for a left tit, a strapless-top-restricting scar on my back and a catheter full of green wee (it’s the dye, not the asparagus) but it’s all for good reason: ding dong, the lump is dead!
But, in the bonfire-pissing spirit of cancer, there’s bad news, too: accompanying my left tit in a hospital waste bin (I’m assuming) are the lymph nodes from my left armpit. The lot of them. That big bad bitch of a tumour had crept up a considerable way into my underarm (we’ll find out how far later after some careful tracking on Google Maps or whatever it is they use), but thankfully my smiley, sent-from-heaven, super-hero surgeon whipped them all out in one go. So, despite the setback, I reckon I can justifiably report that, in this match, I’ve just come from behind to score a wonder-goal of an equaliser (Smiley Surgeon with the blinding assist).
Lisa 1, The Bullshit 1. I’d do a celebratory Klinsmann dive, but I fear it might smart a bit.
*
‘STILL MILKING THIS breast cancer lark, then?’ asked Jamie as he walked into my room the morning after my mastectomy.
‘Piss off,’ I retorted, grinning at him as he removed his jacket. ‘Actually, J, Mum and Dad wanted me to keep this a secret from you, but I really think you ought to know that you were a mistake.’ He winked at me as I beckoned him round to the other side of the bed. ‘Seriously though, mate, just check this for me, will you?’ I asked, pointing down towards the swamp-coloured catheter that was out of his line of sight.
‘Sure, sis, what’s th …? Oh jeez, you bitch,’ he said in disgust upon seeing my bag of green piss. Jamie might be a big, manly, sport-obsessed geezer, but he’s a squeamish one at that. I laughed as much as my painful chest would allow, threatening to show him my bloody wound if he continued to rib his sick sibling.
I’m always excited to see Jamie, but especially so on this day. Because, when you’re bedridden and bruised, wearing this season’s über-chic hospital gown in unfamiliar, worrying surroundings, with tubes seemingly coming out of every orifice, there is genuinely no better person to enforce some normality on the situation than Jamie. He really ought to hire himself out to people in these circum-stances. Either that, or he should be on hospital radio. ‘Suck it up, whingers,’ he’d chirp, before playing ‘Everybody Hurts’, ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ or – for added shock-jock emphasis – ‘Another One Bites The Dust’.
Our telephone call outside the tapas restaurant was the last serious talk Jamie and I had about cancer. To this day, every conversation between us that’s involved The Bullshit has never been more than two strides away from humour. Even in the darkest moments of chemo, he’d delight in teasing me for being a hypochondriac, call me ‘tit face’ and insist to anyone who’d listen that the breast cancer was just another one of my attention-seeking tactics – all of which I’d let him get away with. For a famously close brother and sister like me and Jamie, not having a laugh with each other would have been as much of a tragedy as the breast cancer itself. Not just a tragedy, but plain
weird
. This wonderfully welcome piss-taking precedent was set the moment I was wheeled out from the theatre recovery room. Despite the expected post-op lethargy, when I first opened my eyes to see P and my family lining up outside my room, I found enough energy to give Jamie the middle finger before falling back into my morphine-assisted slumber.
What I didn’t notice in that bird-flipping moment, however, was the relief etched on my family’s faces, nor the tears that fell as I was being lifted from the trolley to my hospital bed. Because, while I was being unconsciously operated on, they had been busy tying themselves in worried knots. So in many ways, I had the easy job. After all, they were the ones who had to wander aimlessly around Central London as Smiley Surgeon cut around the outline of my
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