I spoke to Karen in my Welsh class. Her sister-in-law died of breast cancer, and she asked me how I was doing. I said I had had a bit of a meltdown. She said you can’t live your life thinking about what might happen to you; you need to go forward being positive.
I told her that in my head I had done cancer, cancer was there behind me and I wanted to go forward, but part of me is terrified of what might be. She said we can all be terrified of what might be, that anyone could have anything wrong with them, at any time, but that they can’t live their lives thinking they will die, and that I am in a better place than most people, because I will be monitored for the next five years.
I am coming to terms with the fact that it is OK to think that I have done cancer, and to be positive about living my life. I saw the programme on Mr Monypenny that the BBC did. He is Mr Fantastic, and I can completely understand why, on all those soaps and American TV programmes, everyone falls in love with their doctors. I can imagine that Mr Monypenny would take you somewhere really nice for dinner, and know all about wine and would pull your chair out when you sat down. Mind you, I’d settle for a Harry Ramsden’s in Cardiff Bay if he was sitting opposite me with his lovely, reassuring, smiley face.
Anyway, it showed him performing a mastectomy on a woman and I watched it and it made me feel much better to see a sentinel node being chopped up and analysed under the microscope. The woman who had the mastectomy said she felt ‘lucky’; exactly as I have said many times. It is a word that people find very hard to associate with having cancer. She felt lucky that she would be able to live her life now, having caught the cancer early, and be with her children and grandchildren, and I thought it is very simple for her – she had negative nodes too, so that was very good news.
Kerry also had a facial after me and I looked after baby Daisy – she will go to anyone. I had to go to the supermarket to get Daisy some more milk, as I used Kerry’s only bottle (I never listen to instructions), and I was in Tescos zipping about getting stuff for supper and I thought, Something’s not right. I feel different – am I ill? Then I realised that for the first time in God knows how long, and I am talking years here, not just since my diagnosis, I felt relaxed. I was not tired, I was not sick, I was not anxious about what has been or what will be; for that moment in time, I was calm and relaxed as it should be, and I will NOT let cancer stop me feeling like that.
February 1, Thursday
Mowed the lawn today and trimmed the bushes; I really need to do more exercise, as I am becoming a slug. I figure the garden can benefit from my need to get up off my arse and lose a few pounds, so that I will be thin and gorgeous in a swimming suit when we go to Menorca.
People will, no doubt, look at me and marvel at the fact that I have two children and am so slim and trim. This is my fantasy, as is having hair and a figure like the post-cancer Kylie Minogue. She is my role model, and probably that of about fifty million other people – and that Oliver Martinez is a bloody fool. I do feel an affinity with her which is a bit ridiculous as we do have rather different lifestyles, but I think with breast cancer, or with any suffering, you can identify with people and it cuts across divides. Oh yes, I do love Kylie.
February 2, Friday
We are in Brighton, hurrah! I have managed to escape Cardiff and Wales and am on a mini-break – Bridget Jones style, except I have two children here too. We are at Ben and Bree’s wonderful flat which is near Brighton Pier, overlooking the sea.
February 3, Saturday
The weather is glorious. There is a fair on the Pier, a park right by the house, mini-golf and the sea. Elis is in heaven – mini-golf is his life. We haven’t seen Ben, Bree and baby Nancy for six months but it feels like we saw them yesterday. I drank far too much wine and champagne last night (well, they had to celebrate my fortieth birthday) and am hungover today, but have walked miles as penance. Teetotalism has gone out the window but I don’t really drink that much at all now so I’ll stop beating myself up over the occasional drink. What is that old saying? ‘If you give up drinking and you give up smoking and you give up sex, you won’t live longer – it will just feel like it.’ I realise that is not true, of course.
February 4, Sunday
Another glorious day – the sun always shines on the righteous. Baby Nancy is unwell, I think she’s teething so Ben stayed in with her while, Rhodri and I, Elis and Osh and Bree went to the Brighton Pavilion, which was spectacular, if a little opulently OTT. We had those guides that are like phones, and Elis had one and listened to it all the way around really enjoying it; he is a child genius with his interest in Regency architecture. At the end he was pestering me to buy him a fan with a Chinese Dragon on it, and when I asked him what he wanted it for, he said, ‘To fan myself when I am hot, of course.’
February 5, Monday
Back in Cardiff, I did some serious retail therapy with Kerry and baby Daisy. Rhodri’s third cousin Sarah has had a baby girl so it was another opportunity to buy cute baby girl outfits. We had some photos through and Sarah looks fabulous. That’s what having a baby at nineteen does for you: you bounce back. She is very young, but no younger than my mother when she had a baby. Pop them out when you are young, I say.
I also bought some pink, pretty (yet a little bit slutty) underwear from Next with a voucher Rhodri’s Auntie Pauline gave me for my birthday. On the way to Brighton I asked Rhodri if he had any condoms and he said he hadn’t bothered because he knew there was no chance he would be getting any sex. I hadn’t brought any either and I felt a bit sad that sex is not a part of our life any more; neither of us even thinks about it. I cannot remember the last time we had sex; my treatment has worn me down so that sex is the last thing on my mind.
So when I went to get the children a Burger King in the service station I bought a packet of condoms in the toilet (£3 a pack – a pound a shag) and gave them to him. He said, ‘These will probably expire before we get round to using them,’ so I bet him £10 that we would use them all by the end of February. Kerry said Rhodri will think it’s his lucky day when she saw my underwear. I said he is so desperate for sex, he would do me in a pair of fat pants and a binliner. Rhodri saw the underwear and did get very excited, but I had bought the wrong size bra so will have to change it tomorrow.
February 6, Tuesday
I had sex with my husband. I had sex with my husband. Did my husband in my (one size larger) new underwear. Thank you to Auntie Pauline for the voucher and Next for the slutty underwear which re-ignited my love life. Rhodri now owes me £3.3333 (recurring). Have just realised I have turned myself into a prostitute with my bet. Only have another twenty-two days to collect the further £6.666 (recurring).
February 7, Wednesday
Martyn forgot my birthday – actually he didn’t forget, he sent me flowers, but I think that was after he remembered. So he took me and Sian from work (as she hasn’t seen me since Christmas) out for a posh lunch to French restaurant Le Gallois. Although I am only eating dust at the moment to get into my new swimsuit, I forgot that and had two beautiful, but small courses. Sian and Martyn told me all the gossip from work so I am well up to speed on it all. Sian said, ‘Sorry, Shell, you probably don’t care about any of this,’ but I did because for once it was really nice to speak about something other than my illness; I realised that there is another world out there that I belonged to once. Someone new is joining our team and I said, ‘Make sure they don’t take my desk,’ and was all territorial about my working space, which would have been unheard of even a month ago.
February 8, Thursday
It is snowing. Osh looked out of the window and said, ‘My garden is snowing,’ and Elis woke up, looked through the window and screamed at the top of his voice as if someone was murdering him, ‘It’s bloody, bloody, bloody brilliant.’ Osh has never seen snow; I think it has snowed once in his lifetime but he was tiny so he couldn’t really remember it. Elis just wants to throw snowballs at everyone and make snow angels. Rhodri took them in the car to school; they were bot
h so happy and excited to be out in the snow. As Rhodri pulled off, Elis had his head out of the window, his face beaming, catching the snow on his tongue and it was bloody, bloody, bloody brilliant.
Rhodri was supposed to be going to London today to queue in the American Embassy for a visa. He isn’t going now because of the snow, so it means he can come to the hospital with me for my radiotherapy planning appointment, which I am glad about because I don’t really want to go on my own. Also, if someone else is there and you ask questions, they can remember some of the good bits to counter-balance the bad bits which I tend to focus on at these times.
It’s taken forty years, but I finally have a tattoo. We walked into the hospital and I said to Rhodri, ‘I hate the smell of this place,’ and he said, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad.’ I don’t think he can appreciate what the smell of the hospital does to me.
For the planning session, they lay you on a bed in the room and you have your top half bare, then they put these pen marks on you (not very high-tech, but I am assuming they know what they are doing) and then the bed moves through a piece of equipment which is like an enormous doughnut. It is very much like the Stargate in Stargate, or whatever it is called on Sky, but smaller, which was what I was thinking as I lay there, passing through the Stargate, bare-breasted with three blokes and a woman I have never met before, in another room watching me. Maybe it was one great big joke and the Stargate was actually real and I would be transported to another world or planet or back to June last year where they could undo my cancer diagnosis. This did not actually happen though.
Then this young lad came out and said, ‘I am going to tattoo you now.’ I wondered if he went down the pub after work and talked to his mates about what he’d done at work that day. Rhodri had suggested in the waiting room that I have Bluebird tattooed on it – a reference to Cardiff City and to the fact that my breast is still blue from the substance they injected into it when I had my first operation. (Or ‘nuked me’ as I say, but I have read on Google that it is not nuclear, although the sign on the door says Nuclear Medicine, so maybe I have that wrong.)
Then the young man tattooed three tiny dots on me and that was it. I had asked if I could see my consultant Mr Barrett-Lee, or Gill, as there were some questions I had to get out of my head or they would drive me crazy. Lizzie came, as Dr Barrett-Lee and Gill were out, and I asked her if I could have my mammogram soon to check out the nipple discharge, which I still have – even though it is a tiny amount. They have said it is nothing to worry about, but I am still worrying. If I were able to eliminate the worry from my mind with the mammogram, it would be great.
She said she would ask the doctor and come back to me. I also said that the costochondritis was back, which wasn’t an issue, but I was scared in case it wasn’t that but the cancer spreading to my liver, as I had read in Dr Susan Love’s Breast Book that that is where you feel the pain for liver cancer. And even though that might be a mad thing to say, it was in my head and I’d feel better if it wasn’t in my head but out there for someone to tell me it wasn’t true.
She said that throughout my treatment my vital organs are monitored through my blood. I don’t know how this is done, but I am willing, on this one, to take her word for it. She said that they would have been alerted to any change. They will continue to monitor me, and that if I had secondary liver cancer they would know about it. Hurrah! Someone in the medical profession has given me something concrete. Thank you, Lizzie, for putting my mind at rest.
I also asked about the chemo and would it now be out of my system, which she said it would be, but I might carry on feeling tired for a while. My immune system would be going up and up, and would soon be just like anyone else’s.
So I was happy about that. I have decided not to take any of my boosting vitamins until after the radiotherapy, just my Tesco multi-vitamins and my Vitality with pro- and pre-biotic and omegas; then after the radiotherapy I will be back on the vitamin C and garlic and milk thistle and fish oils, and will read up on the others for long-term use.
I was reading an article in Rosie’s waiting room on Allicin garlic. It is hailed as a wonder drug, so I will be taking that and vitamin C and the fish oils for the rest of my life – long may that be.
February 9, Friday
The snow is clearing. I did a bit of mad cleaning this morning. One of the reasons I will be glad to get back to work is that it will actually stop me cleaning, which I am slightly obsessive about. I guess it is the valleys girl in me. There it is seen as a reflection on you, how often you clean your front step.
It takes me an hour after Rhodri and the boys have left in the mornings just to get the house square, and then there’s washing and bits of shopping and God knows what else. I have just got the Johnson’s cotton buds out and have cleaned the glass door of the shower; I think it’s turning into a bit of an addiction.
I long to be like the women whose houses I go to. These houses are not immaculate – I don’t mean the toys on the floor, that’s inevitable – but may have a dirty sink with bits in it that no one seems to notice, bits of food waiting to germinate into something hideous that would almost certainly wipe out my entire family. People whose houses have never seen a Johnson’s cotton bud in the shower tray – how do I become one of those people?
How the hell did I manage to fit all this in before? Did I just not notice, or was I really Superwoman doing all this cotton-bud cleaning and working almost full-time, or was it a mess and I just didn’t notice? Or I did notice but didn’t care, or I did notice and did care and thereby worried myself into a life-threatening illness.
I’m trying to plough through my self-help books to justify the amount of money I have spent on them. There is one called Cancer Positive and it is really good, mainly because it is quite short which means I can read it twice to fully take it in. It is very reassuring to read, because many of the things the author says in his book, about changing your life, and how a diagnosis of cancer affects you and makes you re-evaluate your life, are the things that I have come to understand and appreciate.
There is mention in the book about ‘the cancer type’, although he may not actually say that; instead the author discusses how stress affects the immune system. The fact is I worry about mould (green and black) in the shower tray, and have to clean it out with a Johnson’s cotton bud.
I have to let go of my worry. It has been programmed into me by my Auntie Beatty and my grandmother, who spent most of my childhood predicting terrible things would happen if I ran or climbed or ate lying down or was left in water too long, and I am exactly like them.
I was reading in the self-help section of Borders, when I went shopping with Kerry, another book – which I didn’t dare buy, otherwise self-help will be becoming an obsession, and that will be another thing to worry about – but it was about a woman talking to another woman about worrying about her children. I thought, It’s one thing to say, ‘Let go of that anxiety and tension, the worrying that something might happen to them,’ but how the bloody hell do you do that?
Isn’t it programmed into us to be terrified that something will happen to our children, so that we are constantly looking out for them and making sure they stay alive? Isn’t that a ‘continuation of the species’ thing, because if you didn’t have a society full of completely paranoid mothers making sure their children lived to adulthood to reproduce, wouldn’t society just end, crumble into dust?
If I wasn’t worrying about the bacteria in the shower tray being potentially harmful to my children, wouldn’t I be doing society and the whole human race a disservice?
February 10, Saturday
Weighed myself in Tescos; I have put on thirteen pounds. I am eleven stone thirteen pounds and I want to be back at eleven stone. When I met Rhodri I was about nine and a half stone. I have a big job to stick to eleven stone, so I must have been like Kate bloody Moss then. I was a vegetarian, rode a bike everywhere as I didn’t have a car, and went swimming nearly every morning before work. HELLO –
was I mad? Probably, but I was thin. Despite my ‘I don’t care what I look like as long as I am alive’ mantra I really do want to lose that weight. I have a tartan mini-skirt which I don’t dare wear until I am thinner, because I think I will be mutton dressed as lamb. But by then it will be summer and I’ll have to wear it next winter now. The plan is to try and lose two pound a week. That should be possible, with lots of water and apples and soup.
February 11, Sunday
Went swimming with Elis this morning. I can’t remember the last time I did that and it was great. Because he can swim now it means I am not sticking to him like a limpet, but can let him move around on his own and have races with him. I am determined to do some exercise. I feel like I’ve been hibernating since my diagnosis, not doing much of anything, just tied to the house.
Not having hair is also very liberating, as when you have hair you have to dry it and do stuff to it. My hair is starting to come back, I think I can see tiny little shoots on my head now where the patches were.
I was in a private cubicle with Elis and he was saying, ‘Tell me when you are taking your wig off. I don’t want to look,’ and he was making a fuss about it. I got cross and said, ‘If you want to come swimming with me you will have to see me without my wig.’ (I wore a swimming hat – very fetching, NOT; it was orange and I looked like an overweight Belisha Beacon.) Eventually he peeled his hands away from his eyes before I put the swimming cap on and he went, ‘Hmm, it’s not that bad, what are you worrying about?’ as if he was about thirty, not seven. Then he completely ignored it.
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 22