have been the Girl Most Likely To Have A Normal Life, and I appreciated and objected to that in equal measure. I’d always done everything exactly as it was expected of me; exactly as I’d planned it. GCSEs by sixteen. A levels by eighteen. Bachelor’s degree by twenty-one. Master’s degree by twenty-two. Magazine editor by twenty-five. Married by twenty-seven. All strictly by the book. No truancy, no shoplifting, no tattoos, no inappropriate piercings, no arrests, no unwanted pregnancies, no off-the-rails drugs binges, no havoc-filled gap years, no weekend-long illegal raves, no hopeless romances with a bad-influence bass guitarist (dammit). So had my lack of Drew Barrymore-esque, wild-child teens or reckless, selfish twenties somehow mutated into a rebellious tumour? As a kid, I’d adored the ‘Solomon Grundy’ poem. Was The Bullshit my ‘took ill on Thursday’?

Don’t get me wrong, I’d enjoyed all the foolish, unscheduled fun that a twenty-eight-year-old lass ought to be able to check off her list, and in the process earned my Brownie badges in tequila shots, one-night stands and puking from cab windows, but all of it had been done within the kind of perimeters that meant nobody got hurt. (‘Fun with rules’, as P would call it.)

I was happy with my life as it was. But I had occasionally wished I could be that little bit more interesting. Well, guess what? Now, I
was
interesting – but I didn’t want any part of it. Lovely as it was to be getting so much ego-flattering
attention
, every now and then I’d remember the reason why I was getting it in the first place, and the reality would leap up to bite me on the ass like a rabid dog. Within seconds, I’d lurch from smugly arranging beautiful bouquets of flowers to collapsing into frustrated tears at the kitchen sink, alarmed that my treatment had got so swiftly underway and terrified about what it might have in store.

My treatment at the hands of cancer was, of course, the reason for my treatment at the hands of my friends and family. They were spoiling me with kind gestures because it was the only thing they could do. They couldn’t take the cancer away, nor could they fraudulently endure the treatment on my behalf like some kind of twisted driving-test scam. But what they
could
do was let me know – on a scale grander than you’d ever experience at Christmas or on a birthday or at your wedding – just how much they loved me, and assure me that, whatever nasty surprises The Bullshit had lined up, they’d be there for me to fall back on; the safety net beneath my swinging trapeze.

CHAPTER 8

The no-kids clause

Smiley Surgeon and Always-Right Breast Nurse were on good form at my mastectomy-follow-up appointment today. They’re right on my wavelength that, whatever news they have to deliver, it surely can’t be worse than what they told me three weeks ago. Hence, they’re always very chipper and matter-of-fact, and keen to talk tennis before cancer.

There was a great moment today when my dressings came off for the first time, and we were all able to admire Smiley Surgeon’s handiwork. Man, that guy should set up an alterations business – his stitching is the nuts. I’ve got one slightly diagonal scar on my back that’s about the length of a Curly Wurly, then one under my armpit that’s a bit shorter than a KitKat finger (thankfully not the Chunky version). They’re both super-neat and healing fast, and they won’t be the kind of thing I’m embarrassed about being visible in the future. (Low-back tops are back on the shopping list. Or at least they would be if I could carry them off in the first place.)

But – drumroll please – the mother of all wounds is at the front. And what a corker it is. I’ve never been a tits-out-for-the-lads kind of girl, but now I might just become one. In my mind,
I
had envisaged some sort of heinous, purple X-shaped gash with bruising all around it and stitches poking out at untidy angles, crusty blood still hanging off. (Enjoying your dinner?) In reality, though, my boob looks precisely like it should, considering what it’s been through. In short, my nipple has been lopped off (technical term) and replaced with a graft of skin from my back. Imagine it all as a slightly-squashed oval shape with a circle the size of a Quality Street Toffee Penny in the middle, and you’ve got the picture. Not bad, eh? No wonder the four of us were cooing over it this morning. ’Tis a beautiful thing.

But onto the rest of the follow-up. (Consider all of the above ‘talking tennis before cancer’.) Because the remainder of today’s hospital visit concerned the serious stuff of histology reports and treatment timelines. So first, the good news:

And then the not-so-good news:

*

I’M STILL BAFFLED
by the immediate way in which P and I reacted to the blow to our fertility. Much like the truth about cancer’s spread to my lymph nodes, it felt rather like conceding a penalty when we were already ten-nil down. There was almost, dare I say, a dark comedy to it. I couldn’t help but think about an exceptionally unlucky bloke I used to work with. If there was a hole, he’d fall down it. If there was broken glass, he’d step on it. If there was a burglar in his town, his house would get robbed. If there was a hooligan at a footy match, he’d be the one who got
punched
. So, rather predictably, he earned the nickname Lucky. And here we were: Mr and Mrs Good Fortune. First the miscarriages; then a lump; then cancer; then an aggressive spread; then fertility issues. Ha ha ha.

‘I’m starting to wonder whether I might have been a Nazi leader in a former life,’ I said to P as we lay side by side on our bed, staring at the ceiling in disbelief. ‘Seriously. What can we possibly have done to deserve such a monumental run of bad luck? You haven’t killed anybody and not told me, have you?’

P rolled onto his right side to get a bit closer. ‘Not that I know of, love,’ he said, resigned. ‘But with all this happening to us I might yet. So much for sodding karma, eh?’

The thing was, with the looming, unknown prospect of chemotherapy a matter of days away, there just wasn’t space in our heads to squeeze in yet another stomach-punching blow from The Bullshit, and so instead we kind of ignored it, with a ‘well that’s that, then’ attitude, however ridiculous that might sound now. It’s particularly ridiculous, I suppose, when you consider that pre-Bullshit,
everything
for P and I was geared towards having a baby.

But, the way we saw it, had we been told in the course of our post-miscarriage fertility checks that we wouldn’t be able to have our own children, that would have been a genuinely gut-wrenching disappointment. We’d have cried and mourned for the kids we’d already named (Maisy Jean for a girl, Cameron Thomas Arthur for a boy) and immediately got our names on an adoption register. But now, things were different. Because, aside from the fact that this news was rather on the woolly side (‘having kids could be dangerous to you’ is an altogether different prospect to the straightforward ‘you
can’t
have kids’), there were bigger issues at hand. Y’know, like staying alive and stuff. Not to
mention
my much more time-pressing worries about what chemo would do to me … whether it would work, how it would make me feel and what it’d do to my looks.

I remember having a recurring dream in which, almost every night, a different boy I knew would learn that I had breast cancer. He’d then take an ill-looking me out on a date and, at the end of the night, kiss me meaningfully, as though he were trying to prove that he was cool with the C-word. Granted, this wasn’t a nightmare – and it was a welcome change to my usual dream where I have to wait ages in the toilet queue of a busy club, only to find when I get to the front that the only available cubicle has no door – but I couldn’t help but wonder whether it had something to do with my fear of becoming completely unfanciable when all the hair-loss and steroid-swelling fun began. Because – kids or no kids –
nothing
was more important to me than having P around.

One night that week, P jogged home from work. ‘I’m taking my frustration out on the pavement,’ he said, when I questioned the change from his usual method of commute. He mentioned that some girls sitting on a bench had commented on his legs. Of course they did. P is gorgeous. And clearly, I wasn’t the only one to have noticed his charms (go near him and I’ll scratch your eyes out, right?), which was something that came to play on my mind more than it might have done ordinarily. Actually, that’s playing it down somewhat. I was completely bloody petrified that he was going to go off me. Because, let’s be honest, balding, bloated lasses aren’t most blokes’ idea of a model wife, are they? And definitely not balding, bloated lasses who are unlikely to give them a child of their own.

All I was hearing from the sensible people around me was not to concern myself with what was around the corner; to
deal
with the present; to take each day as it came. But that was rather like asking a dog not to bark. Whether or not I communicated it, cancer’s looks-destroying, fertility-sapping potential was occupying my thoughts more than I knew it should. And all I could think about was what a bum deal all of this was becoming for P. Was the no-kids stuff going to become a huge regret for him? Might he one day wish he hadn’t woken me up at six o’clock that Thursday morning, with the promise of a wonderful life together and an enticing Tiffany box? And there was always going to be some bench-bitch with a compliment on his legs, ready to divert his attention from his once-beautiful bride.

I don’t really know what it feels like to have major eat-away-at-you regrets. Mine are more like loose ends I wish I’d tied up when I had the chance. I wish, for example, that I’d been nicer to the very decent bloke I had a long-distance almost-relationship with following a couple of very fun dates in our home town, then gave the brush-off when he travelled miles to visit me in London (not because I didn’t like him, but because I’d had my heart broken in the meantime and was frightened of getting close to another boy again). I wish I’d never lost touch with my dear friend Weeza, who missed out on my wedding as a result of our time apart – a fact that will upset me as long as I live. I wish I’d stood my ground in a particularly stressful former job, and done more to avoid the trouble it caused for me and my friends. And I wish I’d never shelled out my monthly travel budget on some unfeasibly high shoes I wore to a friend’s wedding. Not only were they toe torture, they also gave me pins like Miss Piggy’s and were never worn again.