“SURE you’re nobody these days unless you have it,” mother announced upon hearing of her cancer diagnosis.
“That’s true, mother,” I replied. “It’s very fashionable, all the top people have it.” Said diagnosis has really been very inconvenient all round. Firstly, she found out in the weeks before Christmas. This irritated me greatly. I mean, you can’t get cancer for Christmas, that’s just not in the spirit of things.
And also, it meant I was forced into slave labour preparing the festive feast, as mother recovered from invasive surgery.
“Well, I made dinner for 30 years and you didn’t hear a peep out of me about it,” she said, as I chopped my 567th carrot.
“Whatever,” I replied. I was going to add: “Well, I didn’t ask to be born” but I felt that was very 1993.
Instead, I said: “Go back to sleep or something.”
“I can’t sleep, I can’t move, I can’t do anything,” she snarled.
At that stage, I envisaged clanging her over the head with a saucepan but I decided against it.
I don’t think “she was really annoying me” would have stood up in a court of law. But honestly, I must say, cancer patients are rather unpleasant at times – nobody tells you that.
“She has cancer, but I’m the one who is suffering,” Papa has taken to muttering to himself.
It also didn’t help that mother decided to wean herself off her painkillers.
“Please take drugs,” I begged her, after she effectively told her children that we were in her way by just breathing.
“I will not,” she replied definitely. “I don’t want to get addicted.”
“You will not find yourself on the streets robbing elderly ladies at knifepoint if you take medication prescribed to you by a professional to help with your pain, mother; you’re after major surgery, take them.” I said. “No,” came the reply. “I won’t become a drug addict.”
I considered crushing them into her food just to knock her out but thought against it as I’m fairly sure that is against some sort of law in some jurisdiction.
After six weeks of recovering from surgery, the really bad news came when we were told mother is facing into 18 weeks of chemotherapy and radium. This means she will absolutely, definitely, lose her hair.
This is horrific news for a woman who is obsessed with her hair. She lovingly cares for it on a bi-weekly basis: it gets cuts and coloured and primped and preened.
She becomes fiercely attached to her hairdressers – except for that time she fell out with one of them. Mother was late for an appointment, you see, and he gave her slot to someone else.
She then banned her own sister from going to said hairdresser, and I suspect he felt that loss in earnings greatly because she gets her hair done every week.
“This makes me a cancer victim,” mother said on the phone as she was relaying the news. I could hear the annoyance in her voice.
“I don’t know why you’ve taken this worse than the diagnosis,” muttered a baffled Papa. They were doing their tag-team act of ringing from his car and putting me on loudspeaker.
“Well, I suppose you can get a wig,” I suggested.
“I don’t want one of those stupid things,” she snapped. “It’s going to grow back curly too. This is a disaster.”
“Ah, isn’t it better than being dead,” mother’s friend said to her the following day, putting things nicely into perspective.
On the up-side, mother has now found new things for which to shop – such as special hats and scarves for folks with cancer. It’s like a whole new shopping world has opened up for her.
“There is a place in Cork but I don’t like their stuff ,” she reported back. I could hear her typing furiously on the laptop. She is now an expert internet shopper.
“There is a place in Dublin, too,” she said. “But I don’t like their stuff either.”
“Well, you’ll have to find something that you like if you don’t want to wear a wig,” I reasoned, although I immediately feared I would be sent on errands all over the country looking for suitable scarves for mother’s head. How right I was.
“Yes, yes, ooooh, there is a place in Waterford that I like ... that’s close to you, isn’t it?”