Then they talked about osteoporosis and said that it shouldn’t affect me because I have a healthy diet, etc. A female doctor whom I haven’t met before came in to talk me through the radiotherapy and to get me to sign the consent form.
Firstly she examined my nipple, and said, ‘Oh yes, I can see where that discharge is coming from. I’ll speak to Dr Barrett-Lee, but I am not worried about it.’ That is easy for her to say. The last time I was told I had nothing to worry about, I had a cancerous tumour. She came back and said they’d do a mammogram a few months earlier than the one scheduled in August, just to dot the i’s and cross the t’s – which again is fine for her to say, but means I will exist in a permanent state of anxiety until then. She talked me through the radiotherapy saying that at the moment, with a lumpectomy, the chances of that cancer returning were 20 per cent; with radiotherapy and Tamoxifen the chances went down to 2 per cent, which is the same odds as someone having a mastectomy but they have preserved the breast – good news so far.
‘What if the cancer comes back?’ I asked. ‘Will you just take it out again and will I have chemo and radiotherapy again?’
‘Yes, if we can take it out.’ She was reading through my notes and said, ‘You had an aggressive cancer and pre-cancer,’ which was the first time I have heard about the pre-cancer or certainly registered this.
I asked her to explain what that meant, but I was not really taking it in and wished there was someone else with me to remember some of this. She said the excellent news was that it had not gone to my lymph glands, because they are the gateway to the rest of the body, but that basically there was a chance that it could spread to other organs, like the liver or bones or lungs. They will monitor me for the next five years to make sure that it doesn’t come back in my breast and that my other organs are not affected.
I was in mild shock by this time. She asked me if she had explained properly and I said, ‘Yes. I am just wondering how I will live for the next five years, thinking about this.’ She said I would learn to forget about it and probably, when my next appointments were due, I’d worry about it, but no more than anyone else sitting out in that waiting room.
That didn’t help me when I was in a state of mild meltdown, so I left feeling as if someone had punched me in the stomach and that I had been diagnosed all over again. I now have to think about liver cancer and bone cancer and lung cancer and brain cancer and osteoporosis and having my ovaries taken away and the side-effects of Tamoxifen and early mammograms, and it is so much information I think my head is going to explode.
So I get home and I call Rhodri and ask him to come home from work immediately, which he does, no questions asked. Luckily he is in Cardiff, as coming home from Spain could have been a bit tricky. When he gets in, I am sobbing uncontrollably because I don’t want to die. I said that I felt guilty because I was happy it was going to be over soon and that I shouldn’t be so happy in case something happened and this has happened because I was feeling so happy and believing that I would never ever have to think about cancer again, but I was wrong. Cancer is going to be there, hanging over me like a dark shadow, and I don’t know how it will ever go away.
January 24, Wednesday
I went to see Rosie yesterday afternoon. She said she would get my blood count up as it was down, and she has; it has shot up – she’s a miracle worker. Rhodri came to the hospital with me. This was it – the last appointment. I have never been so glad to get something over with in all my life. I feel physically sick writing about it, and every time I think about the place I feel an urge to throw up. I pray to God that I never have to go there again.
January 25, Thursday
Was very tired yesterday afternoon and I’ve been sleeping most of the day today, but I do feel much better than last time, so I do think the acupuncture is the key. I could not open my eyes last time I had chemo but now I am OK. As long as I rest, I can potter about the house and load the dishwasher and sweep the floor which would have been impossible last time.
Spoke to Sarah last night in Ireland – she is a born counsellor, that woman. I said I hadn’t thought about the cancer coming back and all of a sudden I felt as if I had just had the diagnosis all over again , and I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want to think about cancer for the rest of my life. She said that it is better to acknowledge the fear and get it out there and deal with it, than leave it hiding somewhere.
I know she is right. I have to get this out of my system, I have to think it through. I am thinking about my life and how it will be, and whether I need to see Deborah again to talk through some of these dark fears.
I have been online and ordered some self-help books on living with cancer – the self-help industry is doing very well out of me at the moment – to get some perspective on it all.
Had to go to bed by eight as I was so tired. Rhodri came in about ten and brought me a tiny cake with a heart on it for Dydd Santes Dwynwen (the Welsh St Valentine’s Day) and we ate some together. We lay together in the dark holding each other and I said, ‘I don’t want to die, I want to live with you and my babies and be happy,’ and he said, ‘You will be happy and you won’t die,’ and l believed him because I wanted to.
January 26, Friday
Julia and Joanne came down today for lunch. I am feeling so much better than last time, still tired but normal. I have stopped taking my tablets today – this is the earliest I have done this. Partly because I think they contribute to my general feeling of tiredness and I’d rather put up with feeling a bit sick, which isn’t major. I am drinking Milk of Magnesium and Gaviscon and for me they work as effectively as the tablets do. I also want to stop taking them as it is one more step to being free of the chemotherapy.
I have been carrying around in my bag the little yellow card from the hospital which reads I am a chemotherapy patient and tells people what to do in an emergency, so I took it out of my bag and tore it into little pieces. I am no longer a chemotherapy patient. I will try to be strong and remember that, although I live with uncertainty, as Julia says, we all live with uncertainty – though it’s not quite the same. I went to my friend Sarah’s house the other day and a friend of hers was there whose son’s schoolfriend had recently been killed. He was fifteen and had been knocked over – and I thought, God, you teach them over and over again that the road is dangerous, let them go slowly bit by bit when you can trust them, and then that happens and you wonder how you can live with it.
The mother had told Sarah’s friend that she felt lucky because she had had him for fifteen years. I could not think of a more noble statement – that celebration of life in the midst of tragedy.
I suppose what I am afraid of is not the cancer coming back but dying and what death will be like; that may be morbid but I have to acknowledge those feelings. I must read The Tibetan Art of Living and Dying because I need to be spiritually uplifted and realise that death is inevitable, and that when my time comes I should be happy in my heart that I loved and was loved, and that would be enough for me.
January 27, Saturday
Why oh why am I doing this Welsh exam! I keep thinking I’ve got enough going on in my head without the added stress of learning where to mutate treiglads. I have spent all day thinking I should do it, but not even picking up a book, so then I think it was a mistake and I can’t do it. And then I think that I desperately need another focus other than bloody cancer, so I will do it and have a go. I have almost three months to crack it, after all. I will start tomorrow.
Rhodri is in London and my mother has had the children; I’ve been out and about shopping and I feel a bit worn out now. I am forgetting that it was only Wednesday that I had my last session but feel so much better than the other times. I just want to be out there living my post-chemo life.
I have decided to try to be teetotal. Every time I drink now, I think about the physical effects. Wine gives the body an oestrogen boost, plus I want a pure clean liver. I have always thought that I need alcohol to have a good time, as I am e
ssentially very uptight and it completely loosens my inhibitions, but if that is the case then something else in my life needs addressing.
I have been practically teetotal over the last few months anyway, so it’s one step further. It’s easy to think like this now as I have just had chemo and won’t feel that well really for at least a week to ten days. After that, the old feelings of wanting to curl up with a bottle of wine and watch the telly or having friends over may creep back in. I will not say I will never drink again, but I am endeavouring not to drink on a regular basis. My theory is that I will immerse myself in Welsh and books, and write a novel or something and will forget alcohol.
I have become very sentimental about my husband – I think I have realised just how much I love him. My mother sent him a note on Friday with a bottle of wine (he also got a bottle of wine from my sister – he appears to be benefiting from my lack of drinking). The note said how proud she was to have him as a son-in-law and how grateful she was that he was there for me and to look after me. I read it and cried; of course, he had a tear in his eye too.
I have spent so much time thinking about myself throughout all this that I forgot to think how he might be feeling; part of me is frightened to acknowledge that he might be frightened too, because if he is, who the hell is going to look after nutty me when I have my meltdowns.
I was putting some socks in his sock drawer later when I was by myself and found a leather photo album that I put together about four years ago when he went off for five weeks working in America. It contains photos of me and Elis. The day after Rhodri left for his trip, I found out I was pregnant with Osh. I didn’t tell him for about two weeks because I thought I was going to have a miscarriage, but it all worked out in the end.
I was looking through the album and thinking how much Osh looked like Elis, and spotted a wonderful black-and white-photo that Pip had taken of us on our wedding day. We look so young and beautiful and we look so much in love. I sat down and cried for that time when nothing had touched our lives. I have my head on his shoulder and am looking at him and he’s talking to someone, drinking wine, and I looked at that photo and thought we were different people then, because nothing really touches your life in the way that cancer does.
We had Elis later and of course a child shapes and changes your life, but even though having a baby is a thunderbolt in some ways, a lot of changes are also gradual. Here we are: in the space of eight months our lives have changed irrevocably. There is no going back.
I looked at Rhodri, all handsome and smiling and smart in his wedding suit, and he looked like a little boy. I thought, He has gone from a boy who could not answer his wife’s cries in the night when she prayed not to die, to a man who can stand by her side and make her feel that no matter what has been or what is to come, they will face it together. I am so absorbed in my own journey, I haven’t noticed he’s been on one too.
I took the photo out of the album and have put it in a frame on the piano, for even though we were different people then, that love still stands, more than ever.
January 28, Sunday
No Rhodri, no children last night. Home alone was VERY WEIRD. Kept thinking all evening I would go up to the farm and see them, but I was really very tired. When I was putting clothes away in the boys’ rooms and saw their little empty beds, I wanted to drive up to the farm and grab hold of them both and hug them until I couldn’t hold them any more. Tomorrow I will be forty.
Went up to the farm this morning to get my two little monkeys and guess what – I was met with a surprise Happy Birthday 40 Tomorrow party with fab presents and Joanne and Russell, Julia, Emily, Mum, Dad, Janet and my Uncle Ian and the children; it was really nice.
I had made Rhodri promise on pain of death that he wouldn’t do any surprise parties because I would not be able to stand it. I had neglected to tell my family this, however, as I thought it would be too emotionally overwhelming but they did it and it was really lovely. I had designer sunglasses and a bag from Julia and Martin and Lloyd, a leather pouch full of Clarins make-up from my Auntie Janet and my Uncle Ian, a fantastic necklace from Joanne, Russell and Megan. Emily, Sarah and Aidan and the boys have paid for flights to Ireland, and my parents gave me Marks & Spencer vouchers and have paid for my car-hire to Ireland and petrol. I felt like a WAG. It was all beautiful stuff which everyone had put loads of thought into. So I have already broken my teetotal rule and had a glass of champagne. Well, you’re only forty once and I’m bloody glad I’m here to celebrate it!
January 29, Monday
They say life begins at forty and I am proceeding on that basis. My star sign, courtesy of the Daily Mirror for 29 January, my forty-first year of existence, reads thus:
Perhaps certain dreams are gone for ever but still you must appreciate what you do have. The Sun’s meeting with Chiron brings an opportunity for healing and the chance to build a new future. A new era is beginning and you need to play your part in what is created.
January 30, Tuesday
We took Osh and Elis out to a Chinese restaurant yesterday. I wanted a take-away then thought, No, we’ll go out en famille so we’ll all be at Mummy’s fortieth birthday party. At the end of the meal Rhodri said, ‘Thank God we only have to do that once every forty years.’
Basically, between the ages of one and four, children and nice restaurants don’t really go together. Elis is OK but he did spill two full glasses of water over the table. Osh managed to snap BOTH chopsticks in half and constantly wanted to make a run for it, so you spend most of the meal telling him to sit down as, ‘The man is watching’ or ‘A policeman is coming’, which has little effect on him because he is two and why would he give a shit about the ‘man’ or a policeman?
We came back and Alison K was here with a bouquet of flowers and stayed for a bit. I had six bouquets of flowers delivered yesterday and even more fabulous presents. I have already broken my teetotal rule two days in a row, but, after all I have had two fortieth birthday celebrations. However, I only had a modest amount of wine and did not have a hangover this morning; a sure sign of my wisdom and maturity.
Managed to get Rhodri, for the first time I can remember in our ten-year relationship, to come to Marks & Spencer’s – he didn’t exactly embrace it with the enthusiasm that I apply to it, but he turned up and paid for the coffee.
Rhodri got a cake for me, with a photo of me and the boys on the top. Elis wanted to eat his face and Osian wanted to eat his face, so Rhodri and I had half each of my face. Rhodri is taking me away for a long weekend to Portmeirion in the next few weeks as a present. We went on honeymoon there and he is buying me a painting, but I haven’t seen any I like yet.
Rhodri had also done an album for me: forty photos for forty years. It was a bit of a shock to see them all together because there is an image in my mind of a slim, tall, well-groomed woman. Basically that happened for about a two-year period in my life (between ten and twelve) and I am essentially a buxom wench and have never really been slim – it is pure fantasy. Instead of lamenting, I will embrace that image. After all, what the hell have I got to prove to anyone any more?
January 31, Wednesday
Had a facial today for the first time in my life. I don’t know why I’ve waited forty years to do it, it was really relaxing. I don’t really like massages and complete strangers touching me, but it was very nice. I’ve probably got over this because for the last eight months I have had to whip my top off and have men and women I have never met before, poking around my tits. The masseuse asked me if I could relax easily and I said not really. She also has two boys, a seven year old and a two year old, and we spent about fifteen minutes talking about what it is like. Her two year old is almost three, as well – all very spooky – and we both agreed that basically they left us exhausted but that they were lovely.
Anyway, she said, ‘What do you do to relax?’
‘Well, until recently I used to drink shedloads of alcohol,’ (which she found very funny for some reason), ‘but I am not do
ing that any longer, so I need to find other ways to relax. I am watching telly at the moment, and reading again.’ This is a lie as I have not actually picked up a book yet but in my mind I am almost there. Self-help books are piling up by the side of my bed and I need to at least have a cursory glance at those before I move on to proper literature (at a rough count, I have about nine of them – think I might need to put them on a shelf somewhere as having nine self-help books, which includes The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, is a little daunting). If they are on a shelf they will be less intimidating than sitting by the side of my bed, taunting me to help myself.
I am only just getting over the fact that I am coming out the other end of all this and I haven’t had the radiotherapy yet. My Uncle Ian has had radiotherapy. He says it is fine and not to worry about it, which is good coming from someone who has actually had it, rather than my mother telling me about Mrs Jones’s cousin’s uncle’s daughter who was fine.
For my mother, everything is fine because that is her way of dealing with life. I am trying not to fall into that trap. For instance, when I was talking to Kerry about Felix having tests for his leg, which aches, it would have been quite dismissive to say it would be fine, when I didn’t know anything about it. Surely it is more sensible to say, ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve gone though all the tests and you know what the outcome is.’ (I am a born therapist.)
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 21
