The C-Word Read online

  I was fast developing other favourites – my chemo survival kit, if you will. Marmite was right at the top (and, Marmite haters, don’t knock it until you’ve been through chemo); the one thing I fancied in chemo days one to three. Ice cubes, too. The relief of an ice cube dripping water onto your tongue when you’ve been barfing all evening and your mouth feels like the inside of a hamster cage can’t be beaten. And then there was ginger. Ah, lovely ginger. Ginger biscuits, ginger tea, ginger sweets, crystallised ginger … I even had ginger bath foam.

  Not that knowing how best to survive made Chemo 2 any easier than #1. Though I definitely managed the physical stuff better the second time around. During the first cycle, I couldn’t believe that it was possible to feel that lousy and come out the other side. But, of course, you do. And that meant less panicking the second time around. (If not less swearing. Some things will never change.) What it didn’t mean, however, was less of the mind-messing, or less of the depression. Because Chemo 2 didn’t just bring with it the same old side-effects as last time. This time it took my hair as well.

  Suddenly, with hair falling out entirely of its own accord, the hairball on my bathroom window-sill seemed pathetic in comparison. And it wasn’t even falling out evenly. Instead, it seemed to be coming mostly off the crown, leaving me with a balding patch on the top of my head and longer strands still holding their own at the sides – think Andy from Little Britain, or Keith from The Prodigy. Now I wasn’t just a cancer patient – I looked like a cancer patient. And now, the wig-shopping wasn’t just a game – it was a necessity.

  As hard as I tried to turn it into a joke, there was a horrible truth beneath the humour. Because, if I was going to stick to my guns of being as honest as possible about my breast cancer experience – to my family and blog readers alike – I was going to have to ’fess up about just how difficult it was becoming. ‘This blog isn’t a performance or a novel,’ I wrote. ‘It’s my life. My real life. Hence this is doubtless an often frustrating, up-one-minute-down-the-next read. But that’s got to be the way it is, because that’s the way my life is.’

  I hated admitting the depths I’d sunk to, but it was important that I did. And so I recounted on my blog the morning on which I woke up at 5 a.m. in floods of tears.

  ‘What’s wrong, angel? Was it a bad dream?’ said P, rolling over to give me a cuddle.

  ‘No. I woke up,’ I replied. ‘And I didn’t want to.’ I was livid with the world for allowing me to wake up, and for putting me through cancer’s shitty ways for another miserable day. As much as it disgusts me to admit it, at 5 a.m. that day, I’d rather have packed it all in.

  I’m ashamed that I woke up feeling like that. Because that’s not how I think. It’s not how I do things; it’s just not me. Kissing me on my bald patch, P held my tearful face in his hands. ‘I never want to hear that from you again,’ he said. ‘Because if there’s no you, there’s no me either.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I said, ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing,’ P interrupted, now crying himself. ‘Nobody said this was going to be easy. But you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to. I need you to.’

  We both knew that some days were going to be like this. Some days I just wasn’t going to have enough energy to feel like I could keep going. And, as difficult as that was at the time, for me and everyone around me, sometimes, it was just going to have to be that way. ‘Difficult’ doesn’t do it justice, of course. This wasn’t difficult. It was near fucking impossible. Because, when the shock of the diagnosis goes away and all the initial attention you get dies right down, what are you left with? A big, ugly, horrible, grim, morbid mess to scrap your way through, and nobody can fight it but you.

  But I’d do it. Of course I’d bloody do it. And despite the lows I’d been feeling, I didn’t mean it any less. What choice did I have? This awful, awful thing came along, and it changed the course of my lovely life – of our lovely lives. We didn’t ask for it, we hadn’t planned for it, we’d done nothing to deserve it. We HATED it. But I loved my life more than I loathed that cancer. And I was going to get it back.

  CHAPTER 13

  Does my bum look big in this?

  As I type, I’m looking down from my bed at a foreign, furry, blonde rodent, otherwise known as my new wig. It’s balanced carefully on a stand on the floor and, despite the low light in here, it still looks glossy and healthy and wholesome. It’s everything I’m not.

  Next week it’s my birthday, and the one thing I wanted was to still have fabulous hair by that point. (I wanted a gift-wrapped Dave Grohl too, but apparently you can’t always get what you want.) Next best on the birthday wish-list, then, was to have a fabulous, non-NHS wig. Ta-dah! Today, I got exactly what I asked for. And I hate it.

  There’s nothing wrong with the wig I bought today. It’s a damn good wig – as good a wig as I’m going to get, that’s for sure. It’s just that the whole wig-buying experience was so … oh, I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, it was a whole lot better than the stationery-cupboard NHS experience. Wig Man was replaced by Wig Girl who had a far better understanding of what would suit me and how it should be worn. And this time, I didn’t just have the moral support of P, but also my wonderful friend Tills. Even by the time P and I arrived, Tills had got the measure of Wig Girl and the designs she had to offer, and had even picked out the mops that would suit me most. Everything was in its right place, going as well as it could. But this time it was real, and not just pissing about in front of a mirror with Crap FM on the radio. (Actually, that’s a bit of a fib – apparently, all wig places listen to Crap FM.)

  Trying my best to be a cool customer and perfectly at ease, I slapped on my brave face and even played along with a few of the usual losing-your-hair lines. ‘Just think of all the money I’ll save on highlights!’ and ‘Blimey, P, I’ll be able to get ready so quickly!’ Ha ha ha! Well, no, actually. Not ha ha. Because, I realised, this is fucking rubbish. Here I am, at twenty-eight, trying on wigs. Not for fun, but because I’ve got breast cancer. Not so funny now, eh? And it was about that point at which I lost my sense of humour, got really bloody angry and burst into tears.

  I quickly asked Tills to tell me about something else that was happening in the world. She recalled a story about our friends’ little girl, who recently threw a tantrum when her mum gave her a biscuit, and nobody could understand why. Much questioning revealed that the issue with the biscuit was that it was slightly broken, so it was quickly replaced with another one from the same pack. But that brought on an even bigger tantrum because, in fact, what the (frankly, genius) little lass wanted was the very first biscuit she was handed, just without the broken bit. She wanted the perfect version of her original biscuit. Just like I wanted the perfect version of my original hair. I was having the same tantrum.

  In my tantrum, though, I sobbed and had a go at two of my favourite people for telling me how great I looked, when what we were really looking at was a cancer patient in a wig. ‘The reason I’ve got you two here,’ I spluttered, ‘is not so you can tell me what you think I want to hear. Stop fucking telling me I look good. I look like I’m wearing a wig.’

  In these angry, shouting-at-people-I-love moments, what I want is someone to really kick the crap out of. But, because I’m lucky enough to only ever be surrounded by lovely people, there’s never anyone to kick the crap out of. So instead, my most incredible, supportive, wonderful friend gets it in the neck, after giving up her morning to be with me for this ridiculous wig-buying charade. I don’t just want to do all this crap-kicking because I got breast cancer in the first place, or because I feel so ill or because I’ve lost my hair. I want to do it in retaliation for turning my time with Tills from cava-drinking, tapas-eating loveliness into shitty, cancer-focused experiences like this.

  I know those times will come back. And then some. But I really miss my mates, dammit. I’m sick of being the cancer patient on the sofa, talking about myself and skirting around the truth of how very, very shit all of t
his is, in case people don’t want to hear it. I want my mates to see me in normal circumstances with a brew, a load of gossip and a bloody lovely head of hair. I want them to say, ‘Wow, Lisa, I honestly can’t believe it’s a wig! It’s exactly like your old hair!’ And I want them to mean it. But again, that’s one more thing I can’t have. Because if anyone does say that, they’re lying.

  *

  ‘I KNOW, I know, you were expecting the wig,’ I said, greeting my boss, Kath, at my front door.

  ‘So where is it, then?’ she asked, peering suspiciously at the LA Dodgers baseball cap that made me look like even more of a fruitcake when coupled with White Company pyjamas.

  ‘On the bathroom window-sill. And it’s staying there. I fucking hate it.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she said, dropping a bag of goodies on the nearest chair and marching down the hallway.

  ‘That’s it? It’s nice!’

  ‘Yeah? You try wearing it.’

  ‘And the headband …?’ questioned Kath, upon looking a little closer and finding the rug styled up with an Alice band.

  ‘Oh, that. I’m just trying it out. Seeing what I can do to make it look more like real hair.’

  ‘But it does look like real hair.’

  ‘Mm. Until you put it on your head,’ I concluded.

  After all the support she’d given me, the least I could have done was let Kath be the audience to my wig’s debut performance. I felt bad about it – I should have given her a glimpse of the bald head by way of compensation. People want the good stuff, right? And that was the weird thing about my reluctance with the rug. People knew I’d had a mastectomy; I was happy to show them the scars. They knew I was having chemo; I was happy to show them the baldness, and yet I still wouldn’t let them see me in a wig. And so I’d spent £200 for the privilege of displaying a syrup on a stand. This was getting ridiculous.

  There was nothing wrong with the wig in particular. For short periods at least, it didn’t feel all that unusual to wear. And, admittedly, it looked better on my head than it did on the stand. But it still didn’t look like my old hair – and it was never going to. Like it or not, I had to get used to it, and so I set a new rule: if I couldn’t have my own hair, then I was damn well going to have everyone else’s. This was simply Wig 1 of a New Wig Army. I wanted a shelf of wigs like my shelf of shoes. I wanted a wig for weddings, a wig for work, a wig for shopping, a wig for the pub. I was going to be a wig slag. Apparently I just wasn’t a love-the-wig-you’re-with kind of girl.

  I don’t know why I expected to love the wig immediately. In fact, I’ve always been rather suspicious of anything – and anyone, for that matter – that instantly impresses me. I’m a big believer in the slow burn. Even when I first met P, I hated him. I took his initial shyness as arrogance (I believe I told a colleague he was ‘practising to be a git’) and did all I could to avoid him around the office. Which just goes to show that first impressions often mean squat. And, true to form, the same seemed to be happening on the wig front.

  My intentions of wig-slaggery seemed to be paying off: from hating the sight of Wig 1, within a matter of days, I had come to actually quite like it – and its new sister, Wig 2. The wigs, by the way, came with names. Not names I had given them, you understand. (An ex-boss once told me about a brilliant naming system he and his wife devised to covertly ensure her wig looked good when they were out at a restaurant. ‘Have you seen Sharon recently?’ she’d ask. ‘Is she well?’ To which he’d reply either, ‘Oh yes, she’s fine,’ or ‘Well, I think she could do with a lift.’ Genius.) The thing is, all wigs have names already – names to distinguish them from one another in the catalogue and, my God, how brilliant they are. Wig 1’s name was Codi. Wig 2 was called Erika. (I wonder whether people switch from jobs in paint-naming to wig-naming?)

  I bought Wig 2 (sorry, Erika), from a different Wig Place to Codi. This time, it wasn’t Wig Man or Wig Girl, but Camp-as-Christmas Wig Guy – the best of all the Wig Folk so far. He was ace: the perfect mix of a damn good laugh, super-knowledgeable and understanding of the reason I was there in the first place. He even offered to shave what was left on my head to make the wigs fit better. I politely declined, opting to GI Jane it in my own time. (The following morning, as it happened – so much hair came out in the bath that P and I nonchalantly took the scissors to the lot of it, making me less Andy-from-Little-Britain, more Aryan army recruit. Call it Hitler Youth Chic.)

  Camp-as-Christmas Wig Guy stuck rigidly to the wigs’ catalogue names throughout my appointment. ‘Samantha’s lovely; see the way she’s feathered around the face. Let’s try her and let’s take in Miranda too.’ (Disappointingly, there was no Carrie or Charlotte.) And, despite thinking I’d walk out with a long wig, I found myself still unable to wear one that didn’t make me look like a member of the Mexico ’86 England squad. Thus, Wig 2 was another bob. A longer one, though, with a slightly wispier fringe. And this time it was Spring Honey, in comparison to Wig 1’s Creamy Toffee (see what I mean about the paint-naming thing?).

  My insatiable, hussy-like appetite for syrups even had me looking into Wig 3. In anticipation of my appointment at yet another Wig Place, I began looking at their wares online, and was so excited by the daft names that I set to sharing the joy on an email round-robin with my mates. Because, at this place, the wigs didn’t just have women’s names, they had brilliantly wanky titles like Emotion, Ecstasy and Rendezvous. There was even one called Ominous. But my favourite by far was from the Delboy Trotter school of wig-naming: Tres Bien. Très Bien! Now that, I thought, could definitely work in a covert restaurant wig-checking situation. ‘C’est bon?’

  ‘Tres Bien, Rodney, Tres Bien.’

  In the meantime, though, it was time to stop taking the piss out of the wig industry and get to the more pressing business of actually stepping out of the flat in one of the buggers. I’d spent years faffing with my hair, demanding impossibly high standards from it. (I’d better clarify that I’m talking post-schooldays, by the way – 1990–1995 was a half-decade hair-mare. With that and the braces, it’s amazing I ever got a snog.) I’d blow-dried, straightened, sprayed, lacquered, highlighted, lowlighted … all in a quest for the perfect ’do. Newsreader hair, if you will. That pristine, shiny, well-conditioned, weather-proof, always-looking-perfect kind of hair that just doesn’t exist. Or does it? Because, as it turned out, the perfect hairdo was achievable – but it wasn’t without its drawbacks.

  August bank holiday was Get Over Yourself And Show People The Wig weekend. And I think it’s fair to say that it made an impressive debut. Sorry, they made an impressive debut. First up was Wig 2 (a choice I still don’t understand, given that Wig 1 was always my favourite). My future sis-in-law Leanne’s hen party was that weekend and, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to stay the course for the Big Night Out, I instead showed my face for an hour at the pre-cocktails picnic. Well aware that twenty-something hens can be tough crowds, I had never felt more self-conscious. It didn’t help that, as I tentatively walked towards the tiara-wearing group with my sunglasses perched on top of my head (because that look’s got ‘natural hair’ written all over it, right?), I promptly got my Aviators stuck in my wig and had to prise them out in the middle of a busy Kensington Gardens. Suffice to say, I chose not to wear my designated hen-party tiara.

  That’s what I mean by drawbacks: leave your wig alone, and it’s perfect; start to fiddle, and you’ve given the game away. The thing is, wigs are itchy. For about twenty minutes, they’re surprisingly comfy. After that they’re just plain irritating. And when I’ve got an itch I’ll scratch it, which meant that my fringe suddenly had the ability to grow beyond my eyebrows in a matter of seconds, and my parting could magically move two inches to the right without the help of a comb. I might as well have left the label hanging out.

  Everyone was very complimentary about it, though, even the unlikeliest of praise-givers – namely my mate Jon. Despite being one of the most thoughtful men you could hope to me
et, Jon isn’t one to offer up an easy compliment, even at a time when you might need it most. (I remember once going to meet him in town while we were seeing each other. I was trying really hard to look impressive despite a crippling hangover and I thought I’d done a decent job, too, until I strutted over and he said, ‘Wow, you look like shit.’) A couple of days after calling round to see me, he rang to give me his verdict. ‘Now, there’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ he said, ominously. ‘The other day when I was round at yours I was, of course, aware that you were wearing a wig. Because you’ve told me about it, and because I’ve been reading about it. But when I was sitting talking to you in your front room, I wasn’t thinking, “Here I am having a brew with Lisa in a wig,” but, “Here I am having a brew with Lisa.” After initially seeing it, the wig just didn’t occur to me at any other point.’

  I appreciated Jon’s ruling on the rug. But then, I guess, he was hardly going to go, ‘Sheesh, Lis, that’s one dodgy syrup you’ve got there.’ But whether or not he was blowing smoke up my ass, it didn’t matter. Because, for the meantime, when baldness was the only alternative, wearing a wig was as good a second best as I was going to find.

  CHAPTER 14

  My Super Sweet 29th

  September 2008

  There’s something wrong with my tear ducts. I’ve been back through all my chemo leaflets and lists of side-effects, but it looks like this is one thing I can’t blame on the drugs. The problem is me – I’m turning into a cry baby. Over the past week, I’ve felt happier than I have at any point throughout The Bullshit, and probably even happier than I’ve felt for a while before it. Last night I almost felt guilty for being so chuffed with my lot – cancer isn’t supposed to feel this good, surely? So why do I keep sobbing at the slightest thing?