Noun: friend; plural noun: Friends

 

A person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations.

  

If you are lucky enough to have good ones, this group of people will be the ones who help you maintain your sanity throughout this whole fucked-up period in your life.  And through the miracle that is social media, you can be in constant contact with your friends where they can virtually hug you, get drunk with you, cry with you and laugh with you in cyber space 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Apart from actually wiping your snot away, and poking food into your mouth, WhatsApp chats with your besties can be as therapeutic as any session with a shrink. 

 

Women are so much more fortunate than men in that we tell our friends everything.  We can talk about anything, show each other our body parts, discuss sexual partners, preferences, give each other a hug.  Men find this all terrifying. 

 

I have a friend who I knew from when we both lived in Singapore.  She still lives there and I have been back in Blighty for a decade.  (I have told her that if this ever gets made into any kind of film, I will insist that Jenifer Aniston plays her part.  She was happy with that).  Anyway, needless to say, since she lives about 7,000 miles away from me and in a whole different time-zone, we don’t actually see each other that much.  She has been through this horrible journey herself, just a few months before me; and had to endure the same cycle of treatment (they must have put something in the Bombay Sapphire at the British Club in Singapore – such a horrible coincidence that we have gone through the same illness at virtually the same time.  But also an incredible comfort to know someone who knew exactly what I was going through).

 

Before Singapore, in the UK, we lived about 3 miles apart from each other, had kids of a similar age and had mutual friends, but our paths had never crossed.  We are chalk and cheese.  She is tall, blonde, polished and well-spoken, where as I am dark, fuzzy haired, disorganized and a little rougher around the edges.  She is the silk to my sandpaper.  The first time we actually met was at the airport on the day we were both moving to Singapore.  She was having a heated discussion with the poor check-in girl as she had about a grands worth of excess baggage, and I knew immediately that we would be friends.

 

She paid me a visit during the summer, when I was about 6 weeks into chemo.  I had last seen her in the flesh about 3 years before.  And on this occasion, she breezes into my kitchen, pours herself a drink and the first words out of her mouth are ‘And, how is your vagina?’

 

MY VAGINA??!!!  What the fuck is going to happen to my vagina??  It’s my tits that are trying to kill me!!!  Apparently one of the delightful side-effects of chemo can be vaginal dryness.  Hers cracked and bled, and she eased the symptoms by applying a special soothing gel.  (I don’t think we need to get Jennifer to act that bit…..)

 

When she is back in The Sauna, we have ongoing text conversations where we frequently remind each other that we need to stay Strong and Positive.  When I say it to her, her answers are usually along the lines of ‘Fuck yourself!’.  I can hear her saying it in her polished ex-pat accent and it always makes me smile.

 

I set up a WhatsApp group called TC Update (tit cancer….) I don’t have a massive circle of friends, but the ones I do have are old (as in I’ve had them for ages, not that they are a bunch of wrinklies smelling of lavender and wee).  This group of friends has been an incredible support to me.  Driving home after receiving the full diagnosis I sent the first message to them all, crying as I typed it.  They all were waiting to hear from me and the answers came back fast and furious and I knew they all shed a few tears that night too.  I have pinged this special group of women photos of my balding head, my wig choices, my bruised and battered new boob and my hip to hip battle scar from my DIEP flap.  They have got me through sleepless nights when the steroid-induced wasps in my head wouldn’t let me rest, they have allowed me to rant, sulk, laugh and cry.  Most of all they have drunk large amounts of alcohol with me and made me feel like a person and a friend, and not just someone who is suffering from cancer.  And all through it they have never pussy footed around or avoided talking about any of it, whilst recognizing that we don’t have to talk about it all the effin time!

 

One of them is also a colleague, who had to pick up a lot of my work in the early months, before they found cover for me.  On the day that I had my PET scan, it also happened to be Ladies Day at Chelmsford City Racecourse, and the whole female population of North Essex was pretty much in attendance.  I had a ticket, and said I would meet up with the girls if I could get there in time.  I did manage to get there (Blue were playing.  I couldn’t miss it!) and when I arrived I walked past this particular friend and colleague who was perched on a grassy knoll, dressed in her Ladies Day finery, one or two proseccos ahead of my game and as she saw me coming she shouted ‘Oi!  Margerum! (my maiden name). What the fuck are you doing here??  You are supposed to be at home dyin’ of cancer!’  This is the intimate level of care and support that I love from my friends.