Health, wealth, wisdom and youth

Finally, after 8 weeks of medical mayhem, a quiet month arrives like a lull in the storm. A chance to take stock and get the necessary done before treatment starts. There is a schedule and a rhythm to this mirror world of being a cancer patient with secondaries and I realise I am being acclimatised. I have been given a month for my ovaries to pack their bags and to get any necessary dental work done to avoid having to stop treatment for unnecessary infections. I hardly ever need dental work but as it happens I had to cancel a wisdom tooth extraction around the time of my biopsy. So this week’s task has been to persuade my very busy dentist to do that at a moment’s notice. Amazingly they found the time and it’s tomorrow. Farewell fertility and with it my wisdom (tooth).

My childhood friend Julie arrives from the States tomorrow as the Husband leaves to do an annual cross country race around the arctic circle. And I shall be on soup for a week. As a girl who really loves her food this is probably the thing I am most distressed by. I guess I’ll survive. We will have to plan all the dinners and shows I had hoped for spontaneously. In my head I’ve been trying to reinvent and invert the famous Kate Moss phrase ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. I guess my motto would have to be something like ‘skinny never feels as good as food tastes’ but that’s not as catchy. How about ‘skinny girls suck’. But that’s just sounds catty and maybe some women are skinny for medical or other reasons or naturally. Fuck it. I just really love food and I have never minded being slightly chunkier or less ‘feminine’ as a price. At 51 I have accepted that healthy(ish), well-fed, protein fuelled and preferably built like a brick shithouse will do. I still like to arm wrestle men in bars and attempt a few jiujitsu moves. I know it’s not ladylike but what the hell. I’m a good role model and my daughter is still famous for wrestling a boy four times her size in the playground who, four years on, still claims ‘he wasn’t ready’. She rocks and I wouldn’t mess. Two brothers is good training but it’s a shame to have to teach girls to be so fierce.

Today I have time to write because I am sitting out in the sun at my eldest’s rowing regatta at Dorney Lake. Eton’s very own rowing lake. It’s a stunning day and feels and smells like summer. The place is positively vibrating with healthy (wealthy) youths. I’m so glad my child gets to be part of this. Brentford Rowing Club is a grassroots community club and their coach Nick has worked at all the posh schools. He spins a great narrative around their hoped for victory at National Schools this year. Like class warriors in a war against privilege. It’s become one of those underdog movies where he takes a rag tag bag of kids and turns them into champs. ‘The kids you’re up against,’ he reminds ours ‘get to stroll out of their classrooms and row at lunchtime, and after school they cross their well mown lawns and do it again, and then they go upstairs to their high tech gym.’ We have a portacabin on the banks of the Thames in Brentford and they just awarded Chiswick £5m to build a new boathouse instead of us. Actually they do have a nice new erg room and gym but shhh that ruins the story. Regardless of their class, the youth and the health here is beautiful. I envy and celebrate it.

I grew up distinctly middle class with white working class and immigrant parents who grew up without all the privileges that they afforded me. My dad grew up in Calcutta in a marginalised Chinese community and my mum had working class parents. She used to say ‘he’s a doctor’ or a ‘lawyer’ in hushed tones like it was something very special. I once dated a lawyer from Oxford briefly and she told me to hold on to him. I wondered why I couldn’t be relied upon to make my own money but I see that she wished the very best for me. Who needs a lawyer for a husband when you can hire one?

Our class narratives are passed down by our parents like lines of flight and my outsider stance definitely stems from having a mix of my British grandfather’s ‘fists up’ attitude and my Indian born Chinese family’s entrepreneurialism and perhaps their sense of success against the odds. So, I’m fond of a bit of class opposition but, like all self-styled outsiders, there is longing and pleasure in being accepted. I see rowing and Oxbridge and even TV industry culture as part of this. I could never quite believe they let me into Cambridge (or that some of my friends had holiday homes and swimming pools) but I adapted well to these luxuries. I hope I imposed my will on Cambridge as much as it made an impression on me but it gave me a sense of access and, yes, entitlement. Never mind the education. It simply teaches you to say ‘that’s mine.’ The same challenges of class narrative have permeated every setting I’ve worked in, especially the BBC and Channel 4, less so universities, even hospitals are no exception. If you weren’t born into it you will always live by navigating it and only you can decide your tolerance boundaries. I have very little tolerance these days.

These rowing kids just don’t look like they are made the same as kids in Hounslow but god they look healthy. They learn what it means to win at life from an early age.

I handed over the remainder of my work yesterday to a very intelligent and capable consultant who will take over from me for the next few months at least. It’s strange to divorce yourself from your working identity for a while. It’s not the first time I’ve had an enforced stop through illness. Generally I’ve just done another degree when work got tedious or too much. But this time it is a very orderly handover of responsibility. Last time I had cancer I dropped work like a hot stone as it was not a healthy environment for me to hang about in. I was persuaded back after just twenty weeks while I was still covered in burns from radiotherapy. It was too soon and I felt like no one had my back. This time it’s all more serious. I’m well supported and I honestly can’t say when I am coming back but I will not allow myself to say ‘if’. Who knows what the future holds. Although it’s only 6 or 7 weeks since my initial (thankfully incorrect) diagnosis of terminal lung cancer (which has a very poor prognosis) I have allowed myself to attach to the considerably better range of outcomes of incurable breast cancer. Still in the lung and the bones to be clear. Nothing in the actual breast. But not lung cancer. Hard to get your head around. I have decided to grant myself the luxury of decades to come…but I am aware the space I allow myself is all in my head. No one knows the future. So why not. But I am suddenly a lot more careful crossing roads if that makes sense. Be terrible to go to all this effort to stay alive and get carelessly knocked over.

I suddenly feel the same about drinking. I’ve had about three drinks since January and each one makes me choke and cough all night. It feels like I am shaving a few months off my life as I drink it. Never had such a strong incentive to stop. To carry on feels totally counter intuitive.

It is possible, after all these years working with disabled people and fighting for better representation and accessibility, that I will become physically disabled. Legally I am. Just on slightly reduced function right now. I get tired easily and try to avoid situations where I’m forced to do a long walk. And I’m aware that if the little dictator in my left hip or the grumpy granny in my spine play up or make further incursions there will be trouble. I spent just a few weeks in a wheelchair at university after an argument with a firework in Mexico (recorded in the yearbook as an ‘incident with a fiery tortilla pan’ with heavy insinuation but actually someone just set me on fire for a laugh). I have never forgotten what it taught me about myself and other people. As my mum became gradually disabled through her bone cancer and went from stick to rollator to scooter to wheelchair I deeply resented the thoughtlessness of the general public and the built environment. But I have to prepare. Keep mobile. Stay a healthy weight. Stay strong.

And work? Well work can wait. My identity is no longer tied to it and I have my painting and writing a book to keep me going. I’ve done a lot of work in my life to keep up with the lawyers and the doctors and pull myself up to my full height (ha ha all 157cm of it and shrinking). Now where’s my son and his winning crew got to?