Free The C-Word by Lisa Lynch

Vernon Kay! I ask you! Apparently the more ludicrous the lie, the better the result.) Or in Freshers’ Week when I began a rumour that I’d turned down a place in the Spice Girls to study for a degree. Or the day I told some kids at school that my dad was an ex-Derby County player. And then there was the night when my brother was having a house party, so I got my mate to call him up, pretending to be the police reporting a noise complaint. The result was magnificent: Jamie’s mates have never let him forget it, and it still makes me feel fantastic. With a piss-taking history like that, it was a wonder anyone even believed the earth-shattering news from the girl who cried cancer.
    It was a strange old time, the week after getting out of hospital. Suddenly, it seemed, The Bullshit wasn’t a mere news story any more, but an actual, live-feed, twenty-four-hour event that everybody wanted to get in on. And it couldn’t have felt more surreal. Back in my pre-cancer life, I’d hear the word ‘cancer’ and leap to all the assumptions that such an ugly word carries – that it must be excruciating; that it must make you feel horrific; that you’d obviously know you had it before you were even told. But, of course, it doesn’t work like that. And, in the early stages at least, it’s not the cancer that makes you feel so dreadful, but the treatment. And the treatment was what I had in store next.
    The trouble was, I didn’t
feel
like I had cancer. If anything, I felt like I’d had a bit of cosmetic surgery and, stitches and swelling and stiffness aside, I felt oddly fine. So, despite the fact that I had a disease that could kill me before I was thirty, I was queuing up episodes of
Coronation Street
on Sky+. And despite the fact that I’d had a life-threatening tumour growing beneath my nipple mere days before, I was busy filling my diary with pre-chemo lunches, pub visits and dinner parties with my mates. In fact, I was more popular than I’d ever been. Breast cancer, it seemed, had made me interesting.
    Which was strange, because I’d always felt rather uninteresting. If my school had created a yearbook, I’d have been the Girl Most Likely To Have A Normal Life, and I appreciated and objected to that in equal measure. I’d always done everything exactly as it was expected of me; exactly as I’d planned it. GCSEs by sixteen. A levels by eighteen. Bachelor’s degree by twenty-one. Master’s degree by twenty-two. Magazine editor by twenty-five. Married by twenty-seven. All strictly by the book. No truancy, no shoplifting, no tattoos, no inappropriate piercings, no arrests, no unwanted pregnancies, no off-the-rails drugs binges, no havoc-filled gap years, no weekend-long illegal raves, no hopeless romances with a bad-influence bass guitarist (dammit). So had my lack of Drew Barrymore-esque, wild-child teens or reckless, selfish twenties somehow mutated into a rebellious tumour? As a kid, I’d adored the ‘Solomon Grundy’ poem. Was The Bullshit my ‘took ill on Thursday’?
    Don’t get me wrong, I’d enjoyed all the foolish, unscheduled fun that a twenty-eight-year-old lass ought to be able to check off her list, and in the process earned my Brownie badges in tequila shots, one-night stands and puking from cab windows, but all of it had been done within the kind of perimeters that meant nobody got hurt. (‘Fun with rules’, as P would call it.)
    I was happy with my life as it was. But I had occasionally wished I could be that little bit more interesting. Well, guess what? Now, I
was
interesting – but I didn’t want any part of it. Lovely as it was to be getting so much ego-flattering attention , every now and then I’d remember the reason why I was getting it in the first place, and the reality would leap up to bite me on the ass like a rabid dog. Within seconds, I’d lurch from smugly arranging beautiful bouquets of flowers to collapsing into frustrated tears at the kitchen sink, alarmed that my treatment