How I look is key to my identity. I refuse to apologise for wanting control over the physical changes cancer brings
80 per cent of women also gain weight during treatment, partly due to being pumped full of steroids to prevent chemo side-effects, partly due to brutal hormonal changes as we stop HRT or take oestrogen-suppressing drugs. even manicures and facials can be off the menu due to infection risk and many salons do not feel confident treating women with cancer.
You might think these things are a small price to pay to be alive, and that even to worry about them is foolish vanity. You wouldn’t be alone. While I reeled from the trauma of my diagnosis, I remember thinking I would happily sacrifice everything to live, saying, ‘You can cut off my legs if you like.’
Luckily, my consultant understood me better than I did. He was the first to suggest I wear a ‘cold cap’ — a contraption, free on the NHs, designed to chill the scalp during chemotherapy — to try to preserve my hair.
‘You won’t like looking in the mirror and seeing yourself bald,’ he said, perceptively.
The cap works partly by sending hair follicles into suspended animation, so they’re not as vulnerable to the chemo drugs designed to attack fast-dividing cells. The cold also shrinks blood vessels to cut the amount of drugs reaching my poor hair roots.
The first ten minutes or so of scalp cooling are painful until blissful numbness kicks in. Plus, the first time I wore it, I had a claustrophobic panic attack due to the tightening effect as the cap filled with cold liquid. It doesn’t work for everyone, and it doesn’t prevent hair loss completely.
After five of my eight chemo sessions, I estimate I’ve lost maybe 50 per cent of my hair, but thanks to scrunch drying and volumising sprays, enough of it remains in a curly bob that I don’t yet feel the need for a wig or scarf.
caring about hair when you have cancer might seem like vanity, but even more fundamentally, it reflects a longing for privacy and normality. Hair gives you the ability to work, meet a friend for coffee, go to the gym or walk the dog without pitying looks or awkward questions from strangers.
The day before chemo began, between medical appointments I dashed to Tracie Giles, one of London’s best permanent-makeup specialists, for a semipermanent eyebrow treatment and subtle lash line enhancement. The process, where natural pigments are introduced into superficial layers of the skin via an electrical device with a needle, was a distinct improvement on my own brows.
Knowing that even total hairloss wouldn’t leave my face bald as an egg allowed me to start chemo with more confidence.
In the next few months, I’m also going to have to deal with surgery and its aftermath. At one point, I searched online for post-surgery bras. I found the products so hideous and confusing and the whole concept so incomprehensible that I shut the pages down in a panic.
It wasn’t until I was invited to try out a new cancer centre, called Future Dreams House, that I found the holy grail — lingerie that might make you feel pretty even in the face of cancer.
Future Dreams, the charity, supports awareness and research, focusing on secondary breast cancer. It knows breast cancer affects all aspects of your life, from your relationships to your career and that the impact on body image can be particularly devastating.
In the pandemic, it sent out 7,000 care packages containing not just food, but beauty products to patients and donated more than 1,000 beautiful post-surgery bras.
It’s new centre, a tall, pink building in London’s King’s cross opened recently by Liz Hurley (thanks to donations including £500,000 from estee Lauder co.), houses the only specialised breast cancer support centre in the UK. It feels warm, comforting and luxurious, like a cross between a spa and a boutique hotel.
HeRe, any woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer can find tailored packages of emotional, physical and practical support of the kind the NHs simply isn’t designed to provide.
It hosts classes in yoga, exercise, nutrition, physio, life coaching, bra fitting after surgery, make-up, stress management, scarf-tying and wig fitting. In the new year there will be support sessions in employment advice and group sessions for partners, plus there are plans for future beauty services from cancer-trained professionals, including brow and nipple tattoos for women who have lost theirs.
In an airy studio, I join Marcia Mercier, a specialist Yoga for cancer teacher and breast cancer survivor. exercising can be daunting if you are going through treatment. It’s hard to know just how hard to push yourself, especially when dealing with complications.
When I recently developed blood clots in my left arm from chemo, nobody at the hospital seemed quite sure what was OK for me to do in my regular yoga class. Yoga and Pilates have been lifelines for me throughout my diagnosis and treatment, keeping me physically and mentally strong even at my most panic-stricken.
Upstairs, I meet Ryan Riley, founder of Life Kitchen, a cookery school which helps cancer patients rediscover the joy of eating. exhaustion and illness can destroy appetites, while chemo and radiotherapy can blitz tastebuds. It’s not unusual for everything to taste of soap or metal. Ryan produces easy food full of intense flavours including a delicious miso-infused cream with frozen berries.
For me, however, the most impressive example of the transformative power of Future Dreams House is the time I spend with specialist bra fitter and lingerie consultant Monica Harrington.
A warm, smiley Irish woman from cork, she is half fashionista half therapist. In her elegant fitting room, she takes women whose sense of self has been shattered by breast cancer and gently helps them find their confidence again.
‘My clients can be emotional,’ she says. ‘For example, women often tell me that intimacy is very difficult for them.’
Alongside me is Penny, a chic, witty woman in her fifties with an immaculate blonde bob. Previously, she’d had a double mastectomy and implants. But when cancer returned to one breast last year, the implants had to be removed permanently, leaving her body confidence in tatters.
Gently, Monica shows Penny a range of silky camisoles and satin pyjamas. ‘They are just a little bit sexier, a bit more feminine,’ says
It might seem like vanity but hair gives you the ability to walk the dog without pitying looks from strangers
Monica. ‘I want to get people out of the breast cancer box and into the kind of things they wore before.’
Penny confesses she is ‘dreading’ an upcoming holiday because she can’t face wearing a swimsuit. But Monica soon coaxes her into a one-piece designed for Future Dreams by Melissa Odabash, whose sister had breast cancer.
There’s something incredibly cheering and bonding about drinking tea around a pile of frothy bras and knickers and we soon start sharing anecdotes and hooting about the various indignities of our breast cancer experiences.
Medical advances mean more and more of us are living ever longer with and after cancer. According to cancer Research UK, breast cancer survival in the UK has doubled in the last 40 years, from 40 per cent to 78 per cent. It’s estimated fewer than a quarter of the 50,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the UK will die with it. Most of us will emerge scarred, emotionally traumatised and exhausted but alive. And we don’t just want to survive: we want to live life to the full.
My visit left me with a face aching from laughter, a glamorous Melissa Odabash swimsuit, plus the promise of a bra fitting from Monica and post-surgery yoga advice from Marcia. I felt a world away from a chemical-filled patient and more like, well, me.
SOME names have been changed
TO DONATE to Future Dreams go to futuredreams.org.uk/future-dreams-house/