Bonkers: My Life in Laughs

by Saunders, Jennifer

  Ade was calm, which I like. The last thing I wanted was to have to deal with someone else’s shit, to have to be the rallier.

  When I gave birth to my girls, it was always reassuring that, no matter how much pain I was in, or screaming or near-death throes I did, I could look at Ade, sometimes nodding off, sometimes reading or making a cup of tea, and think, Well, it can’t be that bad. Ade doesn’t seem worried …

  I tried to have my last two babies at home. Succeeded with the first, Beattie, who was born just above Luigi’s Deli on the Fulham Road and grew up on some of the finest Italian baby food known to man. Not so easy with Freya, who refused to be born. Hours and hours I bellowed in the bedroom, to very little effect, with a midwife – determined Freya would be born before she went off her shift – sticking her fingers in and trying to dilate me by force. So painful. More bellowing, more gas and air.

  At one point, Ade left the room to find one of the girls on the stairs outside.

  Looking slightly worried, she said, ‘Daddy, is there a dragon in the house?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s just Mummy.’

  The dragon was eventually taken to hospital and relaxed with an epidural.

  So, I was back at the clinic to have yet another scan, in the gown that does up at the back so everybody can see your pants as you walk along to the mammogram room.

  The results, plus me fully dressed again, thank God, were then sent post-haste to Mr Gui.

  He was studying them as I walked into his office. It seemed there were now two small lumps in the left breast, but he was reassuring. They were small and could have been there a long time. No rush, but let’s operate quite soon. Why don’t you go now this minute and have a biopsy?

  So I did.

  I was now slightly regretting that I had neglected to bring anyone with me for these appointments. Not just for support, but to share the story and have a laugh with.

  To do the biopsy, the doctor used ultrasound to locate the lumps and then, guided by that, he plunged an enormous needle into the breast to extract a tissue sample. Not at all pleasant, but being able to watch it happen on a screen was fascinating.

  I also have to declare at this point that I am pathetically competitive, even when there’s no one to compete with. My family long ago banned me from playing board games. I will negotiate winning even before I begin to play Monopoly. If I go bankrupt, I have to be lent money so I can continue with the game and eventually win. Equally, I want to be the bravest. I will not complain unless it’s absolutely killing and, at the same time, I want the doctor to feel happy and will attempt to make them laugh, if at all possible.

  So, back to the biopsy.

  DOCTOR: Tell me if this hurts.

  ME: I certainly will.

  DOCTOR: Anything yet?

  ME: I didn’t realize you’d started, ha ha.

  DOCTOR: You can have more local if it’s painful.

  ME:No, no, I’m fine. Would you like some painkiller? Ha ha.

  DOCTOR: OK, I’m putting the needle a bit further in now.

  ME: Actually, yes. Yes, a bit more if it’s going. Sorry. So sorry.

  When the results of the biopsy were in, I had an appointment to see Mr Gui at the Royal Marsden. Ade was by now giving his Captain Hook in Canterbury, so I took my friend Betty with me.

  It is very sobering to be in a waiting room with people you know are a lot worse off than you. Sitting there, I couldn’t fall back on my default behaviour of ‘make light, make jokes’. I knew I was lucky. It had been caught early and the prognosis was good.

  We sat with Mr Gui and a breast nurse. Breast nurses are fantastic people. If ever you need to talk about your breasts, they are at the end of a phone.

  ‘After this appointment, you may like to speak to one of the breast nurses.’

  ‘Yes, I will. Thank you very much.’

  Mr Gui had the results of the biopsy. As expected, it was cancer, but it didn’t appear to be fast-growing. Hurrah! So he had a plan of action. Double hurrah!

  The two lumps were quite deep in the tissue of the left breast, which was good because when he operated, he thought he could remove enough healthy tissue around them without having to remove the breast. This is the only time I have been thankful for enormous knockers. So this meant that the left breast would be considerably smaller.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Basically, it would be reduced, and lifted.’

  ‘I see.’ I’m quite interested now.

  ‘If I do that, would you want the other breast done at the same time?’

  ‘Or … ?’

  ‘Have different-sized breasts. Or have the other one done at a later date?’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  Mr Gui drew it out for us on a scrap of paper. It was very basic. One big tit and one small, pert, lifted tit. Doing both at once would mean a longer operation and recovery time, but that was what I wanted and, as far as I was concerned, Mr Gui was a god.

  I could feel Betty getting anxious that I wasn’t thinking through all the information I had been given, and instead was just getting overexcited at the prospect of a tit lift. Which I was. This was a result.

  Betty, however, was brilliant. Trying to stem my rising hysterical pleasure, she explored all the options, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. What happens to the nipple, etc., etc. (By the way, it’s always worth taking someone with you to appointments. They will ask questions and get the facts when you’re just trying to be brave and not a bother, and they will remember things later when your mind is a blank.)

  A couple of weeks later, I was in hospital waiting for a breastlift – sorry, lumpectomy.

  I had only ever had one anaesthetic before, and that was for a back operation many years previously. We were living in Richmond and I had just started recording a French and Saunders show. Outside our house was a car parking place covered in too much gravel. Thick, unstable, stupid gravel.

  Ade had a lovely Moto Guzzi motorbike parked there, and every time I pulled in fast to park, the gravel would shift and his bike would crash over. The last time it happened I was too embarrassed to go in and tell him, so I attempted to pick it up myself. While straining, I felt a distinct popping sensation in my back followed by pain. A lot of pain.

  I had slipped a disc, but decided I didn’t have time to have a slipped disc and soldiered on. We were taking the kids to Euro Disney with our friends Betty and David and their children, and I wasn’t going to miss that. However, it was a mistake. The Runaway Train and Thunder Mountain took their toll on my spine and I had to go and see a doctor, who prescribed intensive physiotherapy and some pretty fabulous painkillers.

  I was fine. I could record a French and Saunders, no trouble.

  Yes, I was fine. I was fine until just after we’d recorded a Pan’s People sketch with Kathy Burke and Raw Sex. I jumped off the raised stage on to a concrete studio floor wearing some 1970s high heels. That totally did it. The protruding disc was now crushed, and bits were floating about inside and jabbing into any nerves they could find.

  I was put to bed with more painkillers and a pile of pillows under my legs. I looked like a dead beetle and was told not to move.

  Days came and went. I was supposed to be rehearsing the next week’s show, but I was totally incapable and drugged to the eyeballs. However, I was still convinced that I would be able to make it to the studio on the night. At one point, through a druggy haze, Dawn and the director appeared at my bedside with Geraldine McEwan in tow. Surely not. Miss Marple in my bedroom and I hadn’t even showered or hoovered?

  She had been brought to me so we could rehearse a sketch for that week. What must she have thought? She was in the bedroom of a drugged-up dead beetle who couldn’t see the lines, let alone read them.

  I didn’t manage to get in for that studio recording, and Dawn managed far too well on her own. I made a slurred phone call to Dawn that was played to the audience over a PA in the studio. Tragic.

  Back to the matter in
hand.

  Before I was ready for the operation, there were two more procedures. They had to locate my main lymph nodes, so one could be tested during the operation. This is done by visiting a nuclear facility that is situated behind lead walls in the hospital. You are injected with radioactive stuff (slightly unclear on the exact details here, as you can tell), then everyone leaves the room and a scanner traces the movement of the stuff as it finds the lymph nodes (you get the gist).

  Then, in another facility, thin wires are put into the breast so that they touch the lumps. This is done using ultrasound, and the wires are used as a guide for the surgeon. So I went home the night before the op looking as if I had been impaled by two E strings in a bad guitar smash.

  I wasn’t feeling quite so clever this time.

  DOCTOR: Tell me if you need more local anaesthetic.

  ME: Yes I do. Thank you.

  No more messing about.

  I am very nice to the anaesthetist when she comes in to see me on the morning of the op to go through the procedure and get me to sign all the forms. So many forms. Sign here, please. Check all the details. Is this you? Date of birth? Profession?

  Profession. Always a hard one. I used to put ‘Actress’. Then ‘Actor’. Then ‘Comedienne’. Then ‘Actor/Writer’. Now I just put ‘Entertainer’ and hope I’m not asked to make balloon animals.

  I’m especially nice to the anaesthetist because someone once told me that it doesn’t matter so much who your surgeon is. It’s the anaesthetist who keeps you alive. Get the best one.

  Mr Gui then arrives on his rounds, followed by a phalanx of nurses. I’m due for the op that morning, so he has come to give me a pep talk and mark me up. I open my gown, and he marks up my breast with a rather sharp felt-tip pen. This is possibly more painful than anything that is to follow. He draws smallened tits on present large tits freehand. He’s no Picasso, and I pray he’s more skilled with a scalpel. I am reminded that surgeons are called Mr because in the early days they weren’t doctors, but actually butchers brought in to do the chopping up.

  I am reassured by all the nurses, who love Mr Gui and say he really does the very best ‘cuts’.

  A few hours later, my time has come. I am walked in gown and hospital slippers down to the lift and then down to the theatre. I am shocked to learn that the lovely cocktail of drugs called the pre-med is no longer given. Damn. I was looking forward to that. No pre-med? What is the world coming to?

  Here goes. On to the operating trolley and straight to needle in arm from the anaesthetist, whom I am still being very nice to, and out for the count.

  SEVENTEEN

  So, chemotherapy …

  Stay with me, dear reader.

  The first thing I had to do was to meet my oncologist, Professor Paul Ellis. Ade couldn’t make the first appointment due to Captain Hooking, but a timely oil spillage then came to our rescue. Someone had leaked diesel oil under the massive panto tent in Canterbury and it was deemed unsafe to perform, due to the fumes. I presume there was the possibility that, if a child dropped a cigarette butt, it could turn into a giant Peter-Panny fireball. So he had a few weeks off.

  Paul Ellis explained in beautiful detail the reasoning behind chemotherapy. My cancer was hormone sensitive and HER2 positive, so I was going to have Herceptin as well as other drugs. He did some small sketches on a scrap of paper. From the drawing, I understood that there were some spiky things that needed small hats. Then he went through all the different options of drugs I could have and the various courses of treatment. I made a good face and attempted a question or two, but all I wanted to say to him was, ‘Listen, you don’t have to do this. I will be happy with the option you choose. I trust you.’

  It is the same with my agent, Maureen, and contracts. She knows that it is pointless going through the fine detail with me. Fine detail, to me, is white noise.

  ‘I won’t go through the whole thing with you, love, because I know it bores you. Any questions?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you just want to sign where indicated?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Thank you.’

  So Paul decided on a six-month course of treatment that we all agreed sounded the business. Six months. I made a note on the calendar. Six months and then back to normal. Job done.

  Before the ‘off’, I had a portacath fitted. This allows the drugs and whatever else to go directly into a vein. It was quite different from what I imagined. I thought it would be like the top of a carton of fruit juice, but no, it actually sits completely under your skin and the needle is then stabbed through into it, which means there is never any trouble finding a vein. Marvellous! All this required was a small operation, which gave me the chance to see Mr Gui again, and the anaesthetist, whom I was again extremely nice to.

  Port in place, and the chemo began.

  The first one is a bit scary, because you have no idea how you’re going to feel. I had my own little cubicle, and Ade and the girls came along to keep me company and have a look.

  The clinic offered me a thing called a cold cap, which is a helmet you wear that is extremely cold – freezing, in fact – and can prevent a good deal of hair loss. I gave it a go, but losing my hair was not a real worry for me. I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life in wigs of one kind or another. Most people don’t really know what my real hair looks like, and are shocked to find out that it’s not red and curly.

  A little detour about wigs here. There are acrylic wigs, the kind you can get in department stores, which are obviously not made from real hair and are attached to an elastic net – pull-on wigs. But wigs made from real hair are painstakingly constructed by specialist wig makers and made to order. Every individual hair is knotted on to fine lace. The first fitting you have involves having your hair pinned down as flat as it will go and having layers and layers of cling film wrapped tightly round your head. It’s not a good look. The hairline is drawn on to the cling film before the whole thing is removed and used as a template. Then a huge box of dead hair is produced, of every length and colour imaginable, and the selection process begins.

  It’s not actually dead people’s hair – which is what I always used to believe it was. Or nun’s hair. It is just people’s hair that is cut off and sold. So, basically, poor people’s hair. The hair is then knotted on to lace by tiny people with tiny fingers and excellent eyesight. It takes weeks. The hair is then cut and treated like normal hair. It’s hairpinned on to yer head, and the lace at the hairline is practically invisible and stuck down with glue. There you go. Just so you know.

  Anyway, with a very cold head, it’s time for the saline drip, some paracetamol, some antihistamine and then the big boy: a huge horse syringe of red liquid that’s pushed in through the port. Then more saline. Then wait. And what comes is like the most enormous hangover you’ve ever had in your whole life; it’s like a night on mixed spirits, wine and grappa. It’s a real cracker. It’s a humdinger.

  When we left, I was walking very slowly, and clutching a large bag of various pills and anti-sickness medication, which worked brilliantly. I never felt sick. I was lucky. And the steroids they give you keep you fairly buzzy for the first few days. They tell you to keep active, so I swept the patio ceaselessly.

  The following night, Dawn and I were booked to appear at the Palladium – no, I’m joking! It was actually the Albert Hall, for the Wainwright/McGarrigle Christmas show. As we knew Rufus Wainwright and loved the whole family, it seemed like a fun thing to do. I can’t remember exactly what it was that we did, but I expect it involved dressing up, showing off and listening to some wonderful music. As it turned out, it would be one of Kate McGarrigle’s last shows as she sadly died of cancer the following year. She was unwell that night but extremely brilliant and brave, and it put what I was going through into perspective.

  From one day to the next, you never really know how you’re going to feel: some days you can go for a long walk, the next you get breathless after a few steps. Sometimes you stay in bed; sometimes you
just have to get up. It is the most frustrating thing: you have the perfect excuse to just lie abed, but you can’t because you feel like you should make an effort.

  Freya was still living at home and was an absolute stalwart. She checked I had taken all my drugs and even had to administer the odd injection. I don’t mind injections, and I thought I was quite good at them, but, as it turned out, I could give them to anyone or anything as long as it wasn’t myself. Mainly, I could give them to sheep and lambs.

  One year in Devon, when we still had our sheep, Ade had decided to put them to ram, with the aim of having lambs by Easter. The only slight problem was that he had failed to realize that the dates of Easter change every year. Thus the lambs started to arrive a month earlier than he expected, and he was locked away in Fame Academy for Comic Relief. So I had to do all the lambing. Lambing is satisfying and enjoyable but bloody tiring and involves giving injections of antibiotics to the lambs that are struggling. I got pretty good at it. Big needle, tiny lamb? Yes. Tiny needle, own huge bum or thigh? No.

  The weird thing is that I came to quite enjoy my visits to the clinic. If you’re me, having treatment is a fairly good thing: your life has a routine and a pattern. You do what you’re told, and I find that quite liberating.

  I had the same wonderful nurse every time. Joel was funny and a sharpshooter with the needle; bullseye every time, and no fuss and nonsense.

  Friends would drop by with papers, and I had a rota of company keepers.

  I came to like my big white chair. I had given up on the cold cap. It was painfully cold and looked funny. It’s hard enough making your way to the loo with your drip stand in tow, without having to wear what looks like a spaceman’s riding hat as well.

  My hair had started to thin so I cut it short, and then shorter, until we all knew it was time for the clippers to come out. Freya shaved my head.

  I had always been certain that I had a pan head, all flat at the back. But lo and behold, my head actually had a shape. I looked quite cool and felt great. I found myself stroking my head a lot. Finally Ade and I had matching hairdos.