Ep.50: Bruised

In a landscape that offers up no end of breathtaking days today is a jewel in the crown. I walk down to the loch side, standing to squint as the sunlight catches on the snow-covered stones lining the shore.  The temperature has dropped sharply over the past week until now the air itself seems to have cooled to a pause. A single delicate cloud floats over Aldourie Castle opposite, a handful of ducks bob over its perfect mirror image.  

I raise my camera to try and capture the scene but I’m never quite sure if looking through a lens disconnects me somehow, renders it all second hand.

The beauty of the day sits at odds with my mood. I’ve used the rarity of the light as an excuse to try out my new lens but in truth I’m here escaping the house.  Lockdown schooling has turned life into a pressure cooker.  Today I’ve been repeatedly scorched by the temperature of B’s frustration and anger.  Cancer, work, everything is parked while I dig into reserves of patience I didn’t know I possessed. But I can’t keep my own frustration compressed any longer, I feel the hiss of steam at my back, it’s all I can do not to burst into a run. Instead I move consciously, slowly, quietly, I linger, drawing out this walk as long as I dare in the hope that I’ll be able to uncoil these curls of anxiety I’m nursing.

As I sit at the Loch end, delaying the moment I turn for home, my mobile rings, and an arm reaches out to gather me in to a sisterly embrace.  It’s an arm I hardly know but I lean in, soaking up the comfort and companionship, the sense that this friend has joined me in the trench makes me swell up with gratitude.

I have a new crew of bad boob buddies to play with, I’m not sure the collective noun for breast cancer survivors but there’s so very many of us I’m tempted to coin one.  A ‘bruise’ of survivors perhaps, because we all are, bruised, we’re black and blue with it, even a year on hardly any of us are fading to green and yellow.

The four of us met through a breast cancer charity course and while the support materials offered up miss their mark with me, I’ve found myself clinging these women like a life raft. I’m intrigued by the instant connection that cancer has given us, a bold and brazen camaraderie which I can’t imagine happening so lightening fast were we not all side-swiped by breast cancer or ‘that cunty cancer’ as we collectively now enjoy to call it. We’re quite unapologetically sweary, our CC collective, sometimes breathtakingly so, outrageous comments sit well alongside cancer recovery it turns out.

Each day we message each other, WhatsApp-ing our concern, friendship and support across the length and breadth of the UK. Each day a different one of us tips off balance, a sudden collapse under the weight of what our body carried. And every time we muster, advise, empathise and offer up simple, understated understanding.  We stand in each others shoes through knowing.

So it’s to my bruise of new friends that I turn when I linger on the shore, sharing how today its my turn to sit with the black dog and its one of these women, Polly, who calls to listen.  In the wake of social media and so much of our life now being conducted over messaging of one form or another, a call has become a much more intimate and invested gesture, that voice in your ear, the audio equivalent of gently reaching out to touch someone else’s skin.

It brings to mind a programme I once did about cyborgs, that curious interface between man and machine. I talked to a man who had robotic arms, asked him where he ended and the robotic began, then gently touched my hand to his carbon hand to emphasise the point. Neither of us quite knew the answer but the intimacy of that gesture was undoubtedly human.

So now Polly bridges that melding of human and smart phone to offer up her humanity as she walks me back along the shore. We trade stories of our daughter’s shared ages and struggles.  We unite over the precariousness of trying to guide your child through your cancer recovery alongside Covid and the sheer unadulterated weirdness of the world this past year. And by the time I reach the bottom of the track I am unwound. I’m ready to climb back up and face B’s misery, knowing that although all our paths are uniquely personal, we’re not walking any of them alone.

Once again I’m surprised by the unlooked for gifts that cancer brings, this time in the shape of these 3 extraordinary, bruised but beautiful women who’ve become woven into my world.