The C-Word (28 page)

And yes, getting a tattoo was probably fifteen years too late for teenage rebellion. But then, I figured, nothing about my ageing process was working to rule any more, so going from a hot flush to an ink-filled needle seemed strangely appropriate. That morning, an hour’s menopause-related Googling had confirmed that it was the right thing to do. During my search, I discovered a ‘menopause scoresheet’, on which you could log the severity of your symptoms and learn … well, nothing you didn’t already know. But at the top of the page was an image of three smiling fifty-something women, by way of we’re-all-in-it-together reassurance. One of them was even wearing sports gear, clearly in preparation for an afternoon of tea and tennis at the Menopausal Ladies’ Club, of which I was now a scoresheet-approved member.

The trouble was, despite the infuriating hot flushes, the difficulty sleeping, the change in my skin, the loss of my periods and the joint aches of a woman twice my age, I considered myself more
Mean Girls
than
Calendar Girls
,
and
in no way was I ready for my Menopausal Ladies’ Club welcome pack.

Just like breast cancer and wig-wearing, I had always assumed menopause to be one of those things that I’d have to worry about many years down the line. So now, with the mind of a twenty-nine-year-old but the body of a fifty-nine-year-old, for the first time in my life, I struggled to know how to behave. In many ways, getting a tattoo punctuated the end of my old Grand Life Plan and the beginning of a new – infinitely less rigid – one. Or perhaps that’s all the therapy talking, and it is what it is – a star-shaped bit of ink.

I still like to think, though, that my star marks the full stop to many a sentence: the end of my active treatment (it’s on my right wrist, beside the point at which my chemo needles were inserted), the reward for getting through those difficult few months (it’s no coincidence that the shape isn’t unlike that of the star stickers that primary teachers award their pupils), plus the recognition that my life has changed irreparably, and that Solomon Grundy life plans aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Still, I’m pleased that I stuck to the old plan for as long as I was able. I’m glad I was a Good Girl. It got things done. But now there was no plan to speak of – just a new tattoo and a blank page. And, while that terrified and excited me in equal measure, I was intrigued to see what would come next, once Operation New Tit was done with.

The life-planners were out in force on the day Tills and I went to get my tattoo, as we discovered over a celebratory post-ink drink in a department-store restaurant. There we were, strutting in with our designer handbags while other women our age struggled in with designer prams. We clinked beer bottles while they shook milk bottles. We talked tattoos while they talked toddlers. And while, several
months
previous, I’d have been envious of the women on the tables surrounding us, I realised there was a lot to like about my screwed-up approach to age. Benjamin Button eat your heart out – this was The Curious Case of Lisa Lynch. And so, in honour of my fucked-up, twenty-something menopause, I wrote my own ‘Warning’.

CHAPTER 31

Dotting the i

Is there a Guinness World Record entry for the world’s biggest nipple? Because I think I’ve got it. For verification purposes, I suppose it’s strictly a nupple. And since there aren’t even half as many nupples in the world as there are nipples, I’m skipping the adjudication and taking the crown. Well done me.

I’ve only caught a very quick glimpse of it, mid morphine-trip from my hospital bed when a nurse came to inspect my wounds (it might have been the drugs, but I’m sure her name badge said ‘Mariwana’), but even in my stoned state I couldn’t believe what I’d seen beneath the bloody dressings. Sheesh, it could have taken my eye out. Seriously, it’s the size of a grape. It’s not just the small mound I’d expected from Phase One of Operation New Tit, but in fact a fully-fledged, proud-as-punch, specially constructed imitation erect nipple. I know! Erect! Hell, that’s not even something I can say for my right nipple. That’s generally a lazy little bugger, only standing to attention when absolutely necessary. Not so the nupple. This little baby (sorry, big baby) belongs on a newsagent’s top shelf. Or, better still, beneath a smutty bikini in a
Carry On
film. (Oh behave.)

Actually, I fear it might be better suited to a horror film right
now
, given the stitching and swelling and scabbing. Always-Right Breast Nurse came to visit me on the ward before my surgery to explain the procedure, forewarning me that the new nip would be ‘a bit on the large side’ post-surgery, as Smiley Surgeon purposely intended to make it bigger than it would actually end up. Since it’s not made from living tissue, part of it will eventually die and fall off like the leftover bit of umbilical cord on a baby’s belly button.

It was a brilliant surprise, seeing Always-Right Breast Nurse. Given that she doesn’t usually work on Saturdays, I hadn’t expected to see her on the day of my surgery, and her visit to my hospital bed was the one calming tactic that actually worked on me. In many ways, heading back into hospital felt like the same old cancer-treatment routine: turning my nervous frustration into shouting at P the night before (this time about getting the blinds to sit straight, or some other such nonsense), blocking the loo before leaving home, sobbing on the cab journey there, then blocking the loo again when I got to the hospital (what can I say – nerves do funny things to your bowels). It was a surreal, emotional experience, being led back to the same ward where I’d spent several days last June, for the removal of what was about to be replaced. Both Smiley Surgeon and Always-Right Breast Nurse mentioned that the months seemed to have passed so quickly since the last time we were discussing my left breast on a hospital ward. And I suppose it does seem speedy to them. They’re doing this kind of thing every day, but for me it’s been a lengthy, loathsome, laborious process that’s gifted me my first grey hairs. (‘No bloody wonder,’ said Dad as he pulled them from my head.)

No amount of pre-op nerves could make me behave around Smiley Surgeon when he came to visit me before his Saturday-afternoon melon-twisting session, mind. I was my usual, cringe-worthy, goony self. Actually, I was worse than that. I was a
complete
twat. He poked his head around the door and – this being the first time he’d seen me without long hair, a wig or a headscarf – for a second he didn’t recognise me. ‘Wow, your hair!’ he exclaimed, realising that he was in the right place and walking towards me purposefully with his clipboard.

‘Huh, yeah,’ I snorted embarrassingly. (Goon alert …) ‘Hey, look!’ I yawped, pointing at his head. ‘I’m catching you up!’ From the corner of my eye, I saw P wince as his head fell into his hands, and felt my face getting hotter as I kicked myself for being more of a tit than the body part that Smiley Surgeon was about to create.

Normally I’m a think-before-you-speak kind of girl, but whenever I’m around this man, I just cannot stop these ridiculous things from spewing out of my mouth. It’s like trying to act cool around a Beatle. Though I’m sure I’d be more composed around Paul McCartney than I am around Smiley Surgeon. Hell, compared to how I am with him I reckon I’d be a picture of ease if I ever met the Queen or the Dalai Lama or Dave Grohl. Well, maybe not Grohl. The man is a legend. Whereas I, on the other hand, am a twonk.

As he always does so expertly, Smiley Surgeon delicately side-stepped my fame-blinded faux pas (surely the breast reconstruction equivalent of ‘I carried a
watermelon
?’), quickly moving on to the business of Operation New Tit. He stood opposite me as I sat topless on my hospital bed, sizing up my real boob against my meantime-boob, and explaining that he didn’t think size and weight would be a problem, but that he might have to spend some time getting the projection right (which, I think, was a polite way of saying that my boobs are a good shape, but they don’t stick out all that much). Apparently, in preparation for the surgery, he lines up all the available implants in the relevant cup size, then tries out the likeliest ones after he’s made the incision before settling on the one that’ll
stay
beneath my skin. I loved the thought of Smiley Surgeon standing behind a table filled with size-ordered fake tits, like a bell-ringer ready to perform, and I focused on that image as the anaesthetist sent me off to sleep.

When I woke up three hours later, I caught myself mumbling P’s name (thank God it wasn’t Smiley Surgeon’s) as the anaesthetist who’d put me under handed me a tissue to wipe my tears. I was utterly overwhelmed. There I lay, gowned up and drowsy from the drugs, in the same recovery room I awoke in after my mastectomy, directly opposite the same silver clock and surrounded by the same familiar smells of detergent and dressings that I hadn’t realised I’d remembered from last time.

I cried quietly all the way back to the ward, too, and even once I was back in my bed. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t necessarily out of pain or discomfort; more out of anguish. Trauma, even. I was shell-shocked by the months of treatment I’d been through to get to this point, yet completely surprised that I’d finally –
finally
– made it here. The whole experience was unexpectedly turning into a bitter reminder of everything I’d fought so hard to forget, and the disbelieving, impossible-to-stomach impact of my diagnosis was hitting me all over again.

Thankfully, P knew just the trick to put a stop to my tears and, perching on the side of my bed, produced a tiny Tiffany bag that brought me round from my morphine-induced sobbing-stupor faster than you can say ‘bling’. Inside the little bag was a card that read:
For my wonderful wife, a wonderful ring to mark our wonderful future
. Of course that set me off all over again, even before I’d seen what was in the box.

‘Well,’ said P, gesturing to my new tit, ‘you’ve gone through all this to give me something new to play with. The least I can do is give you the same in return.’ And what a deal! I’m going to snag some tights on this baby, I tell you. He’s right; it
is
wonderful. A sparkling, proud-standing and fabulously
show-offy
cocktail ring to wear on my middle finger – our way of sticking one up to The Bullshit. I can’t help but think that P’s got the raw end of the deal, though. After all, his toy’s going to shrink. But not mine. Mine’s staying middle-finger-erect for ever.

*

THE WEEK BEFORE
my surgery it was Lil’s thirtieth, and I used her party to mark my last night of wig-wearing. And, just like the first time I wore it, it was all a bit of an anticlimax. I had visions of strutting out of the pub and getting a mate to animatedly tear it off my head in the middle of Soho, freaking out the drag queens to the sound of trumpets and adoring applause from the revellers of W1 (seems I’m more drama queen than drag queen). In fact, it wasn’t quite as liberating as I’d have hoped. I was narked and sweaty from a hot-flush-filled evening, and struggling to hold myself upright in my sky-high peep-toes, so out of practice was I at the business of Central London socialising. So the rug was not ripped off to an emancipatory, horn-section sound-track; it was instead done by P to an exasperated, car-horn chorus as I attempted to three-point-turn my way out of a tricky parking space. Which pretty much summed up my entire experience as a wig-wearer: clumsy, begrudging and not a little embarrassing.

The original plan had been to stick with headscarves (or the wig, on special occasions) for another couple of months. But even I knew that it would be too much of a hassle to keep up the pretence in hospital and so I figured this was as good a time as any to out myself as a very-short-haired person. Upon asking my family and friends what to do with my baldness-covering devices, the overwhelming consensus was to throw them away in spectacular fashion. Firing
them
from a cannon or sending them off on a burning log out to sea or some such. Both of which sounded very appealing, were it not for the fact that I was completely terrified that the moment I decided to ditch them, I’d discover that they were still needed. And so, even as I write this, with a decent head of hair and several months after having relegated Wig 1 to a bottom drawer, that’s exactly where it remains – in my bottom drawer, tangled up in the unruly chaos of hairbrushes and headbands. It’s ruined, of course. But for some reason I can’t bring myself to throw it away.

With my bag packed and my ill-person pyjamas washed and ironed by Mum (still keeping to her promise of helping to ease these moments in the best way she knew how), everything was ready for Operation New Tit. Well, everything except me. This was the part I’d been waiting for – the chance finally to get back the beautiful breast that cancer had taken from me. And while I understood the surgery was nothing like as serious as my previous operation, that the reason for this procedure was a more welcome one, and that the hospital stay wouldn’t be as long, I had still switched from kid-on-Christmas Eve excited to night-before-exam-results brick-shitting.

I knew that my nervousness was bordering on the irrational, and I knew the reason why. The last time I came around from my anaesthetic, Smiley Surgeon came to my bed with the news that my cancer had spread. And I couldn’t help but prepare myself for bad news when I woke up this time, too. I hated not knowing what was going on in my body. It’s not that I knew exactly what was happening in there pre-Bullshit either, of course, but now it was driving me to obsession.