The C-Word by Lisa Lynch

whether it had something to do with my fear of becoming completely unfanciable when all the hair-loss and steroid-swelling fun began. Because – kids or no kids –
nothing
was more important to me than having P around.
    One night that week, P jogged home from work. ‘I’m taking my frustration out on the pavement,’ he said, when I questioned the change from his usual method of commute. He mentioned that some girls sitting on a bench had commented on his legs. Of course they did. P is gorgeous. And clearly, I wasn’t the only one to have noticed his charms (go near him and I’ll scratch your eyes out, right?), which was something that came to play on my mind more than it might have done ordinarily. Actually, that’s playing it down somewhat. I was completely bloody petrified that he was going to go off me. Because, let’s be honest, balding, bloated lasses aren’t most blokes’ idea of a model wife, are they? And definitely not balding, bloated lasses who are unlikely to give them a child of their own.
    All I was hearing from the sensible people around me was not to concern myself with what was around the corner; to deal with the present; to take each day as it came. But that was rather like asking a dog not to bark. Whether or not I communicated it, cancer’s looks-destroying, fertility-sapping potential was occupying my thoughts more than I knew it should. And all I could think about was what a bum deal all of this was becoming for P. Was the no-kids stuff going to become a huge regret for him? Might he one day wish he hadn’t woken me up at six o’clock that Thursday morning, with the promise of a wonderful life together and an enticing Tiffany box? And there was always going to be some bench-bitch with a compliment on his legs, ready to divert his attention from his once-beautiful bride.
    I don’t really know what it feels like to have major eat-away-at-you regrets. Mine are more like loose ends I wish I’d tied up when I had the chance. I wish, for example, that I’d been nicer to the very decent bloke I had a long-distance almost-relationship with following a couple of very fun dates in our home town, then gave the brush-off when he travelled miles to visit me in London (not because I didn’t like him, but because I’d had my heart broken in the meantime and was frightened of getting close to another boy again). I wish I’d never lost touch with my dear friend Weeza, who missed out on my wedding as a result of our time apart – a fact that will upset me as long as I live. I wish I’d stood my ground in a particularly stressful former job, and done more to avoid the trouble it caused for me and my friends. And I wish I’d never shelled out my monthly travel budget on some unfeasibly high shoes I wore to a friend’s wedding. Not only were they toe torture, they also gave me pins like Miss Piggy’s and were never worn again.
    But all of those things seemed like mere details in comparison to the regrets that P could later come to have about his choice of wife. At our wedding, we’d opted for different vows than the usual ‘for better or worse, in sickness and in health’ (luckily). Instead, we promised to care for each other with love and friendship; to support and comfort each other through good times and through troubled times; to respect and cherish each other and to be faithful always. But, on that spectacularly beautiful day in December – a mere eighteen months previous – neither of us could have imagined that those ‘troubled times’ might come to mean all of this.
    Thanks to our duo of disappointingly short pregnancies, P and I had, of course, been forced to consider a life that included just the two of us. It mostly involves us watching cricket all over the world, lots of four-poster-bed weekends away, buying a second house in Spain, always going to Glastonbury in a pimped-up camper van, and owning a ridiculously child-unfriendly Zone 1 apartment with a massive roof terrace that’s