As I was about to leave, Elis came into the room and said, ‘I feel really sick.’
‘Oh, poor you,’ I said in that way mothers have of saying ‘poor you’ but not actually meaning it. Suddenly he projectile vomited five times all over the room. On a duvet, on the floor, on the rug, the sofa, the floor again. I pushed him in the direction of the downstairs toilet and he continued to vomit before finally reaching the toilet, at which stage the entire contents of his stomach had already been released so the toilet was no longer much use.
It was a scene of total carnage and I had to leave for the hospital that minute. I looked at Rhodri and we smiled at each other. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think I’m about to make amends for my earlier inadequacies, Shell. I’d give anything to be coming to the hospital with you now.’
‘I know,’ I said, and skipped off merrily, thanking my lucky stars that by the time I returned, the mess would be cleared up.
Velindre hospital is a small place about five minutes’ drive from my house – very convenient, although convenience and cancer are not necessarily two words that easily sit together. I arrive and realise it is called Velindre Cancer Hospital. Shit, I’m in a hospital for cancer. I reassuringly note that a woman with no hair in a wheelchair outside the main entrance is smoking a fag.
With every wrong turn and wrong room I entered, trying to find Dr Barrett-Lee’s office (as I wasn’t really listening to the directions from the receptionist) my tra la la attitude, my ‘I’ve forgotten I have had cancer’ attitude was drip-drip-dripping away.
I am confronted by really sick people; I mean people who are clearly dying or who are very seriously ill. These are not people who have shiny hair and manicured nails and a sunny disposition like me. I am talking about wheelchairs and no hair and stretchers. This place should be on the school curriculum as a compulsory trip – not a fag would pass your lips and binge-drinking sessions would diminish. You would want to look after your body and nurture yourself, and thank your lucky stars you are alive, fit and healthy – just as I did, but I have cancer too. This is serious shit. The staff are lovely but almost too lovely; they have seen it all before – the positive, skippy ones like me, the ‘they only just manage the stairs’ like the woman sitting next to me, the ‘we’ll give it a go and see if it can help you’ and the ‘we’ve done all we can for you’.
I am on the good side of bad, I am on the good side of bad, I am on the good side of bad. I feel people are looking at me because I’m young – well, in this place I am young and bright and cheery and I don’t look ill. I look well-dressed and polished and smiling, and I look as if there’s nothing wrong with me and I shouldn’t be here, and maybe I’m in the wrong place and I should go home and help Rhodri clean the sick up. I won’t need to wear gloves in case I catch something off Elis because this has all been a big mistake – sorry about that. But no, my name is called, I am weighed and measured – does chemotherapy shrink you? I am unable at this point to fall in love with Dr Barrett-Lee as his colleague Mr Jacob comes in and examines me. As he prods me about, I wonder whether, if I did have another growth, would it come that quickly? He asked if I was on my own. I told him my son was sick and my husband had to look after him. He methodically went through the treatment. There was nothing that was really new to me but I nodded, not wanting to be rude, while looking at the letter Mr Monypenny had sent to him. I was reading upside down so it was difficult. I said, ‘Excuse me, would you mind if I read that letter? It will clear something up for me,’ (about the 75 per cent). It said my survival rate with Mr Monypenny’s surgical intervention was 75 per cent. I asked Dr Jacob what that meant; he said I was currently at 75 per cent; chemo and radio and Tamoxifen would add on another 14 per cent making a total of 89 per cent.
If they took one hundred women with exactly the same symptoms as me, same age, with negative lymph nodes and tumour removal, adding chemo and radiotherapy and Tamoxifen, then there would be a 90 per cent survival rate over ten years. I told him I thought they were good odds and I would take them. That was the wake-up call I needed. Survival rates and health and being blasé about cancer and not thinking I need to change my lifestyle simply disappeared; by the time he had left the room, the drip-drip-drip of my tra la la attitude to this cancer had finished and I knew I was a cancer patient who was lucky to be alive and I was NOT going to fuck this up for those people who spend their lives looking after people like me – the surgeons, the oncologists, the nurses – as well as for my family, for my husband, for my two beautiful children and for me.
Lizzie is a specialist nurse who works for Cancer Care Cymru, a charity at the hospital which works with cancer patients; when she came in, she explained everything to me again. She gave me a wig prescription which was on Velindre headed paper and said one wig please which made me smile. She explained about the cold cap, which is a cap you put on before and after the chemo which can save your hair. I said I would try it but wasn’t really that bothered about it. She said if my hair was saved I would have to treat it very gently, that I would have to wash it with baby shampoo and very lightly towel it dry, and that I should only wash it twice, possibly once a week.
‘You’re joking, I said.
‘No’, she told me, and said that I could not use a hair dryer.
‘You’re joking,’ I repeated.
‘No.’
‘What about hair straighteners?’
‘No.’
Nor am I allowed to dye it during the treatment, or for six months after.
Oh my God. I’ve been grey since I was twenty-five, I tell her and without straighteners my hair is curly. So basically I am going to have grey, curly, thin, smelly hair. I’m laughing and saying, ‘I’m sorry I’m so vain. I’m sorry there’s so many sick people here and all I’m worried about is my bloody hair.’
Lizzie is so kind. She says most women react like me. All I’m thinking is, one wig please. I’m thinking Catherine Zeta Jones, Chicago, and don’t take in another word she says. I hope it wasn’t important. I start my treatment on 11 October.
I was humbled by Velindre. Cancer is no great mystery, not really. It is simply a group of cells which decide to work faster than the rest and eventually they will kill you. There is a skill in controlling them and killing them and finding cures against them so that doesn’t happen. And these people who work with us, we cancer patients – that is what I am, I am a cancer patient – they are the ones who are the mystery to me. Surrounded by all this illness and suffering and death, they do this work, I suppose, because they see hope in people like me. I feel like a fraud, as if I have less of a cancer than other people, as they are SO ill and I’m not like that – well, not until I’m zapped by the chemo. But I will get better, I have a 90 per cent survival rate in the next ten years, while some of those other people will never leave that hospital. Rosie won’t need to remind me about having cancer, for after six months of coming back and forth to this place, I’m not going to forget.
When I got back home, the smelly rug had been hosed down in the garden, washed with disinfectant and was drying in the sun. The duvets had been binned and the floors were clean. Rhodri had indeed, redeemed himself, and I felt so happy to be alive.
October 2, Monday
Elis is off school again. He was fine yesterday so I thought he was OK to go back. However, he was complaining before school that he felt REALLY ill, but I just thought he was trying it on as his sickness had stopped. As a treat, we went to McDonald’s after school. I was giving out about McDonald’s in the car, saying how crap it was. I said, ‘I wouldn’t eat it, it is rubbish, but I let you eat it. What sort of mother does that make me?’ He replied, ‘A great mother.’ At midnight I realised he wasn’t trying it on, he was really ill, and spent about half an hour throwing up. He was still on a mattress on the floor in our room – the last night just to make sure – so I managed to get him to a bowl before another set of bedding was ruined. He was so ill. Rhodri is in Spain and not back until Thursday. I feel a little bit
like I did when I had a new baby. I must have woken about four times in the night and about four times the night before that, to make sure he was OK. Every time he so much as moved I was up checking he wasn’t sick – mainly to get to him before he got the bedding. Also, he is usually sick in his sleep, which is very worrying.
The next day, I took him to the doctor – well, nurse practitioner – who checked him very thoroughly and said he has just had a virus, and to keep him off school until he stopped being sick.
God, it’s been seven days already. Even he wants to go back to school now. The novelty of staying at home has worn off a long time ago. Although he has escalated up the levels on Lego Star Wars II, so there’s an up side to everything.
I am supposed to be going wig shopping with Joanne tomorrow. My mother was on the phone, all mother-like, saying she had got Clive in to look after the farm for the day and I had to go and get that wig and she was going to look after Elis. I said I didn’t want to put anyone out, that I had until next Tuesday to get my wig and it would be fine – I would wait until Rhodri was back. ‘No,’ she said, it was something that had to be done, in the way someone says it when they have to identify a body.
She said, ‘You are not putting me out; I am your mother.’ God, I hope I’m as self-sacrificing with my children, although hopefully not in the looking-after-the-grandchildren-while-they-go-to-buy-wigs-type way – unless it’s for male pattern baldness, then that would be fine. Well, not fine but not life-threatening.
So it was all settled and she is coming down to sit with Elis while Joanne and I go shopping for ‘one wig please’. My mother has said she will pay for a more expensive wig. This will be a whole new shopping experience I never thought I would have, but there we go. As she is coming I have tried to tidy up a bit. It’s chaotic here and I know what will happen. She’ll come down, see the mess and tell my sisters I’m not coping.
I’ve had a vomiting six year old for a week, have been washing sheets and blankets every day and generally being single mummy while Rhodri is probably having a really hard time (NOT) eating tapas and drinking wine in fab little Spanish bars.
God, I get really resentful when he goes away. I know he works hard and there’s not much of a break in the schedule, BUT he’s away from home, generally in beautiful locations, generally in another country, and having someone else worry about all his arrangements. He is eating in nice restaurants and most of all sleeping in a hotel room without waking up every hour wondering if his vomiting son has asphyxiated. Try as I might to be the understanding wife, when you are knackered and have two demanding children taking every ounce of your energy, what you wouldn’t give for a hard day’s filming, a restaurant with tapas, a nice wine and a hotel bed, with clean sheets. Also a bed you could actually get into without having to move the twenty things you put on there earlier thinking stupidly you would put them away later, and without the vomiting six year old on a camp bed on the floor far enough away so you don’t catch anything, but not too far so you can’t hear him vomiting in his sleep. I suppose I should be grateful because normally when this is happening I am also holding down a full-time job. I’m not sure how I manage that, as the thought of working at the moment is just overwhelming, actually. I’m sure that will change and I will want to go back, but at the moment I can’t think about it.
October 6, Friday
My mother came down today to sit with Elis while Joanne and I went wig shopping. I have decided not to have the cold cap because there is a line in the leaflet about hair loss which basically tells you that the cold cap stops chemotherapy going to your scalp, and that in rare cases you can develop cancer of the scalp. Add that to the paranoia I have about every other type of cancer I might get as a result of chemo and radiotherapy, and it’s one less thing I can do without.
I don’t want to have to go through chemo and still possibly lose my hair and then, every time I have an itchy scalp, think I’ve got scalp cancer. Also, it’s about two and a half hours to have it which is too long to spend in the hospital. I really want to get in and out as quickly as possible.
We went to Howell’s department store in Cardiff city centre, where there were some wigs in a window display, so we thought that was it. I told an assistant I had a wig prescription and asked if these were all the wigs they had?
No, she said, they had a specialist wig department, and she directed me to Lingerie. Down a small corridor tucked by the side of the lingerie department in Howell’s is the wig department. Unless you had business there, you wouldn’t know it existed, it is so discreet. It is a small white room containing various wigs on stands. The woman who works there has obviously seen it, done it, heard it all before and is very professional.
I said I wasn’t sure what to go for but was thinking Catherine Zeta Jones in Chicago. The woman sat me down and put a bobbed red wig on me, with a fringe almost exactly the same style as mine, in a red colour – my natural colour when I was a child. She adjusted it, gave it a bit of a brush and I was transformed. It was amazing. It was the way I look on a perfect hair day. Joanne started laughing, and said, ‘It’s perfect – it just looks like your hair.’ I couldn’t believe it. I took it off and put it back on again to see if I could make it look the same as she had, and I did – it was the same PERFECT HAIR. And that was it: I bought it and came out with perfect hair. All that trauma, all that, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to look like a wig!’ and there it was. You couldn’t tell the difference between the wig and my own hair except that the wig was so much better.
Joanne and I then went for a tapas and then we went back to Mum, who couldn’t tell the difference between the wig and my real hair, except she said, ‘I hate to say it, but it’s better than your hair, it’s like a perfect version of your own hair.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve finally got the hair I’ve always wanted and it’s a wig. It’s amazing.’
Babs came over. She sat down and said, ‘Your hair looks nice,’ and I screamed, ‘It’s a wig!’ and she didn’t know the difference. She brought a bottle of wine and the children were in bed so we drank it and talked about our cancers. She pulled up her top and showed me her scars and I pulled mine up and showed her mine to illustrate various points we were talking about. We laughed a lot about goodness knows what. She has just had a double mastectomy and I’ve had an aggressive tumour removed, but maybe that’s why we could laugh. Whatever it was about, the wine certainly helped. I love Babs. What would I do without her?
October 7, Saturday
Rhodri came back from Spain this evening and I had my wig on and he didn’t notice it was a wig – I’m loving this game! I’d told him on the phone the day before that I’d been to the hairdresser and had it coloured, as the colour is different to what it was before he went away. ‘I don’t know why I bothered,’ I said, setting the scene. ‘It’s all going to fall out anyway.’
Anyway, after about twenty minutes I said, ‘Do you like my hair?’ He had raised his eyebrows at it approvingly when he came in, but Elis and Osh took him off into the bedroom to play with them. He said, ‘Yeah, it’s lovely, really sexy,’ and I said, ‘It’s a wig,’ and he said, ‘Oh my God,’ and I said, ‘I know, I want to wear it for ever.’ Wigs R Us.
October 9, Monday
Martyn rang earlier. Work seems very stressful, although it never seems like that when I’m there, and I’m more tired being at home than being in work. I’m not phoning people at the moment or having anyone round, I am so tired.
I guess I’m gearing myself up for the chemo mentally and physically. I went to the healthfood shop today to get astragalus – it’s in my Suzannah Olivier book. Looked it up on the internet. VERY important in Chinese medicine, as it boosts the immunity, and is very important in chemotherapy, so I have started taking it. Predictably, it costs a fortune. I must check with Rosie that it’s OK to take it. I don’t want it conflicting with the chi she’s working so hard on. The gorgeous man-boy – God of Supplements – in the healthfood shop sold it to me. Ah, he i
s so lovely, I could definitely do a Demi Moore Ashton whatshisname with him, and he’s so nice to my children and he speaks Welsh. I, of course, couldn’t have any of his children as I will have withered ovaries or removed ones if the oestrogen-producing time bombs won’t die. But like Ashton he could love my children like his own and we could always adopt a Chinese baby or have dogs.
Must do a bit more tidying before my mother comes down casting her aspersions on my ability to cope, little knowing it has nothing to do with cancer. I just can’t be bloody bothered, and it’s nothing that a husband in the same country, a good night’s sleep and two hours to myself wouldn’t fix.
October 10, Tuesday
Am I mad? Yes, I am. It’s the day before I start chemotherapy and I’ve got a hangover. I drank almost a bottle of wine last night. Why am I doing this to myself? I wake up feeling like shit with a fuzzy head, then get all irritable. It’s my coping strategy, I know, but I am constantly beating myself up about it. I’m supposed to be a picture of health going forward into this when instead I feel as if someone has hit me on the head with a hammer.
I’m trying to hold on to what Alison K said to me the other day about needing to make sure I have done everything within my control to make sure that cancer doesn’t come back. I’ve forgotten all those thoughts about the sick people in the hospital and about wanting to see my children grow up, all those feelings of desperate hopelessness, thinking I was going to die. I will make an appointment with the counsellor today for next week, as I need someone to talk to, I think.
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 8
