It’s the home run, and it shows. I have a black eye as I finish chemotherapy and head into radiotherapy. My now completely grey hair has fallen out for the second time, with the last dose of taxotere, and I faint climbing up the stairs, falling forward and getting the shiner, a badge of honour. I have no eyelashes.
It’s the home run, and I am flat on my back again. My arms are over my head and three people are marking me up with felt-tip pens. They are concentrating intensely, so they make no eye contact with me and limit communications to, “No moving at all, please, no blinking if possible, very sorry, no coughing.” It takes them about half an hour to process each patient, and the waiting room is full.
They are comparing angles. A red laser line criss-crosses my body. Behind me, vertically, there is a giant 360-degree circle and they are measuring against the corresponding circle on the floor. I am the point of a compass, and these people are conductors of radiation.
The men have warm hands, the women’s hands are freezing. One of the men has a bad stammer, and another has only half an arm - we are the maimed - but he’s so friendly, so skilful, so easy, it’s three sessions down before I realise it is his stump he is using to shift me. The consultant radiotherapist looks intently at my chest, nods, and says yes, put the ball-bearings here. Ball-bearings?
When they finish the markings, they say: OK, starting now. And then they flee the room, running, not walking, just before they press the button that starts the whirring. When they return, I say, why, if you spend all that time making those intricate calculations so the radiation will only get the exact space on my body and not venture beyond your marked-out angles, why do you run like tigers are upon you when the machine comes on? They smile but do not answer - no talking yet - so I make lists.
Five Things About Which I Feel Benign
1 Emla cream. You put it on before injections - the blood tests, the drug infusions - and the area is numbed. You don’t feel the needles. My friend Chani, living through the worst year of her life, found the mental and emotional space to tip me off about this bit of medical knowhow.
2 My private health insurance company, Standard Life. This will sound contrived, but it’s the truth. The night before this all began, I said to Anthony, why on earth do we need private health cover? We never go to the doctor. The insurance has covered each treatment, without delay. Within days of herceptin, the latest cancer-inhibiting wonder-drug, being lauded by the conference of specialists in Florida, Peter Ostler, the oncologist, was on the phone to the company to say that my particularly aggressive form of tumour would respond to the £25,000 drug. I don’t know what he said to them, though I think the words newspaper and writer may have been in there somewhere, but Standard Life agreed to pay straight away. Before Bupa and PPP, though they have now joined in, and long, long before the NHS, which is still stalling.
3 The astonishing Jane, receptionist of this department. Completely unflappable, completely helpful, never, ever making you feel like you’re imposing.
I stall on number four because one of the radiographers has just put her clipboard down on my stomach. I’m lying so still, she thinks I’m a desk. So now it’s Five Things About Which I Feel Quite, Quite Malignant:
1 Doctors who call breasts “boobs”.
2 Most other human beings. People, I’ve learned, love a victim. Because I look well, because I won’t wear my illness on my face, women come up to me saying stuff like: “So and so has this, but of course not like yours; she really has cancer.”
3 People who say, “surviving?” in an attempt at confronting illness with bonhomie.
4 This freezing cold radiotherapy room. The radiotherapists say the room will warm up - the treatment is daily - then on week three someone lets slip that “haven’t you been told, the machines need cold to work”.
5 The weight gain from the steroids. The struggle to keep moving, although my joints have grown stiff, and hunched. They have aged me before my time; it’s the menopause apparently.
It’s the home run, and I drive myself back from hospital these days. A woman phones to say she is writing an MA on post-mastectomy dressing, and can she interview me. And I make pancake mix because it is Nina’s birthday.
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