A - Z Of Breast Cancer: KEEP IT REAL

I Forgot I had another K!

If you are not careful you could end up living in a parallel universe where the only thing that exists is cancer, so you will have to make an enormous effort to keep things real. Following a week long stay in hospital, I was discharged at 2.30pm and I wanted to go straight home to bed and lick my wounds. But school let out at 3pm so instead of going for my lie down I went and collected my son from school. You should have seen his face light up when he saw me. I was back in the real world.

I have cancer, you know

Cancer made me feeble-minded. A few times when people asked me to do things I would think I can’t do that, I have cancer or I can’t go there, I only have one boob when really, there was no good reason why I couldn’t help out. I just felt out of kilter with the world. Well, the only way to get back in kilter is to do things. And so I put a toe back out into the world and found myself selling raffle tickets for the music school, driving the ten year old and his mates to a swimming gala, and taking part in a ‘Ceremony of Light’ when my radiotherapy burns were so bad that the nurse told me not to. I only did it because the ten year old pleaded with me. He was sick of having a sick mum. So I did it. I stood at the front of the church and lit the candles the children brought to me and became choked when I had to light the candle of one child whose mother had died of cancer a few years before. That was hard.

Don't let cancer totally ruin your life

It is really important to come down from planet cancer and do these ordinary everyday things, even if it feels impossible. For me, one of the biggest hurdles was dressing up for Hallowe'en as it came only weeks after my mastectomy. We dress up every year but this time I told everyone I wouldn’t be partying and in fact, no one expected me to. Then, as I was smearing green face paint and blood stains on my son’s face I thought, If I don’t go to this party, cancer really is ruining my life, and his. That was it, I was going, but I only had fifteen minutes to get ready. I went as a not very convincing Amy Winehouse because I had a daft wig that I could pile on my head and a post operative pallor that any coke addict would have been proud of. I wore a black mini dress, black tights and black knee boots. At the party one of the other mums asked me if I’d hired my costume from the fancy dress shop down town. “No,” I said, “These are my clothes.”

Maybe I need to keep the wardrobe real too.