January 13: Shock Doctor

Shock and horror in equal measure today. Went to see the consultant for a post-operative check-up. My sister came too, so we took our seats by the radiator in the antenatal clinic, watching disapprovingly as the chavs (Nike bottoms, cans of Coke, greasy hair in bobbles) failed to stop their ugly ginger kids running riot and screaming. It was a slow, slow wait. Over an hour? And I turned into a grouch.
‘Let’s just leave,’ I said. ‘There’s no point being here. I don’t even know why they want to see me. Bloody well making us sit here for nothing.’
The consultant called us in.
‘It’s not good news, but it’s not necessarily bad either,’ she began.
‘We’ve had the results from the cyst and it’s what we would call a borderline tumour.’
Whoo. Hold your horses.
When I was initially told about the cyst, there were one or two vague mutterings that it might be cancerous, given the ugly-brute size of it (a grapefruit, that then metamorphosized into a football) and how fast it was growing. But, they did ‘tumour marker’ tests and they came back negative, as I just somehow knew they would.
I was convinced, for whatever reason, that the cyst would just be a lump of horrid yet harmless gunk, and honestly didn’t give it a second thought.
But no. It seems it’s borderline cancer. Whatever the hell that means. Like borderline living or dying. A borderline fatal heart-attack. A borderline 60-mph car crash into a brick wall.
The consultant tried to explain. Healthy cells, on their transition into evil nasty cancer ones, basically change into an abnormal shape, and then cause trouble. Mine are in the middle. They are not quite ‘proper cancer’ cells. Neither are they healthy. It seems they can’t make up their mind. ‘It’s not cancer,’ she kept saying, registering my shock. ‘But the cells aren’t in a good way either. It more than likely, probably, won’t have any effect on your life expectancy.’
More than likely? Probably? Borderline?
The news settles like a heavy anchor as my sister drives us for a fry-up (sometimes, nothing else will do and we can’t go home yet to face mum until I know what to tell her). Cancer is something that has never, ever entered my brain. I am thirty. I am as fit as a fiddle (well, I was before the operation and Bump's invasion). I eat salads and organic eggs for lunch (only because carbs make me sleepy… took me a good 28 years and a few bollockings for inappropriate afternoon slumbers to work it out). I go cycling, and swim in wild roving rivers while others shiver on the bank and shake their heads at me in disbelief. I used to climb rocks until my rock-climber boyfriend dumped me. I drink real ale and cook with olive oil and eat apricots and raw carrots. I don’t do drugs, don’t smoke, don’t eat McDonalds – ever. Why me?
There is also, thankfully, hardly any trace of cancer in my family. Only my gran – on my father’s side – had it. To my shame, I don’t even know which sort. But she swiftly put pay to all the west-Walian curtain-twitching doom-mongerers, refused to moan when all her hair fell out, refused to give in with the sickness of the chemo, and damn-well beat it. Hooray for her.
But now, I might have it. Or some borderline sort of it.
It’s the phrase that gets me. It’s just so bloody infuriatingly evasive. I’ve never thought about what cancer really is before now. But, as far as I can tell, it’s just abnormal cells dividing and doing their worst. But if my cells are abnormal, why can’t they just tell me that I have ‘abnormal cells?’
I could cope with telling people that. I could say it out-loud even, announce it at a dinner party over a Thai Green Curry and glass of Chablis. I could say, ‘I’ve got some abnormal cells but they’re more than likely, probably nothing to worry about,’ raise my glass to my lips and take a hearty swig to prove that life is in full-throttle. But a borderline tumour? That’s a whole different ball game. I don’t want to die. I’ve not met Bump yet. He can’t come into this world without his space-cadet mother.
Of course - and I think I forget this at the time due to my shock and general lack of cognitive ability – for now, the ‘borderline tumour’ has been removed.
They’ve taken the cyst out. The baddie has been zapped. But then, something else occurs to my pea-sized brain. If this is cancer, it’s ovarian cancer. And what did the nice kind doctor leave in during my surgery? But my ovary.