The C-Word Read online

  But from the moment we left the flat, everything went well. We had a smoother ride to the hospital by choosing to go in our own car, rather than suffering the questionable driving of the World’s Dodgiest Cab Firm. When we got there, the receptionist gave us a Golden Ticket in the form of a free parking pass, thanks to my ongoing treatment (see, cancer’s not without its upsides). I also decided to overdress for the occasion, beginning my new life-tactic of saving nothing for best. And I went prepared by uploading series two of Gavin & Stacey onto the iPod.

  Things were even pretty fun in the chemo room itself. All the coolest nurses were on shift, including my favourite who swears as much as I do. There was a real Friday Feeling, too – it was quieter in there than usual, which meant more banter between the nurses, good sweets out on the counter, a bit of flirting when the male doctors came in and a whiff of gossip in the air.

  And so, ill and old and wobbly on my feet and slow in the typing department as I feel at the moment, I’m also pretty excited. Actually, excited doesn’t even nearly cover it. I’m emancipated. I know I may be speaking too soon (fave nurse warned me that the ‘buggery bit’ of this kind of chemo may come between days three and nine), but even the possibility that I may never again have to endure Puke Friday (at least, not of chemo’s doing) is the best news I’ve had in ages. Knowing I’ve got all three cycles of that first f-u-c-k-i-n-g h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e chemo type out of the way is, I reckon, as close to the undoubtedly wonderful feeling of being told you’re cancer-free as I can get right now. For the first time since The Bullshit began I feel that I’m back in charge. I can handle this. I’m on top of it. I’ve pulled one back. Is the worst of it over?

  *

  STUPID, STUPID GIRL. Had I not learned that the Spoilsport God of Cancer would be reading that post? Within three days of assuming that the non-sickness of Chemo 4 made it an obvious improvement on the three that had preceded it, along came the gift of a brand-new menu of side-effects – excruciating bone pain, headaches, earache, loss of balance, thrush (both vaginal and oral, as a special treat), pins and needles and that same old impenetrable fog of depression.

  I’d had enough. Everything was pissing me off, from the state of my tongue to the squirrels in the back garden and even people’s well-wishes. I was an idiot for saying that the aftermath of Chemo 4 had been any better than the last – not just in the statement itself, but in the resulting contact it elicited from delighted friends and family. They’d make calls and write emails and send messages to say how pleased they were that things were looking up – and all just in time for the ‘buggery bit’ that my nurse had warned me about. I wanted to strangle each and every one of them, but I barely had the energy to think it, let alone do it.

  Whether it was out of sympathy or intimidation, people would continually tell me that having cancer entitled me to a whinge whenever I wanted one. So I found myself taking advantage of their kindness and cranking up the moano-meter at every opportunity. So much, in fact, that I soon became sick of it myself. In fact, I was bored of it all. Bored of whinging, bored of the side-effects, bored of the enforced sitting around … bored of cancer. The novelty had well and truly worn off.

  As much as I’d probably have taken a vicious swipe at anyone who tried it, what I secretly wanted was for someone to finally have enough of it, kick me up the arse and say, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, stop your whining, will you?’ My mate Leaks did once courteously include me on a group email about a pub meet-up, despite knowing full well that I couldn’t make it. ‘Who’s in?’ she asked, to which I replied, ‘I can’t – I’m washing my hair.’ She fired an email straight back: ‘You’re not still trotting out that old cancer excuse, are you?’ And I loved her for it.

  The thing was, despite The Bullshit having been part of my life for months, I still could not believe that I had cancer. You’d think that all the boob-and-hair-loss fun would have made damn sure the reality had sunk in, but no. It was just such a fucking ridiculous idea: me with breast cancer. Yeah, right! I wanted to laugh, it seemed so ludicrous. I was still half expecting to find out that it was all some kind of huge, Truman Show-style experiment that Channel 4 were secretly filming. And no amount of me actually saying the word ‘cancer’ was making the truth any more believable. And it really should have, considering the fact that I said it all the sodding time.

  It still came as a shock to hear other people say ‘cancer’ with reference to me. Shortly after the ‘buggery bit’ hit, in yet another of my pathetic, long-faced, sympathy-seeking moments, P pulled a blanket over me as I lay on the sofa, and I looked up at him with those pity-me eyes (that even I was annoyed by) and whinged, ‘P, I’m pooooorly.’

  ‘Well yes, of course you’re poorly,’ said P, with the patience of a saint on death row. ‘That’s because you’ve got cancer.’

  I almost slapped him. ‘What’s he talking about?’ I thought, before remembering that it was, in fact, the case.

  Not everyone was comfortable saying the word ‘cancer’. Even the nurses in chemo tried not to say it out loud, instead calling it ‘it’ or purposely missing it out of sentences altogether. (‘Yeah, it’s different with each day in here. All the women here today have got breast. Mondays is ovarian. And on Thursdays everyone’s prostate.’) One day I even caught Mum mouthing the word ‘cancer’ mid-sentence, in that over-enunciated, speaking-through-glass way that some people still revert to when saying ‘lesbian’ or ‘black’.

  But being able to say it aloud like Harry Potter says ‘Voldemort’ didn’t mean I was any better equipped at handling it. This should have been a joyous, exciting time – Jamie’s wedding was just days away, but not only was I unable to fully enjoy the anticipation of the happiest day of his life as I would have ordinarily, but I felt increasingly guilty for trumping my family’s matrimonial excitement with my stupid bloody illness.

  With my chemo schedules timed around the big day, things had been planned so that I’d be feeling better and ready to party just in time for the nuptials. But, anxious as I was to get to that stage, with Chemo 4, the getting better was more of a struggle. It was the movement thing, mostly – with my bones aching to a point where I was convinced some of them must be broken, I was shuffling about like a geriatric Quasimodo. And, with little more than a week to go before I had to pull my huge hat, strapless dress and four-inch heels out of my wardrobe, I was convinced that, come the wedding, I’d look more Neanderthal than Homo sapiens.

  Jamie’s wedding was the only thing pulling me through my depressive lull. And depression was what it was. I had thought that all my whinging was just me taking the opportunity to have a moan, and letting the bubbling-under-the-surface anger have its moment but, as my procrastination became more painful, I had to concede that it was more than that. I was cross with myself for confessing it. I hated having to say it. Depression was a word I loathed. Like ‘stress’, I saw it as a term that was bandied about too much by people with no sense of its meaning. To my mind, telling people I was depressed made me look weaker than I liked to think I was. It was admitting defeat. But it was the truth.

  In reality, depression is something that is stuck, rigidly, in your mind (or your soul or your body, I don’t know), that shows its face only when you allow it. Not that you consciously allow it. It senses when you’re vulnerable and lacking the compulsion to keep it hidden, and surprises you with a mini mental breakdown in the middle of Deal or No Deal. It makes it impossible to do all the little things that show the world you’re okay: laughing at a joke, winking at your husband, tapping along to a tune, enjoying a cup of tea, idly singing to yourself as you get dressed. It presents you head-on with all the worries you try so hard not to think about: that the treatment’s not working and you might be dying; whether you’ll make it through the night; whether or not you can trust your family to pick a decent song to play at your funeral; whether you’ve got time left to listen to all the favourite albums you’ve not heard for ages … The worries get more and more ridiculous as they come, and
it’s the trivial ones that panic you the most.

  And then, as the panic reaches its peak, it all implodes in your head and you’re left with a bleak, grey nothingness and uncontrollable weeping that makes you tell your dad – the one person you most want to keep up the front for – that you’ve got no fight left in you and that you haven’t got the energy to go on. And then you feel even worse for letting him hear it, and it leaves you not just with chapped, raw, painful eyes from all the crying, but a gut full of guilt from letting your favourite people in the world hear all the stuff you’ve tried so damned hard to keep from them. You go from a strong-on-the-outside, brave-faced girl to a consumed, cloaked, troubled mess with a dark side to rival Anakin.

  All of it – all the blogging, all the banal things I talked about, every stupid sentence I said that didn’t reveal what was underneath, every time I set the Sky+ for Coronation Street, every smile I’d offer and joke I’d crack and ‘I’m fine’ answer I’d give – ALL of it was a gargantuan effort I was making not to let the dark stuff surface. Because it was there all the time. Cancer forces you to act. And soon the acting becomes the reality, because you’re so bloody determined to put out the right signals, come across a certain way and get the better of the stuff that could ruin it all for you. It was the role of my life: my Hannibal Lecter, my Don Corleone, my Scarlett O’Hara. And it was exhausting. But I was going to have to pull it out of the bag once more for the sake of my beloved brother. And I don’t think I could have done it for anyone else.

  CHAPTER 18

  Pull out the stopper

  Ooh, it’s all go in here. Morning suits hanging from every curtain rail, hat boxes out in the spare room, marks on the carpet from new shoes being worn in, and me and Mum look like we’ve been dipped in gravy after getting a spray-tan. Oh, and a certain kid brother of mine is sitting beside me with a grin the size of a banana (let’s see if he’s still smiling at me tomorrow when he realises who fed his best man all those stories).

  I’m equally smiley. Fancy me having a social life again, eh? I’m starting to forget what it was like to be out among people, acting daft and putting the world to rights over a G&T. The other night I spent longer than I care to admit trying to remember every detail about my favourite London pub, wondering whether they’ve cranked up the log fire yet, if the flush in the toilet on the left has been fixed, and whether the colder weather has forced my drinking buddies to move from the benches outside to the rickety stools in the bar. Classic withdrawal symptoms, I imagine. But I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m being left out of a brilliant social scene and loads of gossip and good times that I’ll never be able to catch up on.

  Those very same drinking buddies met up at the pub in question on Friday night and, by heck, was I narked. My mate Lil sensed as much and, the moment she got back home, updated her Facebook status with: ‘Lil had a great time at the pub but really missed Mac.’ Much as I appreciated Lil’s efforts to make me feel better, I’d had a whole evening of sofa-bound boredom to work myself up by then. I knew full well how ridiculous it was to get so wound up, and tried to console myself with thoughts that my mates weren’t, in fact, having a blinding time without me but had instead been plotting to make and sell charity T-shirts with ‘Save Mac’ on them, and debating which bands they could get to play at Mac Aid. But of course they bloody weren’t. They were drinking dodgy wine, slagging off X Factor contestants for their transparently insincere tears (I’m telling you, I could sob my way to the final of that thing next year) and eating endless bags of crisps, the carefree gits. It’s not like I think the world should stop turning just because I’ve got breast cancer. But the least everyone could do is put their social lives on hold until I’m better, no? So, in typical worked-up and overly sarcastic fashion, I retaliated with my own Facebook update: ‘Lisa thinks you lot are a bunch of bastards for going to the pub without her. Can’t you wait till she’s beaten cancer, you impatient sods?’

  *

  ‘LISA, IT’S AMAZING,’ said my beautician as she aimed a spray-tanning gun at my tits.

  ‘Told you you’d be impressed,’ said Mum. ‘And I told you there’d be nothing to worry about,’ she added, turning to me.

  ‘Really? You reckon?’ I asked, still unsure as to whether it was smoke or St Tropez that was being blown up my ass.

  ‘Honestly, darling, I’ve seen a hundred mastectomies doing this job – and that’s one of the best I’ve sprayed.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be sure to tell my surgeon,’ I said through pursed lips as I tried not to breathe in the orange fumes.

  The thought of my pre-wedding spray-tan had been worrying me for days. Up to this point, the only people who’d seen my cancer-ravaged boob were Smiley Surgeon, Always-Right Breast Nurse, P and those who’d helped me change my dressings, and I wasn’t ready to show it off to anyone else. But, having been to the hospital a couple of days previous for Smiley Surgeon to inflate my currently empty tissue-expanding implant, things were finally looking up on the tit front. Because now, I had boobs – plural.

  I’d been pretty nervous about turning up to see Smiley Surgeon in case he said I was still too swollen to have my implant inflated – aside from anything else, I’d have had an odd-looking, baggy side to the strapless dress I had planned to wear at Jamie’s wedding, and visions of my prosthesis shooting out across the dance floor weren’t doing much to help. Thankfully, he gave me the go-ahead and pulled out the bike bump (disappointingly, it was more of a huge-needle-and-saline-drip combo) so that I could finally, FINALLY, get rid of the Mastectomy Bra From Hell and my comedy sponge tit (honk honk). It wasn’t my old boob, granted, but, in clothes at least, it looked every bit as good. It was round and soft and symmetrical and even a little bit bouncy and, were it not for the fact that I was still singular in the nipple department, it would have been perfect. But even that was due to be rectified a few months down the line in a fascinating process whereby the existing nipple-circle would be twisted into a point, then tattooed to match its non-identical twin. For the meantime, though, I had a fabulous cleavage to enjoy and, after weeks on end of a serious case of the Victor Meldrews, I was damn well going to appreciate it.

  Sucking up the worries of how Jamie’s wedding guests would react to seeing the cancer-crafted new me (some of whom I hadn’t seen since my own wedding – the day on which I looked better than I ever have), I instead set to the remainder of my pre-wedding beauty routine: a long bath, painting my toenails, combing my wig on its stand, face pack, expensive moisturiser … What I hadn’t bargained for, however, as I ran cotton wool pads over my eyes, was my eyelashes finally giving up the ghost and, with expert comedy timing, dropping out in one blink. I laughed into the cotton wool. Of course they’d fallen out. Waiting until the morning after the wedding just wouldn’t have been The Bullshit’s way.

  Thankfully I was left with four or five stragglers on each lid, onto which we managed to glue emergency false lashes the following morning. Not that lash-gate was the end of my wedding-day cancer-calamities, of course. Minutes before the ceremony, Mum suddenly gestured to my head. ‘Christ, Lis, your ears,’ she said, panic-stricken. ‘Sort your ears out! They’re poking out of your wig!’

  ‘Oh for f—,’ I held back the expletive, given the occasion. ‘I can’t pull my wig off here,’ I said, tutting like a wounded teenager and turning to Dad. ‘We’re on the front rowww; there’s all these peeeople!’

  ‘Right, come here,’ said Dad, leading me off by the elbow to a door to our right and closing it behind us as quietly as the heavy oak would allow.

  ‘Yess, a mirror,’ I squeaked, ripping off my hat and wig in one movement and starting the process of concealing my baldness all over again – this time with my ears tucked away. ‘Will that do?’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Dad.

  ‘What if it happens during my reading?’

  ‘It won’t happen during your reading, you’ll be fine.’

  ‘But if it does, right, just point to your ear or something
, okay?’

  ‘Okay, stoopid,’ he agreed, leading me back out into the ceremony with seconds to spare before Leanne appeared at the top of the aisle, all glittery and gorgeous, like a tiny ballerina inside a musical jewellery box.

  In the run-up to the wedding, I was concerned about more than just the physical aspect of how I’d feel – and look – on the big day. P and I had got hitched in the same venue, and I fretted that being there again would upset me, in the same way that looking back at our wedding photos makes us realise how little we knew about our future (and thank God we didn’t). But, in fact, none of those things even occurred to me on the day, because the wedding was king; rightfully reigning supreme from Wedding March to first dance. So spectacular was the day that every so often I even forgot I’d got cancer – and that’s damn high praise.

  Missing lashes and wonky wig aside, the important thing was that, for the first time in months, the occasion wasn’t about me. Yes, people wanted to ask how I was and tell me they were pleased to see me and lie about how well I looked, but this wasn’t my day, so I kept the cancer-talk to a brusque minimum and instead set about the business of being sister of the groom.

  And what a groom. Right before my eyes, my kid brother became a man. A confident man; an impressive man; a charming man; a wish-he-was-your-own-brother man. And, thankfully, the kind of man who’d twirl his sister round the dance floor and not take offence when he realised who’d given his best man all those incriminating photocopies.

  Seeing Jamie and Leanne get hitched was the prize I’d had my eye on from day one. Every step of The Bullshit up to this point had been geared towards me not just making it there, but having a bloody good time too (mission accomplished). And so, in a way, it felt like the completion of Phase One – now that Jamie and Leanne had become husband and wife, it didn’t just mark a new chapter for them, but one for me, too.