Living with mortality: the legacy of cancer

Oncology season is approaching again. Next month, I will arrive with sweaty palms and dry mouth at the hospital which summons supressed fear the moment the A-road heralds the big ‘H’ signpost.

While I perch restlessly waiting my turn alongside fellow cancerees, I will swallow the dreamlike memories that seem to send Pavlovian blades of ice through my heart, and will flick blindly through an old issue of a tacky magazine. 

By the time a nurse calls me in, I’ll be so stricken with embittered adrenalin that I won’t be able to smile. I shall come across as supercilious as I take my seat in the consultation room and wait for the oncologist to enter. Yes, I know what’s coming because I’ve done it all before, many times over the past ten years. Yet still, I never know the full story.

How being a mother to two daughters stirs the feminist in me

Last week, I had a profound and memorable nightmare that left me awake under the covers in a sweat of shame. 

The gist of the storyline goes that in meeting up with old friends and colleagues I haven’t seen for more than a decade, I absent mindedly turned up to an old London haunt wearing my apron. 

With a floury handprint on each thigh, the shame brought by the public realisation I was sporting my homely pinny, next to the professional attire of my friends, resulted in the contemplation of some home truths. 

A no-makeup selfie too bare to bear

Many years ago, a friend gave me a piece of advice that served me well – until recently. She confided that she found it useful to see herself in her mind’s eye as more attractive than experience, and a mirror, told her she really was. I took on board her philosophy, and developed the theory (rather than the practice) that I had to believe in my own appeal in order to convince others.  After all, perception of appearances is surely attitudinal, as well as aesthetic. Back in the healthy glow of youth, when looks were the chief currency of dating, this kind of delusional confidence was a definite asset in many areas of life. 

Then, last month (bear with me – I’ve had a holiday from blogging), the no-makeup selfie in aid of Cancer Research raised a massive £8m. Exposing our own bare-faced truths and the illusion of our made-up faces played to our shameless curiosity, as well as the vanity of the lucky few who found the time to be multitudinally and ravishingly makeupless. The exercise was a resounding success.

One boob or two?

If you’d told me when I was a teenager that I’d have a breast amputated in my 30s, I would have wailed in horror. Back then, looks meant so much and I felt that somehow my appearance would dictate my fortune – and not just in the mating game. 

Fortunately by the time fate intervened and it was a toss-up between my boob or my life, the boob suddenly seemed rather insignificant. It was with regret I took a last look in the mirror the night before surgery, steeled myself, and waved goodbye to a unique protrusion of my identity. 

I’ve blogged before about the collateral of defeating cancer, and how very lucky I know I am to be here, and I’ve written about the umbilical miracle that meant not only could I escape with my life, but with the life of my unborn child, too. So I am not ungrateful, but the mutilation of survival does give me the odd moment of chagrin. 

Although my mastectomised chest is not a pretty sight, what bothers me most is the nuisance of disguising asymmetry. I could choose to have reconstruction, and many friends are agog that I have not opted for a pair of Double-Ds on the NHS.

'No more chicken fillets!' they encourage, 'Imagine the cleavage of your dreams!' But it's complicated. Were it a simple case of implants, I'd be under the knife quicker than you could say '34C please'. But surgery means robbing Peter to pay Paul, and I'd have to choose a body part to masquerade as a boob. Naturally it would have to be a part that lends itself to the consistency of breast tissue, such as fat from my belly, back or thigh. It would mean grafting skin that wouldn't match, dealing with scars resistant to healing, even feeling an itch on my back and having to scratch the new boob to satisfy it. All-in-all, I'd end up another step closer to Frankenstein's monster. No offense intended to anyone who's chosen reconstruction - I am completely respectful and understanding of individual choice, and don’t believe one route is better than another. But the collateral physical compromises of reconstruction are a step too far for me.

And so it is I choose to live mono-breasted, with only a little heartache.

Still, there are practical difficulties which leave me frustrated. Swimming is one activity which makes my heart sink. The fewer the clothes, the harder the disguise. At first I avoided swimming, even at the expense of my children. Then I purchased some fiddly, uncomfortable swimwear with water-logged chicken fillets, and braved the waters. But honestly, the whole rigmarole was putting me off.

So it is I come to write this blog, after a remarkable, timely coincidence which recently gave me renewed courage to just be as I am.

I've taken to using the half-hour of my daughter's swimming lesson to grab the opportunity for a quick dip myself. Three weeks ago, I told myself while hanging up the wet stuff that this was silly; it was time to swim au naturel. Not nude, please note, but wrapped in a swimsuit, single-breasted.

I emerged from the changing room with trepidation, avoiding all eye contact en route to the water's edge, clinging tightly to the towel, praying nobody I knew would be here to see me. I counted to three, shed the towel swiftly and jumped straight in to the water's concealing embrace. Then I swam 20 lengths, showered with arms across my chest, and retired triumphant to dress. Yes! I'd done it. So much easier and more comfortable. I might even do it again.

Once I was clothed, I opened the changing room door to retrieve my daughter.

And there in front of me stood... a one-boobed woman! She used no towel to disguise her figure, which missed its left breast. She chatted happily to her friend and their small children, and seemed totally unselfconscious. I was almost disappointed to be clothed, with my curves strapped back on.

Had I been in my costume, I may have dropped my towel and shouted,

'Ta da - snap! Together, we have a matching pair!'

Thank you, dear stranger, for the unknown solidarity you have given me by being there just at the right moment.

The rings that bind us: what's in a wedding?

It took ten years and two children together before my husband and I were newlyweds. 

As bride and groom heading for the age of 40, secure in a relationship that had endured serious sickness and enjoyed years of health, we tied the knot retrospectively. By the time we got round to the wedding ceremony itself, our vows had been made in practice, rather than promise, and the wedding was more about practicality than romance.

My grandmother (right) wearing the wedding ring (right hand) that is now mine. A kind Welsh woman (left) took my Austrian grandparents into her house in 1940, just a week before my mother was born (snugly swaddled in the centre). 

If daddy were mummy

I’m picking up the girls from a sleepover at my sister’s at the end of the Christmas break. 

‘Where’s daddy?’ asks elder daughter as she dances up to the front door to greet me. She looks round to see behind me, as though over the holidays, mummy and daddy have become two halves of the same whole.

‘Daddy’s back at work today,’ I say. 

‘At work?’ she says, screwing up her face, then skips off back to the TV. 

In the car, the subject is not yet closed. 

Bitches, besties and the female clique

When I was a teenager, I was one of the Sydenham Six. While the label would be more fitting for a band of fugitives than a collective of girls from the same school, the meaning it imparted was nonetheless immediate: we were a clique.