Ep.16: No one would know you have cancer...

Each day I treat myself with a walk, coffee or lunch with friend, on Friday my treat takes the form of Cat.  Cat’s a social worker by training, a human dynamo who commits to extraordinary feats of endurance, pushing her body to the limit through extreme triathlons and ultra running events when she’s not helping take the weight from families collapsing under the strain of childhood cancer battles.  She’s a thinker and rule breaker in all the best possible senses, I adore her no nonsense approach to everything, time with Cat always involves intensely honest, deeply chewy and satisfying conversations.  I always come away feeling satiated and full.

We meet at the Culloden Battlefield, I haven’t seen her since the diagnosis but before we plough into talk of cancer she gets the practical and pragmatic out of the way.  “For the freezer” she says handing over soups and curries, rice and naan in a large cloth bag, “for hospital” she says and in another smaller green check bag there are various small parcels individually wrapped in black, red and white tissue paper.  Once again I’m tripped up by generosity, an unlooked for demonstration of caring which I struggle to feel I deserve. 

We walk through Culloden woods while Cat mines me for information and intelligences.  She knows the art of both intense talking and listening.  We have a shared curiosity of life and both treat the subject of my cancer journey as an adventure to be thoroughly dissected, analysed and poured over.  Cat instinctively understands my need to step back and approach this experience as a psychological experiment, a place for philosophical theorising as much as weeping.  We roar with laughter at some of the more bizarre moments of the past few weeks and I feel lighter, like sharing them with Cat uncouples them from being a direct part of me. 

And I wonder sometimes what people might think if they see me walk and talk my way through these human friendship “treats”.  I wonder if they’d be surprised to know we were laughing about cancer, my cancer. 

On Saturday David and me join our friend Alan who is doing a 9 hour stationery cycle in Asda to help raise money for the Maggies Centre.   We take our bikes and fix them to turbo trainers then ride with him for the final hour while his wonderful wife, Ailie, dances around us dressed as a dinosaur, entertaining the families.  She lost her mother to cancer last year and now her sister is recovering from a cancer fight, we’re all touched by this.   Familiar faces come and go gathering ingredients for their Saturday evenings.  I pass small talk with Paul, a photographer who lives a few doors down from us; Donald, a BBC colleague, his wife Sine and their two blond daughters wave from the check out; I smile inwardly at the odd sight of Donna – a fellow cyclist – in wellies and ‘civies’ instead of the more usual lycra and Christine, a close friend, who gives me a deeply felt hug and goes off to take out cash for the bucket.  She messages me later “I’m so proud of you…no one seeing you up there would have guessed for a minute what you’re fighting just now Pennie” and it makes me wonder, what does someone who’s going through this look like, what image am I meant to present to the world?  What are our expectations of a victim of cancer?  I wonder how many people I walk past each day, in the supermarket, on the school run, heading for work, are going through a similar battle to my own, silently, invisibly, numbly going through the motions because, as much as anything else, like me, they’ve no idea what else to do.  Ailie asked if I had any symptoms, was I feeling tired?  And I do feel tired but I don’t believe that’s the cancer growing in my breast so much as the psychological toll it takes to carry it around all day long. 

Maybe the evidence of what I am, someone with cancer, is as much in what I don’t do as what I do.  Maybe it’s tucked away in the fact that I’ve been avoiding going to buy a front fastening post-surgery bra for a week.  It’s lurking in my struggle to make myself a proper meal or find the motivation to go to the gym and exercise.  It’s there in my not sleeping long and my not laughing so much.  It’s about some kind of absence rather than presence.  David keeps having to gently lead me through each of these things I’m avoiding, disguising a suggestion of a walk and a coffee as a way to direct me to the door of Debenhams where the bra lurks.  We’ve been spending a fortune eating out, partly I suspect because he knows it’s one way of tricking me into ending up in a space where eating is expected and I’m compliant.   He also managed to lead me to a shop where I bought pyjama trousers because he knows I’m resisting anything related to the imminent hospital stay although now I can’t remember where I stowed them back at the house.  Maybe out of sight out of mind was my theory but it didn’t work because now they’re lost and I’m obsessing about where they might be.   

Even if no one knows I have cancer from the outside I sense more and more it is eating me up from within, not just the tissue of my left breast but nibbling away at who I am, its consuming the content of my life.  Each day is now shaped by cancer, each conversation curves itself back around the subject, each message on social media is about how I am.  And I feel guilty for giving in to it, for letting it infect every cell of my life.  Deirdre phoned and ranted with frustration about their new dog before apologising profusely for making the conversation about her but I could have kissed her for it.  The glorious relief of hearing normal life continuing outside of this bubble. People don’t want to share the minutiae of their lives, thinking that it’s all too mundane compared to ‘what you’re going through’ but I’m hungry for it, hungry for any scraps of gossip or updates from their lives.  Doug phones and asks if I can nip up to his new flat and stick a number on his bin which has just been delivered plus perhaps check for any mail and maybe see if there’s any sign of leaking from the shower tray, “yesssss!” I want to yell and I’m entirely delighted that someone sees me as a person they can ask for assistance rather than as a victim to be helped.  Deirdre’s dog rant and Doug’s ask for help stop me being defined by this cancer, they treat me like they’ve remembered there’s more to me than this deadly disease, and I’m profoundly grateful for it.