by Lisa Lynch
Mr Marbles steadfastly ignored my pleasantries about what kind of week he’d had as we walked along the oddly familiar corridor to his office. This déjà vu suddenly made sense when I heard the instantly recognisable sound of Crap FM coming from the cupboard-like room several doors down. A sneaky look as I walked by left me surprised to discover that the figure in there, surrounded by boxes of grey syrups and tapping her feet to Destiny’s Child, was not, in fact, Wig Man, but an equally bored-looking and lacking-in-job-satisfaction Wig Woman. I giggled on my way into the Brain Training room, then stopped when I realised it might make me look too jovial and unworthy of free NHS therapy.
The next thing I knew it was fifty minutes later, I had a handful of crumpled tissues, redder eyes than I went in with and was listening to Mr Marbles read out the notes he’d written throughout the seemingly lightning-speed session. By heck, you don’t half get going when someone gives you the opportunity to talk about yourself. Poor sod could hardly get a peep in. When I did finally give him the chance to speak, though, every single thing he said further convinced me that the Brain Training is a good idea.
Just like everyone else I’ve encountered at the hospital, Mr Marbles is brilliant. Again, I felt that now-familiar, wonderful, über-professional mix of total understanding and a means-business determination to help. He’s sensible and serious, but not to the point of being unable to crack a smile. He puts you at immediate ease, doesn’t pass judgement and never lets his face give away what he’s thinking. Plus he wears corduroy slacks. Of course he wears corduroy slacks. I’d have been disappointed if he didn’t wear corduroy slacks.
During the session, we spoke about survival instincts and concerns and expectations and outlooks and fears. I talked endlessly, sobbed and apologised a fair bit. He nodded, scribbled notes in an orange file and revealed that the best-known way to feel instantly better is to make sure your husband buys you a pair of Louboutins. (He also identified humour as one of my coping strategies. I suspect it’s more sarcasm.) The whole coping-strategy shizzle is a funny one, though. Not least because the words ‘coping strategy’ sound like something David Brent would say. But, semantics aside, I reckon that, in a roundabout way, I’d already realised that I had a few coping strategies up my sleeve. I’d just been calling them ‘projects’, is all. (Yep, we’re back to the old blogging/baking/kitten equation.)
Naturally, that conversation backed me into a better-tell-him-about-the-blog corner. And so I did. I told him how often I posted, the kind of things I blog about, what writing it has meant to me, how it’s helped my family and friends understand my experience of breast cancer and how it’s made me realise that I want to keep writing, even when The Bullshit is a distant memory. (I didn’t call it The Bullshit, by the way. Probably best to save the expletives until session three or four.) Mr Marbles asked how people had responded to the blog, whether I’d ever reread it from the beginning (I haven’t) and how I think it’d make me feel if I were reading, as opposed to writing, it. I started to worry that he’d ask for the web address, too, but (a) I’m sure that’d be against some sort of Counsellor’s Code and (b) after spending all day listening to people’s neuroses, the last thing he’ll want to do when he gets home is read 60,000 words of the same. The man’s got telly to watch and wine to drink and slacks to iron.
*
AS I’D MOANED to P before my therapy appointment, my frustration was growing over my inability to stop peering round corners, trying to guess when the next shit-pie would come hurtling towards me. I simply couldn’t – or wouldn’t allow myself to – pause for a moment to bask in the glorious achievement of having seen off an almost impossibly traumatic, exhausting, immune-system-destroying, tumour-killing, total git of a course of chemo. Because, God knows, that was my time to lap it up. Instead, I brushed all of that aside in favour of fretting about another issue altogether, and forcing my husband to stay up until 2.30 a.m. the night before therapy so we could talk it out.
One of the main reasons (the main reason?) I asked for a therapy referral was that I was worrying about the process of moving into a life of non-treatment and eventual remission; specifically, a life that was very different from the one I left behind when I heard the words ‘signs consistent with breast cancer’. A significant concern stemmed from the fact that, pre-Bullshit, everything for P and I was geared towards having a baby. But suddenly, thanks to the cancer-creating effects of oestrogen on my body, everything was geared towards us not having a baby. As I’ve mentioned before, it wasn’t as though P and I had never before been forced to consider a childless life; it’s something we’ve given more thought to than most. But now, knowing that the no-kids issue would no longer be an ‘if’, it created another hurdle for us to negotiate, and I spent more time than I care to admit worrying about what to do next.
I know it was rather a daft thing to be fretting about given the circumstances, but I bemoaned the deviation from my carefully scripted Grand Life Plan. And, in turn, I was frustrated with myself for allowing such a ridiculous thing to bother me so much when, surely, the bigger worry at hand should have been the fertility issue itself? My tendency to plan had gone too far. I mean, hell, not even getting breast cancer could teach me that it was impossible to map out my life – which was why I needed a therapist to kick me up the arse instead.
As I explained to Mr Marbles, I wasn’t worried about whether or not I’d be content and fulfilled in the future – once the health stuff fell into place, I knew I’d have all the right ingredients for a very happy life. It was more a case of worrying that, if P and I weren’t going to have kids (and with adoption agencies hardly gasping to add a cancer patient to their books), then what, exactly, were we going to do? What was in the Grand Life Plan now? And I wasn’t alone in thinking like this. In our 2.30 a.m. talk-athon, P revealed that he had been having much the same thoughts (match made in heaven or what?).
‘It’s not just about us though, is it?’ I said to P.
‘How do you mean?’ he replied, puzzled.
‘Well, your mum and dad,’ I continued. ‘My mum and dad! Maybe it’s more of a shame for them than it is for us? They must have expected grandchildren, right?’
‘God, yeah, of course. And our mates will have expected it from us, too. They’re all at it, after all.’
We were in that happy stage of our lives where the people around us were endlessly announcing engagements, weddings, pregnancies and christenings, and P and I are very good at the business of being genuinely interested, enthusiastic and delighted on their behalves. (Yeah, we’re lovely like that. We should hire ourselves out. Rent-a-Reaction.)
But now there were no kids on the table, we didn’t want people to be anxiously anticipating how we’d react to their news, or for them to feel they had to water down their joy because of us. Yes, with every pregnancy that was announced there might be a wistful window into what could have been. Yes, it might hurt and we might shed a few tears over it behind closed doors. But we’re not the kind of people who’d ruin anyone’s fun with the unfortunate reality of our situation. So, to prepare ourselves and be ready at a moment’s notice to dish out all the right handshakes, back-slaps, hugs and congratulations, we set to making a mental list of all the friends and family we were expecting to announce baby news over the next few years, and in what order. It may have been crazy, but it made us feel better in that moment. Because, when you’ve had as huge a shock in your lives as P and I had, it’s an instinctive reaction to anticipate where the next one’s coming from.
I wish I could tell you that our worrying stopped there, at the impending few years. But I’m assuming you know me better than that by now, so I might as well admit to the following conversation.
‘It’s the dinner parties I worry about,’ said P, now breaking into our stash of emergency Maltesers. ‘When all of our mates have kids and we don’t, will we have nothing to add to the conversation?’
‘You’re right, yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Like childcare and tuition fees and th
e latest toys.’
‘I just don’t want to stop being part of their lives because of this, you know? Because some people are defined by their children – like your parents and my parents. So I don’t want us to be defined by not having had them.’
‘And I don’t want anyone to patronise us because of it, either. I don’t want people to tilt their heads and say, “Ah. P and Lisa. Lovely couple. Couldn’t have kids. Shame.” Like that awful dinner party in Bridget Jones’s Diary or something.’
‘You know what pisses me off?’ continued P, his cheeks puffed out with honeycomb balls. ‘How some people used to say to me, “Oh you wouldn’t understand until you were married” – that kind of stuff. What? So I wouldn’t understand what it’s like to love someone so much that they’re your whole world, and you’d be completely devastated by their loss? It’s fucking ridiculous.’
‘But nobody would say that to us about kids, surely?’
‘Hmpf, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve heard that sentence a couple of times before,’ continued P, increasingly agitated. ‘And I never – never – want to hear it again.’
To put it simply, we just didn’t want people feeling sorry for us. Because there was nothing to feel sorry for and because, despite everything, I don’t know many people with as happy a relationship as me and P. And, kids or no kids, that’s quite the lucky break.
I was quick to communicate all of that to Mr Marbles.
‘And you’re married, yes?’ he asked.
‘I am; to P,’ I answered.
‘And are you able to talk to him about any fears or difficulties?’
‘Yes. Absolutely. Yes, of course. He’s wonderful,’ I said, a little too enthusiastically.
‘Well, that’s good,’ he concluded.
‘It is good,’ I continued. ‘It’s better than good. It’s perfect. I want you to know how lucky I feel to be in that kind of marriage.’
Just as I didn’t want therapy to force me to deconstruct my relationships with my folks or my family or my friends, I refused to do it with my relationship with P, either. I wasn’t there for that kind of stuff – and I wanted to make it clear from the off.
‘The thing is,’ I said to Marbles, ‘I haven’t come here because I don’t have anyone else to talk to. I’ve got plenty of people to talk to. Honestly, aside from this cancer stuff I really am exceptionally lucky. I just don’t want those people to have to hear all of this.’
‘And why is that?’ he asked, scribbling in the notebook that was leaning on his crossed legs.
‘They’ve heard enough of my whinging.’
‘It’s not whinging,’ he said abruptly.
‘Well, whatever it is, I don’t want them to hear it. There are things I need to discuss here that I never want them to be party to. They’ve had enough heartbreak from me, and they don’t deserve any more. Plus, I couldn’t handle the guilt of offloading onto them.’
We continued to talk about the guilt I was feeling generally – about getting cancer in the first place, about the time everyone had given up to look after me, about the hopelessly defeatist things I used to say in the darkest throes of sickness – and about the disappointingly empty anticlimax of finishing chemotherapy.
‘Did you do anything to mark the end of chemo?’ asked Marbles.
‘Well we got the kitten.’ I shrugged. ‘But more than that, no. I didn’t feel it appropriate to celebrate.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, it would have been a bit like throwing a party once you’ve been released from months of being held captive: you’re ecstatic to be out, but nonetheless completely traumatised by what you’ve been through.’
‘That’s a good analogy,’ he said, and I beamed at his compliment in the same arse-licky way I would with Smiley Surgeon.
‘Besides,’ I continued, ‘it’s not over yet, is it?’
Whether or not it was really the conclusion, the goal I had been aiming for was not the end of chemo, but instead the last bit of reconstructive surgery the following April – the time, I assumed, at which I’d finally begin to feel like my healthy old self again. Plus, my breast cancer road began with the removal of my left boob, and my finish-line medal was the chance to get it back for good. Of course, the reality is that reconstructive surgery isn’t actually the end. In fact, where grade-three breast cancer is concerned, there is no ‘end’ to speak of. And it was really frustrating to realise that there was never going to be a clearly defined finale to punctuate that period of my life. Especially as you know how much I like to punctuate.
If you don’t count the surgery, it all starts and ends so differently (and by ‘ends’ I mean ‘fizzles out’). Life-changing and heartbreaking and terrifying and shocking and dark and disastrous as the moment is, there’s a ceremony around being told that you have breast cancer. There’s a sombre appointment in a specialist’s office with all manner of people on hand to answer your questions, hand you a tissue and bring you a cup of tea. You get sent cards, flowers, chocolates, books, toiletries, DVDs, magazines, poems, soft toys (if cancer has an upside, surely this is it). You have a seemingly endless stream of visitors. You become the topic of conversation in the offices and pubs and kitchens and inboxes and Facebook walls that you’re suddenly absent from. And it’s the weirdest thing. Nothing is more disconcerting. But there’s no doubting that it all marks a definite, no-question, breast-cancer-begins-here starting point.
So, by that token, wouldn’t it be only fair to have a breast-cancer-ends-here moment? A moment when you can make happier calls and send I’m-free emails and get more flowers and receive celebratory ‘you beat The Bullshit’ cards? But I think we’ve already established that nothing about cancer is fair. Cancer is an attention-seeking, party-pooping bitch. It takes over. It takes your hair, your confidence, your social life, your immune system, your figure (the least it could do is make you thin, for fuck’s sake), your energy, your taste buds, your sense of smell, your sex life. And just when you think it’s done as much as it possibly can, it takes away your chance to celebrate the end of it all.
Once you’ve had cancer, no medical professional will ever say the words ‘cancer free’ to you. You’re too much of a risk, and they’d be opening themselves up to a world of trouble if it turned out that the cancer was sneakily plotting a return, as it often does. That’s why the word ‘remission’ comes in so handy. And so, pitifully few cancer experiences end neatly with a concern-free CT scan or a clear set of test results or a finish-it-off bit of surgery, as I pretended mine would. There’s a lifetime of tablets, appointments, tests, scans, mammograms. And while it’s hugely comforting that the NHS doesn’t just spit you back out as soon as you’ve had the necessary treatment, it does seem like a case of once a cancer patient, always a cancer patient.
I like a clear finish, not a fade-out (it’s the reason I’ve always preferred ‘Please Please Me’ to ‘Love Me Do’). I appreciate a wrap-up; a good, old-fashioned full stop. Loose ends don’t sit well with me. But this fade-out was, I had to concede, another thing that I simply had no control over. I couldn’t create a false conclusion to The Bullshit just to satisfy my need for closure. Some things, I guess, aren’t meant to reach a proper finale (hell, there’s never a final episode of Coronation Street and that’s never bothered me). I was still determined to punctuate the passing of those strange few months, mind. It just looked like that chapter would have to finish with … instead of.
CHAPTER 23
To boldly go
Something weird happened yesterday. Either I had my radiotherapy planning appointment or I was abducted by aliens. For an actually-pretty-serious hospital appointment, I found this one the most entertaining yet. It was like a cross between Star Trek and the ‘Cartman Gets an Anal Probe’ episode of South Park. Except instead of a satellite up my jacksie, I’ve been given three very questionable-looking tattoos on my chest. I’d tell you that they’re preferable to an anal probe but actually I’m not so sure, given that I now look like someone’s
been playing dot-to-dot in my cleavage with a blue biro.
The rest of the planning appointment was much more space age, thankfully. You gown up and lie topless on a black leather bed (not as S&M as it sounds, I assure you) in the middle of a huge, futuristic room that could easily have dual use as a recording studio on the Starship Enterprise. Then the radiographer versions of Captain Kirk and Uhura come out from behind the mixing desk to press buttons on a bunch of different computers that whirr around your body before fixing you into an unnatural position (again, not in a kinky way) that you’ve got to stay in for the next fifty minutes, and for each subsequent twenty-minute radiotherapy session. And who’d have thought that years of cheesy discos could prepare you for such an event? Because, for the next six weeks, you’ll be able to find me on a hospital bed doing a stationary version of the ‘YMCA’. Actually it’s more like the YM. Y with the left arm, M with the right. (And it’s a good job, really – I’ve always found C and A to be the trickier parts of the dance.)
So there you lie, unable to laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of the situation because the Enterprise crew has warned you not to move. And considering the intricate, no-margin-for-error measuring they’re having to do to make sure the rays will always target the right area, I guess it’s fair enough. It was all rulers, angles and trigonometry, with all kinds of crew members looking serious, shouting out numbers and talking to each other in a complicated, technical language (Klingon, perhaps?).