Listen I love you joy is coming

The hospital is a joy vacuum and visiting during corona times is fraught in new ways. I am running late for this appointment due to a flat tyre – which I reacted to as if Sam had purposefully punctured it himself – after already missing an earlier appointment due to being at the point in lockdown where I have given up on the concept of time entirely. The hospital in Brighton is designed as if it used to be a single room and each additional room was added completely at random. Normally I see other visitors also wandering around lost in the labyrinth of unconnected corridors but today it is eerily quiet.

I finally find the appropriate department, after enquiring at reception with the weird shout-whisper I have developed since having to stand 6ft away from everyone. I am directed to an almost deserted corridor where the chairs have been separated from each other and there are signs everywhere telling visitors not to move them. Shortly after sitting down, the masked man beside me bursts into a sustained coughing fit before turning to reassure me that he hasn’t got the virus. I try to look friendly while telling him not to worry, although I am in fact very worried.  Eventually, I am called into another bare room, furnished only with a chair and stool appropriately social distanced from one another. The masked nurse asks if the oncologist has explained the radiotherapy process and side effects, I respond that he has, and she immediately speeds through a long list of risks that I’m sure were never mentioned on my three-minute calls with the doctor. She explains that they will be performing a CT scan followed by permanently tattooing three small marks on my body to map the area. Thrusting a form towards me to sign, she asks if this is okay. Am I allowed to say that no, I’d rather not add a trio of a tattooed dots to my scarred, murderous breasts? The alternative is that I ask them to just eyeball it, so I smile, again, and say that it’s fine. I mean what part of being twenty-nine years old and about to undergo treatment for a second bout of cancer during a global pandemic isn’t totally, completely fine? 

Once all rights are waived, the nurse hands me over to a masked radiologist who leads me into a room busy with equipment. He tells me that they will not have to do a dye test (a relief, as at my last CT scan, the dye fed directly into my bloodstream made me taste metal and feel like I was wetting myself) and if I could please go into the corner and remove my top and bra. I have reached the stage in appointments where there is no pretence of modesty and the doctors no longer leave the room when asking me to take my clothes off. This never fails to make me feel vulnerable and furious, and by the time that I’m lying down on the machine, I am vibrating with rage. He hands me a paper towel to cover myself and then immediately lowers it to examine me. I take deep breaths and stare at the ceiling. He and the nurse position my arms above my head, asking kindly if I can hold the position, and I respond “sure!” while closing my eyes and counting my breathing. One, two, three. They push me gently until I am positioned in the middle of the doughnut and then leave the room.

CT scanners make an extraordinary amount of noise, which builds as if something big is about to happen and ends in an anti-climax when the something never comes. Fresh from twenty-three straight days of watching Marvel movies, I gaze up at the whirring machine and imagine that it is about to transform or – at the very least - vaporize me. No such luck, it is over, and I am the same topless girl being pulled back into the bright, uncaring room by the radiologist trying his best to be kind. While looking directly at my tattoo, he says, “I don’t know if you’ve been tattooed before but it’s going to feel like a light scratch.” Should I step into the lie? Pretend that I am not a person who moves to Germany with a boyfriend and gets his initial tattooed on her body? I make a non-committed noise and close my eyes while he prepares the needle. 

Lying there, I begin to catalogue the damage done to my breasts in the last few years. There are the parallel scars from my bilateral mastectomy, where the surgeon excavated all my breast tissue and replaced it with silicon. Thankfully, I got to keep my nipples, though they are purely ornamental now thanks to nerve damage. New to my right breast is a surprisingly large scar, drawing a jagged line from the original surgical site to my nipple, where the latest cancerous cells were removed. Add in my extremely dumb tattoo and it is enough, I think, to try to become a body positivity influencer with an Instagram page popular with conventionally attractive white women. I imagine the arguments I’d get into with Sam for not getting the right shot for my #sponsored campaign with a range of tone-deaf Feminist™ t-shirts and the absurdity of it all dissipates the simmering rage I’ve been tending since I arrived. 

Soon it is over. I have been tattooed (one in the centre of my chest and two on either side of my breasts; seems like the kind of thing you can just eyeball but who am I to argue?) and the doctor tells me that I am free to leave. I thank him while scrambling to put my clothes on. I know that these series of small humiliations are saving me and still I cannot wait to be rid of them. I never feel younger or less in charge of my life than I do in hospital. With each step out of the hospital, until I am eventually on the street, I become buoyant with joy. I have shed the irritation of a flat tyre, the confusion of wandering around the strangely quiet corridors, the fear of sitting beside a coughing stranger, the vulnerability of lying half naked in a sterile room, and the helplessness of being a young woman who can’t seem to stop getting cancer. I am now just an anonymous woman, nodding at other walkers while zigzagging over the sidewalk to avoid them, listening to Rihanna, returning home, returned to myself.  

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The title of the this newsletter is from Kim Addonizio’s poem “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”