How one woman used humour cancer to deal with her

YOUR BRILLIANT GOOD HEALTH PULLOUT IS FREE INSIDE

TWO years ago, travel writer Ileana von Hirsch was diagnosed with breast cancer. What she needed, she decided, was to be cheered up — so she started writing a journal as a way of amusing herself and a few friends. Here, in an extract from her unique account, the mother of three describes her own personal experiences . . .

CANCER is not a laughing matter, of course. There is nothing funny about it when you look at the bigger picture — yet if you put it under the microscope and focus on those little wriggling, squirming moments, there is plenty of amusement to be found. The idea for this journal developed when a well-meaning lady sent me a book by someone who had suffered a very aggressive cancer and survived, though she had a gruelling time of it.

There are lots of things that are not fun about cancer, most of them unavoidable, but at the top of my list is something that is luckily very avoidable: namely, 95% of the books written by people who have had cancer, which all end up making you feel utterly depressed. To quote the satirist Dorothy Parker, these are not books to be put aside lightly but should be thrown away with great force.

This particular book was so

horrific that I felt the need to exorcise any traces of it in my memory by writing its absolute antithesis: an anti-misery memoir that is safe to give to cancer patients who want to be cheered up, as I did.

I am not a brave person — quite the opposite. I am afraid of crowds and daddy longlegs. If people shout, I feel faint. I keep my distance from large dogs and won’t swim in the sea when there are big waves.

In fact, I can only tolerate the absolute minimum amount of adrenaline needed to stay alive. I was therefore as surprised as the next person to realise that a huge number of funny things happen on the way to chemo, or indeed on the way to most places, and that once you get your eye in, you completely forget to be scared.

My oncologist told me that if on the first appointment he can get someone to smile — and curiously enough, there is no correlation between the gravity of a diagnosis and the likelihood of someone smiling — they will have an easier time of it.

If a fundamentally cowardly person like me can find things to smile about, then there is hope for everyone.

GETTING THE DIAGNOSIS

LIFE seems to separate into two expanses, like the Red Sea before Moses — life before cancer and life after.

My Moses moment happened on holiday on the small Greek island of Ithaca, where my family come from.

When my breast turned a bit hard and red, the local doctor didn’t believe my self-diagnosis, at the age of 57, of mastitis (inflammation) — ‘At your age? Are you mad?’ — and promptly told me to get a scan.

The clinic was a pop-up affair: the scanning machine, together with a trigger-happy radiologist, came over from the neighbouring island once every two weeks, the machine held together with duct tape and Blu Tack, the doctor held together with nicotine patches.

By the time my turn came to be scanned, the radiologist was on his last nicotine patch and reaching for his cigarettes. He was visibly bored and scanned me with a weary look on his face, then suddenly sat bolt upright and said, ‘Holy Mother of God!’

One doesn’t really like providing excitement for doctors, so I asked what the matter was.

He looked at me with shining eyes and said: ‘It is either nothing, or a very rare cancer and you have two to five years to live. Please do let me know how you get on — I don’t often ask patients, but this is exciting!’

I told my children that I had an abscess and needed to go home to get it drained, then I booked the next available flight.

A week later my new surgeon, Mr G, sat with a heap of reports of all the biopsies, etc.

A look of puzzlement crossed his face. ‘Why would you think you only had two to five years to live?’ So I told him.

He continued to look puzzled, and said: ‘I would say it is a perfectly normal, very treatable breast cancer. You have a 70-80% chance of surviving, and I see this sort of thing every day. In fact, I see hundreds of people like you every month.’

Being told you have a boringly normal cancer after thinking you have only a few years to live is excellent news, so, whatever else Mr G said to me that day, I just remember the huge grin that kept spreading over my face, and nodding happily and saying, ‘That’s wonderful news, thank you!’ — and it was.

YOUR FAMILY WILL STEP UP

EARLY on, I overheard my husband call a family conference.

‘Right, everyone, we are no longer in cruise mode. We are now in crisis-control mode, so pay attention.’ Three adult children, three dogs, a sister or two and our lodger all looked at him expectantly. ‘This means,’ he announced, ‘that when you have finished eating, you each clear your own dishes, which means you don’t just leave them near the dishwasher, you put them in the dishwasher.’ I am at risk of becoming spoilt.

LOSING YOUR HAIR

LOSING your hair sounds awful, but in fact it doesn’t have to be a big deal at all — and this is from someone who really dislikes baldness. I loathe shaved heads, buzz cuts, shiny pates, scalps... I told my husband when I married him that our marriage would last as long as he had hair — after that, I wasn’t promising anything.

He loses no opportunity to tell me, from his elevated position on the high moral ground, that (following my course of chemotherapy) I am the bald one now, and he isn’t leaving me.

CANCER LOVES SUGAR, TOO

AS A cancer patient, your goal — and challenge — is to see how often you succeed in eating food that is 100% good for you and bad for your cancer cells. Sadly, it seems that cancer cells and I share exactly the same taste. We love roast beef and buttered toast, we adore chocolate, we crave cookies at teatime.

What this means, though, is that you have to deprive them of their (and your) favourite foods and instead stuff yourself with broccoli and cabbage.

Cancer cells hate these, just like you do. Your new goal is to see how disgusting you can make anything, on the principle that if you hate it, so does your cancer.

Juices are a great place to start. You can get your daily dose of disgusting in one go. Buy one of those ninja machines that whizzes everything up, experiment every day with throwing in as many bitter green leaves as you can, and see just how foul you can make the drink on a scale of one to ten.

I usually get to nine — Swiss chard will boost the score, fast — then add sheep’s yoghurt and salt, which can push it up to ten. If you are going to do the sissies’ soft option with fruit juice, make sure to include the peel, core, worms, mushy bits, pips and stalks.

The funny thing is that I now find it all quite delicious and am thinking of writing a recipe book called Hard Core.

From juices you graduate to bone broth. The principle is the same. How many unsavoury ingredients such as bones, knuckles, sinews, ligaments, kidneys, herbs, roots, onions, bugs and flies, etc, can you squash into your stockpot, and how long can you simmer it before the household rebels?

After two days, your family will be ready to move out.

HOUSE CLEANING AND CANCER

IF I am being honest, my idea of domestic hygiene is having a quick look around to make sure no one is watching when I pick a piece of fallen food off the kitchen floor and put it back on the plate. The prewash cycle on the dishwasher is three dogs licking the plates.

So when my oncologist said (during my chemo), ‘You know, your immune system is now severely compromised, so you must always carry hand sanitiser with you, wear gloves when handling raw meat, wash your hands after touching your pets or picking things in the garden, and avoid germs and dirt in general’, I tried to keep a straight face. My immune system will just have to take its chances.

In fact, the whole time I had chemo, I never had so much as a sniffle. Chemo cleared up a chronic bladder condition, a fungal infection of my toenail that I seemed to have been born with and all sorts of other annoying little things that simply got nuked along with the cancer.

TAKE CHARGE OF THE TV REMOTE

YOU have cancer, so the TV remote control is all yours. No matter what football game is showing, you have priority. Any channel you want: country music, repeats of Two And A Half Men, The X Factor, Welsh sheepdog trials. Whatever you want, you get. You know it won’t last, so enjoy...(If you’re a man, then obviously you’ve always had control of the remote, so there is