15 Things I Would Never Have Known If I Hadn’t Had Breast Cancer
In the aftermath of her diagnosis of breast cancer Melanie McFadyean came face to face with fear. But, she says now, terrible as her experience of the illness was, it also brought new insights and revelations. Blondes do have more fun, ‘tumour humour’ helps, and it forces you to live in the moment Ithought it wouldn’t be me. I even ignored the reminder to get a mammogram.
Many people I knew had had breast cancer, so I mistakenly imagined that the law of averages was on my side. I was foolishly confident that their collective misfortune somehow protected me. My best friend at school has had it. Of four close women friends of 25 years, two of us have had it. Of four of us sharing a flat at university in the 1970s, one has died from it and I have had it. Of four of us sat together at The Guardian 15 years ago, two have had it (and a third has died of lung cancer).
Of four of us who shared child minders, three of us have had it. When I tried using it to get out of a parking fine, the woman on the end of the phone wouldn’t play ball she had just come through it.
One night in March 2004, I went to sleep wondering how I was going to fit in a million things the next day, including going to a party for the colleague who’d had breast cancer and was giving up work. I woke at 3.30am with my finger on a lump, as though someone had crept in and arranged my hand as I slept. I was lucky. I caught it early. In the aftermath of the diagnosis, I found myself on edges and in abysses I had never been to before. But as terrible as it was, it was never boring. It became a project, a journey, a new way of understanding myself, others and the world.
There are things I would never have known or experienced if I had not had breast cancer.
1Breast cancer does not, I learned, carry an automatic death sentence. When I was told I had it, at the age of 53, I wept at the thought of leaving my son, my partner, my parents, my family, my friends. Thoughts ran on: I didn’t know how to do anything but be alive; how would I do being dead? You can’t be dead. Dead is not being.
Helpfully, between crying jags and bouts of bewildered why me?- ism, tumour humour kicked in fairly soon. I started to worry about the music at my funeral, and to feel cross that I wouldn’t be there to enjoy the attention and hear people saying they wished they’d given me more of their time and love. I wanted them to listen to a lot of sad music: ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ (Bob Dylan), ‘Nobody Does It Better’ (Carly Simon), ‘J’ai Perdu Mon Eurydice’ (Gluck), ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ (The Mamas and the Papas), ‘You Send Me’ (Aretha Franklin), ‘Fairytale of New York’ (The Pogues), ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ (Tom Waits), ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ (Leonard Cohen), ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ (Nina Simone), ‘Where Do You Think You’re Going?’(Dire Straits) and, to show what a really nice person I am, the last one is ‘C’mon Baby, Let the Good Times Roll’ (Janis Joplin).
2The sudden threat of death forces you to live in the moment, a skill I have never had and often envied in others. In the late 1960s and early 70s, those hippies lived in the moment, man. I, meanwhile, leaned on the wall in my bellbottom jeans, smoking a joint, pretending to inhale and worrying about the future. ‘Nobody’s future is certain,’ people say, anxiously searching for words of comfort. ‘I might get run over by a bus tomorrow,’ they continue.
It’s always a bus and always tomorrow and they are always getting run over. I have never heard of anyone getting run over by a bus, although one friend assures me it happens regularly in Islington.
3Being ill has been like a journey through challenging landscapes without maps, compasses or sensible footwear. It has been tough and frightening, and brought me face to face with doom, but it has enlightened me and has allowed for moments of extraordinary happiness. With our Anglo-Saxon stiff uppers, our socks heaved up to our armpits and our ramrod backs, we don’t have the vocabulary for the big emotions. The Germans have the word for the doom and agony Weltschmerz. The French have an expression for the happiness joie de vivre. In English, if you talk about world pain or joy in being alive, everyone looks embarrassed and starts fiddling with their mobile phones.
4We don’t know how to react to being told someone has cancer. I am sure I have got it wrong in the past.
We lapse into graveside manners. It’s
terrifying the hand on the arm, the head on one side, the funeral eyes, the hushed tones as though you are already on your way to the undertaker’s.
However much this plunges you into gloom and fear, you smile and offer comfort because these people are being kind to you. Occasionally you snap, then feel guilty for months.
Worst of all is the intrusive questioning. Just when a bit of stiff-upper British restraint would have gone down very nicely, thank you, several people asked me, ‘What is your prognosis?’ One asked if it were good or bad.
Supposing it were bad and luckily mine is not would I have wanted to go into it? At least nobody asked me what one woman I know was asked by a friend: are you going to pass away?
5You cannot imagine what it is like losing your hair, nor overestimate its visceral horror. Two weeks after the first dose of chemotherapy, it started coming out. It was everywhere in the food, on the floor, the pillows, my clothes. There was so much of it you could have stuffed a three-piece suite.
Three weeks later it was almost all gone, except for a few random wispy clumps. I stood in front of the mirror and saw the younger brother my father never had: an old man, his skin yellowing, his eyes pained, his mouth trembling. Then I saw a woman from the old Bedlam. No amount of tumour humour was getting me out of that one.
A friend happened by. She sat beside me as I pulled out the remaining hair it came out very easily and put it in a plastic bag. I was crying and, she told me afterwards, she was, too.
When it was done and all that was left was a few crew-cut spikes, she took the hair to the dustbin, a kind of ritual.
One summer’s day as I walked in the park, there was a sudden downpour. I was soaked within seconds. But the funny thing was my visibility was reduced to about a millimetre because, having much reduced eyebrows and eyelashes, I no longer had built-in natural windscreen wipers. I was blinded by the rain.
6I have dark hair and had I not had cancer and gone bald, I would never have discovered how much fun it is being blond. I bought a Pounds 25 stylish platinum number from World of Wigs. My son said I looked like Pauline Fowler in EastEnders.
I sometimes cover my driving mistakes with rude hand gestures, but as a platinum blonde I had no need. One day I did a routine 25- point turn in a main road, holding up 17 different kinds of SUVs, double-deckers, pantechnicons and motorbikes, all, as it transpired, driven by men. Normally this would result in slanging matches in which the C-word would be spat at me, accompanied by threats of violence, but they all smiled indulgently and let me get on with it. It didn’t have the same effect on other blondes, however. One I tangled with actually chased me at speed, zooming alongside in order to hurl an object at my head luckily only an audio tape which dealt me a glancing blow.
7More blond thoughts. In shops and restaurants, men sometimes opened doors for me. In the dark wig, life went on as normal: at my age men ignore you.
But in the blond wig, to my surprise, they behaved quite differently. One or two even wiggled their eyebrows. I’ve never understood why anyone would find that sexy. A few times strangers said hello in the street and I’d stop and stare at them and say, sorry, do I know you? I am too long monogamous to chance upon men from some forgotten night, and I couldn’t remember the right response to the street come-on, which is to stick your nose in the air and stalk off. I wish I’d had the nerve to take off the wig and see if they still tried a chat-up line, in the same way I used to wonder what blokes in the street would do if you actually gorremoff when told to do so.
I did whip the wig off once during an altercation with a member of Hackney’s finest.
I had to take my documents into the police station as I’d been done for jumping some lights. The woman at the desk wouldn’t accept a faxed insurance document. When I asked why, especially as the phone number was on it and she could have rung to check it was kosher, she replied, ‘Because the people of Hackney often lie to me.’ Being a person of Hackney whose massive council tax pays her wages, that got my goat. It was a Friday, and she said I would have to come back on Monday with the correct documentation. I said I couldn’t because I was having chemotherapy that day. She wasn’t guilt-tripped by this, as I had hoped she might be. She just looked at me with her eyebrows up and shrugged. She looked bored. Perhaps she thought that, like the rest of the people of Hackney, I was lying to her. In for a penny, I figured, and whipped off the wig to prove I was a chemo baldy. The eyebrows didn’t lower even a fraction. I put it back on, crookedly since there was no mirror, and, huffing and puffing, left.
8Then it grew back. The new very short suede-head crop invited approaches from a different kind of stranger. One day in the local organic supermarket, I was trying to work out which soya milk to buy. (I would never have known the complexities of choice involved in going food faddy.) The piped music was a song that went ‘Run, baby, run’, which was vaguely familiar. ‘Great music, isn’t it?’ said a bloke with a ring through his nose and topiarised hair. I nodded and smiled vaguely. ‘Underground can’t beat it,’ he went on. I thought underground was probably a genre with which I am unfamiliar, like garage, but, not wishing to seem old and out of touch, I nodded and smiled again. ‘As in Velvet,’ he added, implying that he realised I was faking. ‘I knew it was Velvet Underground,’
I assumed he was a happy heroin user who thought he’d met a soul mate. I could see my image was confusing: part Buddhist, part monkey, part overweight astronaut. As I turned away, he said, ‘Or shoplifting there’s never been a bad song about shoplifting.’ Surprisingly, though my hair is straight it has grown back curly what’s known as the chemo curl. People pay fortunes to get their hair looking like this, I’m told. I think I look like a used-car salesman. Give me a sheepskin coat and a chunky ring with a tiny diamond in it, and I could set up along the North Circular.
Horrible as it is to lose your hair, it grows back and you forget. I was lucky, I didn’t have to have a mastectomy.
9Cancer cells refuse to do as cells are supposed to and commit suicide the medical term is apoptosis. They are wrongly named free radicals. I thought of them as ‘neocons’, which seemed apt as the continuing fallout of the war in Iraq coincided with my cancer.
And while my neocons were getting blasted by some of the pharmaceutical industry’s strongest chemicals, George Bush, Tony Blair and their radical religious neocon Western colleagues were busy destroying Iraq and wasting taxpayers’ billions.
When I found the tumour, I turned against my ethical code and went private.
The advantage is that you don’t wait I’d done waiting in 1985 with a precancerous cervical condition. I found the breast tumour on a Thursday at 3.30am and it was out Pounds 1,000 and a week later. But I had chemo and radiotherapy under the NHS, and for sure kindness and professionalism aren’t predicated on money; you find them where the people running the show are on top of things, even though resources are minimal.
When clinics are badly managed, chaos prevails and patients suffer.
Learning to live with cancer is like learning to live with heartbreak. At the end of an affair, for an unspecified length of time your first thought and the last before you go to sleep is of the love you lost. For months I woke up with the word cancer in my head. The time came, about seven months in, when it wasn’t always so. And suddenly, as I cycled across the park one bright October morning, the fear lifted, like a veil, a mist, a shroud. I revelled in a sense of happiness so intense, I don’t know how to describe it.
have always thought of my friends and family as special, and they clustered and rallied around me, so that, however bad it got, I felt blessed. The support of colleagues and students at City University, where I teach part-time, was wonderful, too. But the kindness of strangers when you feel your life is threatened was not something I’d ever had to depend on. I have never been seriously ill before and had I not been so ill, I would not have encountered people who there’s no more fitting metaphor walk on water. I can conjure them up in my mind’s eye, a shimmering little crowd of them, coming up over the horizon. One was Professor Kefah Mokbel, a leading European breast cancer consultant, who removed my tumour at the Princess Grace Hospital, London.
He works nonstop, but gives patients his mobile number and does not mind being rung when something scares you half to death. Another was the nurse who works with him, Joan Travers, good-humoured and full of empathy.
I also sought out complementary therapists.
I saw a homoeopath, a herbalist, a cranial sacral therapist and a counsellor. Call me cranky at your peril. I may not be able to quantify the positive effects of complementary therapy there are no statistics but I am sure that it helped enormously.
One in nine women in the UK will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, and 80 per cent of these are over 50. More middleclass, professional women get it. It looks as if this is because the postwar generation of middleclass girls were better fed and heavier, and so started having periods earlier. They had babies later, and fewer babies than working-class women, and when they breastfed, they did it for only a year.
(Apparently having five babies and breastfeeding them for four years each helps prevent breast cancer. I can see that really catching on.) The connection seems to be the length of time for which we are exposed to high levels of oestrogen.
There are things you can do to ward off breast cancer: eat organic, avoid the xeno-oestrogens (the bad, manmade ones) in plastics, filter your water and cut down on alcohol. There is controversy about dairy products, but some of the evidence suggests giving them up could help. Professor Mokbel advises us to cut down on red meat and animal fats, and eat red grapes, pomegranates, cranberries, blueberries, raspberries and cherries.
He advises upping fibre intake. Several hours of brisk physical activity a week reduces the danger by 30 per cent. Avoid HRT, drink green tea and eat soya. Work on the body mass index obesity increases the risk for postmenopausal women by around 50 per cent, because after the menopause oestrogen is produced by fat cells. For a brief but comprehensive rundown on things to do to help avoid getting breast cancer, or having a recurrence, Mokbel’s advice on www.breastspecialist.co.uk is good.
Suzannah Olivier’s book The Breast Cancer Prevention and Recovery Diet (Penguin, Pounds 9.99) is helpful, and the Bristol Cancer Care helpline (tel: 0845 123 2310) was, I found, the most sympathetic and well-informed. CancerBACUP (tel: 0808 800 1234) were also useful.
read obituaries and always look at the dates of birth. Those of my vintage have often died ‘after a long battle with cancer’. People with cancer have enough to deal with without feeling that every day of their lives must be a battle with the disease. People with bad hearts aren’t assumed to be at war with their bypasses. You don’t see ‘X died after a long battle with heart disease’ why should people with cancer be expected to take up arms? It is better to see cancer as a journey. Everyone says that being positive helps you to come through, and being positive during a journey seems easier to me than being positive during a war in which the enemy is all around you.
am free of cancer now, I hope, and wondering how this interesting journey has changed me so far. I think I’m not as mean as I used to be, as quick to relish blame and find fault, as inclined to jump on board the mean ship Schadenfreude. I’ve got a life and I’m going to keep it.