7. Taking control of the battle

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell, 1984

“I’ve lost Sam,” an elderly lady leaned over the fence to tell her neighbour.
“Oh, dear. Where did you last see him?” the neighbour replied, taking a rest from the gardening.
“No, no, Sylvia.I’ve lost him. He died last night.”

In my blissfully ignorant days of youth euphemisms seemed so silly and open to misinterpretation. Why couldn’t people just use proper words? Yet, I learnt as I grew up that when life throws death at us, the little word ‘loss’ becomes many people’s euphemism of choice.

The ‘Party’ slogan from the George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” echoed down the halls of memory and I began to make up my own slogan for coping with my diagnosis: “Who controls the language controls the pain.”

Those who know me might think it’s the typical reaction of a control-freak, but the concept of losing a part of your body that has been with you all your adult life is a kind of bereavement and communicating that ‘loss’ is so much easier if you stay in control of the language. I realised I could do this best by protecting myself behind a wall of different languages, like a fortress with towers and ramparts designed to keep attackers at bay. My ‘tour de force’ (tower of strength?) was the wonderful Latin term of my diagnosis, Ductal Carcinoma in Situ. It took several seconds to say, then depending on your knowledge of Latin, up to ten minutes to work out what it meant. Here was some good stalling time, time to think up a good story! “It’s a cancer that’s not going anywhere at the moment, a ‘good’ cancer.” I began. “It is asleep, trapped in the labyrinths of now disused milk ducts, a comatose minotaur in the mine-shafts of early motherhood."

“Like Theseus,” I continued, “the surgeon will go in and kill it before it properly wakes up. No-one knows how long it might sleep but who would be foolish enough to wait until it wakes up and careers out of control through those labyrinthine ducts until it reached other gateways, the lymph nodes, and the main highway of the bloodstream?“

If Ductal Carcinoma in Situ was my best defence, my best weapon was the word ‘pre-cancerous’. Sounding like ‘precarious’ it was an anaesthetised dart gun keeping the beast asleep and benign, like it hadn’t got the strength to do any real damage. Only when I felt really brave could I pull out the pin out of the word ‘mastectomy’ and throw in the air like a grenade before mentally running away.

What I dreaded most was the invasion of people's word choices to describe what was happening to me as that would kill my courage. The most painful of all, the one that even now makes me wince, is the expression ‘have her breast off’. For this is an image of defeat, of helpless women at the mercy of sabre-wielding soldiers on horseback, slashing their way through civilians, the dying, the injured, the weeping.

So it was that between diagnosis and surgical procedure, I chose to play the goddess Euphemia, pottering round a bland garden of self-deception, picking words carefully to cover over the thorny truth, and by and large pretending it was happening to someone else.

“What? Cancer?” Euphemia would say. “No this isn’t happening to me. No, not me. Mastectomy? No, no, don’t do it to me... Do it to Julia. Julie then, whoever she is, but not to me.”