The C-Word Read online

  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 seaso
n’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.

  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.’