Jackie Collins’s death will have come as a huge shock to her legions of fans, all the more so because she kept her cancer a secret until so close to the end. Her decision to keep the truth from her sister Joan will probably have been one of the most difficult she has ever made.
Who to tell and how to go about it is just one of the many issues that cancer patients face following their diagnosis. Twenty years ago I found myself facing the same dilemma. When I found a lump in my breast, I could so easily have been fobbed off by my GP – “I’m 90% sure it’s nothing. Come back in four weeks if it’s still there,” she confidently proclaimed.
I had breathed a premature sigh of relief, and said, “Oh, good. What makes you say that?” “Well, a tumour would be hard and irregular,” she replied. I went home. It felt pretty hard and irregular to me. So I, usually so nonchalant about my health, that I initially doubted whether I could feel anything at all, went back. And insisted. The consultant hardly needed to do a biopsy – the second his fingertips made contact, he knew. And from his face, so did I. None of us knows how we’ll react to those four little words, “I’m afraid it’s malignant”.
I knew two sisters, both of whom had had breast cancer. The first, who I was at school with, died within a year. Her sister, who was diagnosed three months later, was an inspiration to me. She bared her breast to show me her scar and talked about how it had changed her outlook on life for the better (shopping and holidays being the most effective of all therapies). There was no doubt in my mind which sister I was going to be like. I was not ready to face up to my own mortality.
Initially, I felt an odd kind of euphoria, as though I had come face to face with the worst thing that could happen to me and, hey, here I was walking around Waitrose. Couldn’t be that bad, then, could it? I didn’t have a big “C” branded on to my forehead. I looked just like everyone else. I could almost see the huge hand of fate’s lottery looming out of the sky and pointing to the unsuspecting woman in front of me at the checkout, saying, “It could be you-hoo.”
Once I got over this incredibly silly stage – it lasted about 24 hours – there were more serious questions to face up to. Most of all, would I, could I, tell my parents? My father had suffered two illnesses that I considered stress related – a stroke and a heart attack – in recent years, and I had been brought up in the kind of atmosphere in which the “C” word was never uttered. Instead, an endless stream of euphemisms were used. Auntie Debbie had “the worst”, our neighbour Mr Lytton was suffering from “the curse” and other unfortunate acquaintances fell victim to “you know” or were simply “very, very ill”. All of these murmurings were whispered in hushed tones and accompanied by eyes cast skyward as if to ward off the evil eye.
I am not a very good liar, but can manage half-truths. So I contrived a way to explain away my 10-day absence for surgery during the scorching summer of 1995 by venturing down to the hospital car park, with my chest drain hidden in my chic Harvey Nicks carrier bag, so that I could honestly say I was ringing my parents from my husband’s car. My children and close friends were sworn to secrecy and, amazingly, nobody ever came close to revealing the truth.
In many ways it was a difficult decision to make, not least because I missed the pampering that I know would have been lavished on me had they known, but, to tell the truth, I doubt if I could have put up with the burden of constantly assuring them that I really did feel OK. There are those people who questioned my decision, saying my parents had the right to know but, honestly, what good would it have done them?
Of course, had my doctors decided that my course of radiotherapy needed to be supplemented by chemo, I would probably not have been able to keep up the charade. And had the disease progressed, well, I would just have taken comfort in the fact that they had at least had a few more months of blissful ignorance. Now that they have both died, I don’t regret my decision for a single moment except, perhaps, that I was unable to write about my feelings at the time. It would have been so cathartic. This, at last, is my catharsis.
