The C-Word (2 page)

The concern didn’t even stretch to my GP. ‘Yep, I’m sure
it
’s a cyst,’ she said. ‘It’ll have disappeared by the time you’re back from your holiday.’

P and I had spent months planning our trip: first to LA to visit Ant, one of my best mates, and then on to Mexico for some serious Corona-drinking, sun-worshipping, nacho-scoffing relaxation. Secretly, we both assumed it would also be where we struck pregnancy gold. (Following two miscarriages in six months, baby-making was fast becoming an obsessive pursuit.) So neither of us was prepared to let a pesky, pain-in-the-arse (nay, boob) cyst ruin our sun-filled shagging schedule.

But one week of uncomfortable bikini-wearing and batting P’s hand away from my left boob later, and the lump had begun to worry me. It was hardening, painful to the touch and, frankly, ruining the line of my spaghetti-strap summer dresses. I mentioned it to Ant.

‘Can you move it about?’ she asked as we ate our fro-yo on Venice Boardwalk. I slipped my hand beneath my top and poked the lump, figuring that with Muscle Beach directly opposite, nobody would notice a pale Brit fondling her left tit.

‘Um, yeah, I guess so,’ I said, wondering whether too much prodding might cause the lump to explode like a shampoo bottle at high altitude.

‘Then it’ll be a cyst,’ she assured me. ‘Have it checked out again when you get back and I bet they can even remove it there and then.’

And so I did, albeit not immediately. For while we were in Mexico, we received the news I’d been dreading ever since my beloved Nan died the year before: Grandad had joined her. It’s particularly strange getting that kind of call on a balcony overlooking the ocean in the blistering morning sun. Your folks explain what’s happened, then eventually
run
out of stuff to say, forcing normal conversation with ‘are you having a nice time?’ and ‘what’s the weather like?’, neither of which you know how to answer. I wanted to come home immediately, but nobody was having it. There were only a few days left until we were heading back anyway and, as this was something we’d all been expecting for months, there was nothing in particular I could have done. And so I sobbed in the sunshine until I got back on home soil, where I sobbed in the drizzle instead. With a funeral to arrange and attend, and a thousand brilliant stories of Grandad’s days as Derbyshire’s grumpiest cricket umpire (The Grumpire) to tell, the cyst would have to wait. Not that I was worrying about it any longer anyway. If bad luck had been on the way, losing Grandad was surely it.

A week after his funeral, I finally got around to getting my lump looked at once more. I headed back to see my GP, forcefully suggesting that if it wasn’t a cyst, it must instead be the early signs of pregnancy. (Having twice been knocked up, I knew that the hormones would shoot straight to my bust.) ‘You might be right,’ she said, rubbing her fit-to-burst baby bump. ‘But I’m going to send you for a needle biopsy anyway, just in case.’

Everything froze. Either I’d suddenly found myself in an episode of
Heroes
, with Hiro Nakamura-style powers of time-stopping, or my GP has just used the word ‘biopsy’.

‘Sorry, um … biopsy?’ I stuttered, still sitting bra-less and bolt-upright on the bed. She gestured to me to get dressed, assuring me that it was nothing to lose sleep about, given my age (twenty-eight) and zero family history of breast cancer. Even the eight-week NHS wait for the needle biopsy (standard for ‘low-risk’ cases) didn’t concern her. But, adding mention of the word ‘biopsy’ to my tendency to procrastinate my way to insomnia after as little as a late-
night
episode of
24
, an eight-week wait seemed like a millennia, and I asked for a referral to a private specialist. Eight weeks shrank to forty-eight hours.

P had come with me to my second GP appointment – perhaps more for an early finish from work than out of any serious concern – and we took our chance to enjoy the late-afternoon sun as London’s commuters made their way home. Supping our lager shandies on a bench outside our local pub, we faked nonchalance as best we could, making light of the biopsy that weekend. Once a year, P has to work Saturdays and this, of course, was it. ‘No bother,’ I said, ‘It’ll just be a quick in-and-out with a needle. They can’t shed any light on it then anyway.’

I called my folks when P went in for another pint. ‘So she’s sending me for a needle biopsy on Saturday,’ I recounted breezily, to uncharacteristic silence.

‘Right,’ said Mum, eventually. ‘Um, okay. I see. Right. How are you getting there?’

‘Well, I’ve got the car because P’s at work so I’ll just drive myself round,’ I said, sensing the worry in her voice but thinking little of it, given that Mum has a tendency to fret in much the same way if I mention that I’m crossing the road, getting on the night bus or meeting a friend for a drink.

Dad was in the background, butting in. ‘Tell her we’ll come down tomorrow night. Tell her we can be there in the morning if she needs us.’ Mum reiterated his words.

‘No, it’s fine,’ I insisted. ‘Stop worrying.’

I told P how Mum had sounded. ‘Your mum’s a worrier by nature,’ he said. ‘Look at you; you’re fine. Everything’s going to be fine.’

As it happened, that Saturday was far from fine, but not necessarily because of the biopsy. The morning had begun
with
one of the only two rows P and I ever have (the other being our regular Paul v John Battle of The Beatles): he’d rolled in narnared at 3 a.m. – which wouldn’t have been a problem had he not told me he’d be home by 11.30 and dropped his BlackBerry in a urinal – and I’d started an already twitchy day by giving him the hairdryer treatment for leaving me fretting like a nervy mother at midnight on her teenage son’s first night out on the town. He headed out to work, a furious flea ringing in his ear, and I drove to the hospital, more than a little pissed off.

In the tiny consultation room, I was met with the now-standard reassuring words – again citing my age and lack of family history – as the smartly dressed consultant sunk a needle into my boob. He wrote his number on a business card. ‘I’m sure I can get the results by as early as Tuesday,’ he told me. ‘Give my secretary a call and she’ll squeeze you in that afternoon.’ And, jolt as it was that I’d have answers so soon, I figured it was better than two months’ worth of crankiness and nail-biting.

As I drove home, I thought about the following week’s unusually busy schedule at the branded content agency in which I was an editor – client meeting all day on Monday, press deadline on Tuesday – and for once found myself grateful to have so much to occupy my time. A noise distracted me from my thought. Clack-clack-clack. ‘What the …?’ I said, as I noticed the driver behind me gesturing wildly, making downward-pointing motions with his index finger. ‘What’s your problem, dude?’ I snapped into my rear-view mirror, speeding up a bit down the hill that leads to my street.

The noise continued. Clack-clack-clack. I made it back to the flat and, climbing out of the car as I jerked the handbrake, spotted the flat tyre. ‘Bollocks,’ I spat, a little too
loudly
for my quiet suburban street, and headed into the flat to ditch my bag and call P. As his phone rang, I went back out to the car to survey the damage, angrily slamming the front door behind me. Another expletive echoed around my neighbourhood. ‘Tiiits!’ My keys were still in my handbag. The kid next door stuck his head over the fence and grinned, mischievously impressed by my swearing. I left a few more on P’s answerphone, and couldn’t help but wonder if this was the universe’s wicked way of forecasting a shitstorm.

Each busy at work over the following couple of days, P and I did our best to keep ourselves occupied at home, too, avoiding talking about the obvious by going out for dinner on the Monday night with Mum, who was staying over prior to a conference in London. Whenever conversation turned to the following day, the three of us would robotically recite the consultant’s reassurances like some sort of panic-avoiding mantra.

‘So I’m going to have to shoot off a bit early tomorrow,’ I’d told my boss earlier that day. ‘I had a biopsy on a lump in my boob at the weekend and I’m getting the results.’

She looked up from the sink as we washed our hands in the toilets of our client’s office. ‘But it won’t be anything to worry about, surely?’

I scrunched up my face and gave a little shake of the head. ‘Probably a cyst,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in to check proofs on Wednesday morning.’

I wasn’t.

‘We’re running a bit behind, but we’ll do your mammogram as soon as the room’s free,’ said the nurse, crouching in front of us and resting her hand on my knee.

‘She just touched my leg,’ I whispered to P. ‘I’ve never met her. What’s all that about?’

Even the waiting room was confusing to me. I didn’t even realise I was scheduled for a mammogram. P brushed off my suspicion. ‘She’s probably just a touchy-feely person; some nurses are like that,’ he said unconvincingly, getting back to his BlackBerry while still gripping my left hand.

An hour passed. People who came in long after us were being seen almost immediately. I avoided asking the receptionist what was going on and instead opted for tutting loudly and craning my neck to see how often the door to the mammogram room was opening. Eventually, another nurse appeared from that end of the corridor. She handed me a gown and led me through the door, all the while gushing with compliments about my scuffed, red shoes. ‘They’re take-you-anywhere shoes, those,’ she said, as I stood before the six-foot-high machine and she adjusted a flat, metal plate for me to rest my boob on.

‘I guess so,’ I said, more concerned about the second plate closing down above my bust.

‘It’s going to squeeze a bit, but it’s only for a few seconds,’ she explained as I sucked in sharp intakes of breath to stop myself from crying at the sight – and pain – of my tit being flattened like a piece of Play-Doh. ‘I could do with some shoes like that,’ she continued. ‘The kind that’ll take you to work and then the pub afterwards and not leave you with blisters. And red’s such a versatile colour.’ The machine whirred back to its resting position.

‘Something’s up here,’ I thought. ‘Nobody gets that excited about £12 cork wedges.’ And suddenly the other nurse’s knee-touch made sense. I was being primed for a cancer diagnosis.

Pulling my sequined star-motif T-shirt back on, the nurse
led
P and me into my specialist’s room, still impossibly chirpy and complimentary and high-pitched. There was a scan of my boobs on a wall-hung light box. I was amazed at how quickly it had got there; it reminded me of the time I broke my wrist at Rollerworld as a kid, and how exciting I found it at the hospital, looking at my X-rays, being put in plaster and pinning an ‘I’ve been to casualty’ badge to my sling. But, from the sombre look on the faces of my specialist and the nurse beside him, P and I could tell that my days of exciting hospital appointments had come to a whiplash-inducing halt.

From behind his imposing desk, my specialist pointed to a cloudy area on the scan, saying sentences I can’t recall that could only point to one conclusion. I heard the words ‘breast cancer’. The rest was white noise.

Talk about post-holiday blues. My tan has never faded so fast.

CHAPTER 2

Reality bites

‘It’s
probably
just a cyst.’

‘I’m
sure
it will be completely benign.’

‘
If
it turns out the cancer is invasive.’

‘
In case
you require chemotherapy.’

‘In the
unlikely event
that the CT scan shows cancer in other organs …’

Yadda yadda yadda. Will someone give me a straight answer, for fuck’s sake?

Forgive my bleak outlook, but right now I’m struggling to hunt down the humour that fools everyone else into thinking I’m handling all this. Today, I’m not handling anything. All I can see at the moment is the fact that cancer kills. And before you start, don’t go telling me that time is on my side, that breast cancer is really curable these days, that I’m a fighter … I’m well aware of all those things, thank you very much. And I also know that if you were in my patent pumps, you’d be looking at the bleakest outcome too.

*

‘I DON’T UNDERSTAND
what they told me,’ I said to P as we
walked
from the hospital to the car park. ‘I can’t take it in.’ I was on autopilot. P too. God knows how he managed to drive us home.

‘They told us the news,’ he said. (At this early stage, none of us could bring ourselves to say the word ‘cancer’, which is how its replacement, ‘The Bullshit’, came about – the He Who Must Not Be Named to cancer’s Voldemort.) ‘And then they said that they’d need to determine whether it’s invasive or non-invasive. Non-invasive is better – you might get away without chemotherapy then – but if it’s invasive, you’re going to need chemotherapy and radiotherapy as soon as your mastectomy is out of the way.’ I couldn’t get my head around the multi-syllable medical vocab I was suddenly having to learn.

‘And that’s really necessary, is it, the mastectomy?’ I spat, as though it were P who’d decided that it must be done.

‘It is, babe,’ he said, ignoring my barbed tone. ‘They’ll give you the date for that when we go back in on Friday for the results of your core biopsy.’

The core biopsy was a bitch. Before having it, but right after getting ‘the news’, I’d been led out of the room by the professor and nurse who broke it to me and handed a cup of tea. I’d say that both P and I were in tears, but in fact we were doing that kind of crying that comes without tears. Startled crying. Confused crying. Frozen-to-your-core, terrified crying. The kind of crying that sends your body into such paralysing, world-stopping shock that your tear ducts can’t function, so you just sniff and wail and tremble, like an actor who can’t produce the good stuff on cue.

P stared at his BlackBerry. ‘Shit,’ he said, looking up at me with yet another level of terror in his eyes. ‘Your mum and dad. I’ve missed a ton of calls.’ Fuck. Mum and Dad. How was I going to tell them? As we sat in the hospital, Mum
would
have been on the train back from a day-long London conference to my hometown of Derby, where Dad would soon be driving to the local station to pick her up. We’d been in the hospital for almost four hours. They’d both been calling the entire time. And since I always –
always
– make time to speak to my folks every day, whether from airport runways, drunken karaoke sessions or mud-soaked Glastonbury fields, the fact that they’d not been able to get hold of me could only mean one thing.