Lisa Lynch remembers being in the Pig and Whistle on Merton Road and enjoying the first day of summer over a shandy with her husband.
It was June 2008 and the pair were not overly anxious about a biopsy on a breast lump Lisa, then 28, was having that weekend.
What followed during the next year was six courses of chemotherapy for breast cancer, which - along with the shandy - were captured in a blog Lisa used to chart her journey through diagnosis and treatment.
Lisa, from Southfields, said Alrighttit.com started as a coping mechanism, a way to articulate her thoughts and deflect friends and family from repetitive and exhausting conversations during low points.
“I just wanted to say ‘ha’ to the cancer” Lisa, an interior design journalist, said, after the diagnosis turned her life upside down.
“I had just got married and was enjoying my friends and job,” she said. “The diagnosis took everybody by surprise. I was low risk, I didn’t have a family history of cancer and I was a healthy 28-year-old.”
The blog soon morphed from a cathartic attempt to analyse the feelings and those closest to her, to a way of shaping her cancer fight her own terms.
Writer and actor Stephen Fry described the blog as “funny and brilliant,” hailing her as “the web's top cancer bitch”, and now the blog has been turned into a book, The C Word, which was released last week.
Combining modern female friendly references with irreverent humour, the book walks readers through her loss of femininity, and punishing treatment sessions which see her lose her hair and a breast in a mastectomy.
It tells how after convincing her GP to refer her for a biopsy in two days not eight weeks “to a certain extent you do have to be quite pushy” she was told the cancer had spread to 24 of 25 lymph nodes.
The shock, anger and journey through acceptance (and non-acceptance) is all there, with Lisa ominously recalling: “My oncologist said, we are throwing everything at it”.
A year after the diagnosis doctors told Lisa they had contained the cancer. “I will never have the all clear,” she said, “but that was good enough.”
She reluctantly agrees cancer has injected a new lease of life in her - there is talk of a screen adaptation of the book and she is working on a novel and other writing projects - but remains wary of the fragility of her condition and guilty about the cause of her success.
“I think that’s true actually. I do feel incredibly lucky to be in this position, but I’m still very much aware that’s not everybody’s story.” She said.
Lisa, who volunteers for a breast cancer charity and raised £10,000 at her birthday party fundraiser, has to go back for check-ups every six weeks and, because of the treatment, cannot have children.
She said: “I am conscious that I am lucky. I know that for a lot of people there isn’t a happy ending.”
For more on the book visit Alrighttit.com.
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