The C-Word Page 8

  The first night after having the chemo drugs was horrific. I was a mug for thinking I could bring some cheery charm to the proceedings by glamming up for the hospital last week, flouncing into the Gloomiest Room In The World in my floral skirt and tottering heels like a lost shopper who’d been sent to Primark instead of Prada. Because, within hours of leaving the hospital, the not-so-floral reality hit me. Can’t-keep-anything-down sickness, shakes and shivers, diarrhoea, wanting to rip out my veins, fainting, aching, heart palpitations, all-over bone pain, sweating, panicking, total inability to process my own thoughts, watching as my joints swelled and my skin developed itchy rashes, being able to do nothing but sway and say ‘for fuck’s sake, for fuck’s sake, for fuck’s sake’ over and over. Can you imagine how difficult that must have been for P and my parents to witness? (My poor folks have not only had to live with the fact that their daughter has cancer, but that she says ‘fuck’ a lot.)

  The days thereafter, while 100 per cent better in comparison, have still been cripplingly challenging. Nausea, exhaustion, aching bones, headaches, stomach pains and – worst of all – a complete messing with your head. Chemo (at least the first night after having it) must be like heroin addiction or cold turkey: it mucks up your looks and screws with your mind. It turns you into a different person. It takes away who you are and makes you 24/7 tearful and depressed and confused and paranoid and tetchy and unable to understand anyone around you. It makes you irritable and annoyed with the people closest to you, when all you want to do is tell them that you love them so much, and that they’re the only reason you can be arsed to go through all this, and that without them there’d be no point.

  How do so many people do this? Just how have so many people managed it and seen the other side? I’m only a couple of days into my first cycle and already wondering how I can spend the rest of the year handling this shit. For probably the first time since this all began, I’m feeling really bloody blood-boilingly angry and hard done by. I am twenty-fucking-eight. On the hottest weekend of the year, I should be sitting outside a pub in the glorious sun, drinking lager shandies and talking to my man or my folks or my mates about where to go on holiday, who’s doing what for New Year, whether there’ll be a series three of Gavin & Stacey, or what Derby County’s chances are for next season. Instead I’m craving a cold, dark room, a few hours’ decent sleep and a way out of this physical and mental … I don’t know what … unfairness. Going through chemo has got to be the pinnacle of human endurance.

  There’s not a lot more I can say. Chemotherapy is a motherfucker.

  *

  THAT POST CAME three days after my first chemo. And those seventy-two hours in the meantime were among the most miserable of my life. It had started well enough – dressing up for my first appointment, painting on as good a brave face as Max Factor could manage, doing my darndest to swallow the painful tears that threatened to fall in front of my husband on the way to the hospital, and smiling in the face of the strange looks I got upon entering the chemo floor.

  As P gripped my hand tightly in the waiting room, the first thing that occurred to us was just how much hanging around there was going to be. First, you’re weighed and measured. Then there’s a blood test to check your white-blood-cell levels. Then the wait to find out whether those levels are okay. Then an even longer wait while the chemotherapy drugs are prepared. We could have flown to Spain and back by the time my treatment began.

  But before all of that was a consultation with my oncologist – the same Glamorous Assistant I’d seen the week previous. ‘Good news,’ she said as we sat ourselves down in her office. ‘Your CT scan came back clear.’

  ‘Omigod,’ I blurted. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘As sure as we can be,’ she said. (It wasn’t quite the triumphant ‘absofuckinglutely’ I was after, but it was good enough.)

  ‘That’s really … that’s just … it’s completely …’

  ‘Amazing,’ said P, finishing my sentence for me. ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘So we really know what we’re up against now,’ said Glamorous Assistant. ‘As you know, the scan can’t pick up the smaller cancer cells, but they are precisely what your chemotherapy is designed to treat.’

  Harshing my mellow somewhat, she then reread the list of possible side effects I’d heard the last time I’d seen her and I nodded along with each one, optimistically assuming that, at worst, I’d only be affected by a portion of her list. Because, really, how bad could it be?

  While eating our M&S lunch of couscous and salad on a bench near the hospital, I received the call to say that my chemo was ready, and P and I headed back, our fingers still locked, to the second-floor room where my treatment was about to begin. I chose a seat in the corner and P pulled up a stool alongside me, giving me that pursed-lip, you’re-being-so-brave look without actually using the B-word I’d recently banned. While getting hooked up to my cannula, being suspiciously stared at like a giraffe in a monkey enclosure by the other fifty-and sixty-something women, I asked my nurse to give me a hint about which of my two chemo trios I could expect to be the worst.

  ‘Heck, darlin’, it’s just so different for everyone,’ said the first, beckoning over two other nurses to get their opinions. One thought the first type would be worse on a sickness front, but that the second would be more painful for my body. The other said neither was ‘a picnic’, but that most people found the second type tougher to handle because of the accelerated hair loss. Then the first nurse waded back in, interrupting another chemo patient in the middle of her Maeve Binchy to get her take on the debate. ‘Pff,’ she exclaimed, looking over the top of her book and shrugging in a way that suggested I couldn’t possibly understand at this early stage, before returning to the page she’d left. The nurses looked back hopefully to see whether my fellow patient’s exhalation had answered my question.

  ‘Righto,’ I said. ‘Better get on with it, then.’

  Before being wired up to the drugs themselves, I first spent an hour with my head in a freezer. Or, at least, it felt that way. I’d read the occasional success story about cold caps – designed to cool the scalp, thus restricting the chemotherapy drugs’ access to your hair follicles – and had begged on a previous visit to be given use of one. I’d have done anything – anything – to increase my chances of clinging onto my lovely locks and, catching sight of my cold-capped reflection in my iPhone screen, I realised just what that ‘anything’ entailed. I looked like a prize twat. ‘This had better fucking work,’ I spat at P from beneath the uncomfortable weight of my pink, coastguard-chic headgear, and he did his best to hide his sniggers behind the back page of the paper.

  Persisting with the cold cap meant a longer stay at the hospital, since its best chance of working was to wear it for an hour before and after – as well as during – the administering of the drugs. Which, in total, was a good five hours’ worth of looking like an idiot. Not that the drugs themselves did anything to help. The steroid came first and, despite being the one that sounded like it would do the least damage, it immediately made me feel as though someone had put itching powder in my knickers. What is it with these drugs and their insistence on messing with your nether regions? There I sat, blushing beneath my freezing twat-hat, scratching my bits like a thrush gold medallist. So much for being the most glamorous girl in chemo.

  ‘Tell me that’s the lot of it,’ I said to the nurse before she produced a bag of scary-looking fluid. She shook her head. ‘Sorry, darlin’, but it’s time for the good stuff.’

  The first batch of the good stuff was red – bright red, in fact, like a thicker version of Tizer. ‘Now don’t be alarmed,’ said the nurse as she set it off on its journey into my veins, ‘but your wee will be this colour later on.’

  I pulled a face. ‘Well, that’ll be interesting,’ I replied.

  ‘And this red drug is the one that’s mostly responsible for any hair loss,’ she continued, flicking my IV.

  ‘Or not,’ I said hopefully, raising my eye
brows towards the cold cap. ‘I’d better not be wearing this sodding thing for nothing.’

  Once the first bag had found its way into my body, it was time for the second – this time a clear fluid that didn’t look any different to a saline drip. The red stuff had looked like it might be painful but, in fact, wasn’t at all. The clear drip, however, had a stranger effect. I felt hot around the throat and more than a little woozy. The third bag of drugs – also clear – wasn’t much better, making me feel partly like I was underwater and partly fizzy in my nose, as though I’d eaten a whole pack of Haribo Tangfastics in one sitting. P and I tried to take our minds off the obvious by challenging each other to a water-drinking race (in the hope that it’d flush the red liquid through my system) and watching episodes of Gavin & Stacey on my iPod, but time passed slowly. I replied to all the texts I’d been receiving, wrote a blog post and did some work from my chair. P read a newsagent’s worth of tabloids and continually kept my folks posted on my progress as they made their way from Derby to London, to be there in time for our return from the hospital.

  Scooped-out jacket potatoes with cheese and bacon were waiting for us when we got home; Mum’s caring, comfort-food method of healing.

  ‘So how do you feel, Mrs?’ asked Dad, and I didn’t know how to reply.

  ‘Dunno. Weird. Like something’s about to happen.’ And I wasn’t wrong. Because, in the time it took to publish the blog post I’d written at the hospital and eat half a jacket potato, I’d taken to my bed, feeling dizzy, queasy, shaky and completely bloody terrified. I didn’t know what was happening to my body, nor did my body know what was going on either. Even before things got to the horrible depths I wrote about in the blog post at the beginning of this chapter (the post that still evokes that bleach-like hospital smell and a sickness in my stomach), there was an overwhelming sense in my body that whatever had been put into it had to get out – and as quickly as possible. Hence the Lisa-shaped hole in the wall connecting my bedroom to the bathroom.

  ‘Whose is that?’ I said, pointing to the silver washing-up bowl on my bedroom floor as I climbed back into bed.

  ‘I bought it,’ said Mum, ‘in case you needed it. To save you running to the bathroom.’

  And then, right on cue – even before my head had touched the pillow – I jerked bolt upright, grabbing the bowl to regurgitate the couscous I’d had for lunch. Suffice to say, I haven’t eaten couscous since.

  When you’re sick on a hangover, a relief usually comes from having barfed. But when you’re sick after chemo – much like after food poisoning – you simply can’t barf enough. As soon as Mum had emptied the plastic bowl, I’d need to use it again and, thanks to a carefully placed mirror opposite the bed, I could see that I was getting greyer with every puke. One moment I’d be sweating, the next shivering. My heart raced so fast that it made me panic, then the panicking made me faint, and the fainting made me delirious. I couldn’t focus, I could feel my joints swelling, and I became convinced that my nose was growing too big for my face. I felt like I’d been poisoned. And, I suppose, I had.

  I knew how ill I was. But if I had been in any doubt, all I had to do was look at the faces of Mum, Dad and P – they were petrified. They took it in turns to sit with me; Dad curling up beside me to hold my shaking hand, Mum bringing me ice cubes to suck when I couldn’t keep down water, P mopping my brow with a wet flannel. ‘Do you want the telly on?’ they’d ask. ‘Do you want to listen to some music?’ ‘Do you want a window open?’ ‘Do you want us to stay here, or do you want to be alone?’ But the truth was, I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted nothing. I wanted to fall asleep, bypass the rest of chemo’s immediate ills, and wake up when the agony was over.

  What became clear after even the very first cycle of chemo was that, for the foreseeable future, I would have no significant concept of time. I’d sleep only sporadically, and at unusual hours. I’d eat only occasionally, and only once the smell from everyone else’s meals had disappeared. Not even the promise of a Coronation Street double-bill could get me to the TV at my usual routine time. It was a miserable thing, made more miserable by the fact that the worst of it began on a Friday night and lasted all sodding weekend. I didn’t even have the beauty of thinking, ‘Well, at least everyone else is at work.’

  By Monday, however, things had slowly begun to improve. Taking baby steps and holding on to Mum’s arm, I walked to the nearest corner, and – more importantly – was finally able to enjoy a cup of tea. I was still super-exhausted, still felt a bit sick after as little as a minute of conversation, and everything still tasted like cardboard, but I was feeling more like myself and I wasn’t half grateful. That’s not to say that the effects of my first cycle of chemo had done their thing, mind you. There were still a few surprises to come. Not least the piles.

  ‘Are you okay, love?’ asked P from the other side of our locked bathroom door. ‘You’ve been in there ages.’

  ‘Fucking cancer,’ I whinged from the loo seat. ‘This sodding illness just gets more glamorous by the day, doesn’t it?’

  The hair loss, they tell you about. And the sickness, and the pain, and the depressing effect on your taste buds. But nobody warned me about the toll that cancer treatment was going to take on my arse. First the constipation, then the painful ‘relief’, then getting the runs … and then back to the start of the crappy cycle again. There on the toilet, squeezing my chest to my knees, I finally understood why, right back as early as my diagnosis, every cancer-experienced person I came across recommended that I keep a constant supply of Sudocrem. Bloody good advice – it’s the single most brilliant gift you can buy a cancer patient. (Well, that and Louboutins.)

  ‘P! Help!’ I screeched from the loo seat, to the sound of hurried footsteps running down our hallway.

  ‘I’m here, babe, what is it? Shall I come in?’

  ‘God, no, don’t come in,’ I shot back in a single breath. (At this stage I was still fooling myself that I’d never allow P to see my bald head, so I’d have rather done an Elvis and popped my clogs there on the loo than have my husband see me as I was.) ‘Just, erm, bring me something from the kitchen, will you?’

  P’s silence was deafeningly embarrassing.

  ‘The olive oil, okay? Bring the olive oil.’

  ‘Riiiight,’ he said, scampering off to the cupboard.

  ‘Don’t look at me, okay?’ I mumbled into my dressing gown while P held open the bedroom door for me after Sainsbury’s best lubrication had done the trick. ‘It’s completely bloody humiliating.’

  ‘Okay, beautiful,’ said P – sensitive as ever – though I’d never felt further from beautiful. ‘I’ll leave you alone for a bit.’

  Sitting on a travel neck pillow because I wasn’t able to put any pressure on my damaged derrière, I figured things couldn’t get much worse. But, looking up into the mirror opposite our bed to scowl at my reflection, I noticed that, in fact, it had.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ I said, peering at the acne-ridden mess before me. Equally as startling as the nineteen spots I counted was just how quickly they’d appeared. ‘Great,’ I said, squeezing a zit on the end of my nose. ‘That’s just great. Because the puking and shitting wasn’t quite enough. Now I’m getting uglier by the day.’

  ‘Sort it out, scientists,’ I wrote on my blog. ‘What the hell is keeping you? You can send tourists to space, you can clone sheep … hell, you can make Posh Spice’s tits stand up like that (thanks, Isaac Newton, your work here is done). So tell me, boffins, whose idea was it exactly to skip past the Making Chemo Bearable module and instead goof around growing human ears on the backs of mice? Or is this some sort of reverse-Weird Science experiment to create a hideous troll of a woman who’ll actually consider getting off with one of you geeks? Because, well done, it looks like it’s working. Get your lab coat. You’ve pulled.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Getting wiggy with it

  August 2008

  As cancer experiences go, I’m not convinced I’
ll have one quite as memorable as my first wig fitting. I’m rather entertained by the fact that I keep calling it a wig ‘fitting’, actually. That makes it sound like buying a wedding dress, when actually the two experiences couldn’t be more different. In one, your mum cries while you spend an hour trying on a frock you’ll wear for twelve hours. In the other, you cry with laughter while you spend fifteen minutes trying on a wig that you might have to wear for twelve months. The only similarity is showing off in front of a mirror although, again, in one experience your reflection looks as good as it ever will, and in the other your’re staring back at Rod Stewart.

  On the NHS, you’re entitled to an acrylic wig, paying a prescription fee of about £60 (human-hair wigs bought privately can cost anything upwards of £1,000). It was never really my intention to go down the acrylic route, but I figured I’d take what I’m entitled to and see how I get on with it. Plus there’s a tiny, foolishly optimistic part of me that thinks that since I’ve not lost any hair yet, it might just hang on in there, and that I’ll never need a wig. Probably the same part of my brain that thought they’d got it wrong about the breast cancer. If needs be, though, I’m perfectly prepared to throw some money at the problem (the Louboutins can wait) and buy myself a real hair wig from a specialist shop, but for now I’d rather not have to think about it.

  The NHS being the NHS, there was zero sense of style in the process. Instead, P and I were ushered into a hospital back room the size of a stationery cupboard by a disapproving little man with surprisingly small feet. The stationery cupboard had very high shelves displaying mannequin heads with truly awful hairdos that Wig Man had to stand on a chair to reach. (Wig Man is, by the way, completely bald – I wonder if he tries on the wigs when nobody’s looking?) The lower shelves were home to an ancient-looking radio buried among lots of boxes containing wigs that had been ordered for other patients. I had a sneaky look and noticed that most of them were grey – another reminder of the lottery-winning odds of getting The Bullshit at my age.