The world really doesn’t need another mediocre painting, right? Shouldn’t I just get a ‘proper’ job and not be such a financial burden on my partner?
I have been asked these rather blunt, and less than kind questions, on more than one occasion. I have also asked them of myself.
So why art, and why now?
In 2020, just as the UK was going into its first COVID lockdown, I was getting changed in the bathroom and I noticed a small dent in my left breast. I’d just read a newspaper article about a woman who had discovered she had breast cancer after spotting just such a dent. I thought, “Well that’s flipping inconvenient, just as we can’t go out, and getting to see a doctor is pretty near impossible, I find this!” I figured I’d see how long lockdown lasted, hoped it wouldn’t be too long and reckoned I would deal with it when the world opened up again. It’s hard to believe now, but I then totally forgot about it.
We were living with my dad. My youngest son, my partner and I had moved in with him because, in his late 90s, his dementia had got to the point where we were getting worried phone calls from his neighbours saying they could smell gas. He was leaving the gas fire on (unlit) and when told about it insisted he couldn’t have, because he didn’t even have a gas fire. Oh dear.
I’d always promised him he would never go into a home – he had a morbid dread of people – so we gave most of our furniture and appliances away, packed up 50% of our stuff and binned the rest. My eldest was already married and had a place of his own with his family. My middle son still reminds me that we made him homeless – there was only room for three of us at dad’s. In my defense, he had already moved out once but boomeranged. My youngest was 17 so he got the room at dad’s and my middle son found himself a very spacious apartment, with really high ceilings and very low rent. Although he totally fell on his feet – and I’d never have seen him on the street, he knows that – he still reminds me now and then what a terrible mother I am.
Dad’s dementia was getting worse, it seemed, daily. We went from being asked to chase non-existent dogs and birds from his bedroom, to his insisting we used the upstairs bathroom (it’s a bungalow) and there were other, distressing behaviours which out of respect for my dad, I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say, it was emotional trauma on a daily basis.
And then there was COVID. While everyone else at work was furloughed I was one of the few that kept working. I was managing a public building so had responsibility for test and trace, face masks, social distancing and coordinating the efforts of multiple tenant organisations, all of whom seemed to have competing needs, many of which I was unable to meet, due to the legal restrictions imposed.
I was worried about dad catching COVID, worried about my sons and grandchildren, my partner and my sister in Australia, and of course my own respiratory health. At the time I remember thinking we would probably never get back to normal, and I wasn’t alone. Everything seemed a little bit unreal. Of course dad didn’t understand any of what was happening, the radio news bulletins confused him, we told him it was nothing to worry about.
So, unbelievably, the sinister, worrying dent completely slipped my mind.
Then in August 2020 I was getting changed in the bathroom when I noticed a dent in my left breast. I thought, “Oh look at that there’s a….” and then I remembered. I’d seen that dent before. In April. Shit!
Of course it was a Sunday morning. Nothing was open. I could have called 111 but instead calmed myself down as best I could and jumped on the phone to the GP’s surgery at 8am Monday. The receptionist noted all my details and said a doctor would call me. I expected a wait of a few hours. It was 10 minutes. “Can you get down to the surgery this afternoon?” Shit! “Yes no problem.”
The female doctor couldn’t see the dent at first, I had to raise my arms above my head and turn this way and that so the light caught me from different directions. I was beginning to think that maybe I’d imagined it. Then she said, “Oh, I see it.” Shit!
“It’s probably nothing, but I thought I should err on the side of caution,” I said breezily. She looked pale behind her face mask and shook her head gravely. Shit! Shit! “I’ll refer you to the hospital, you should hear within a week.” Two days later I was called to the hospital. It was a bit of a whirlwind after that. A consultant said he thought he could feel thickening. A radiographer thought she could see something on the ultrasound – guided to the spot by the circle the consultant had drawn on my breast with a felt tip pen. But there was nothing showing on my mammogram from less than a year earlier. The radiographer put a ‘seed’ into my breast – a marker – in the area where there was the vaguest of smudges on the ultrasound. Ouch. “I’ll take a biopsy while we’re at it.” Double ouch. Then a mammogram. They put it side by side with the previous one and called me over for the worst game of ‘spot the difference’ I’ve ever played. You could kind of see something close to the very obvious dot of the marker ‘seed’. It definitely didn’t show up on the 2019 mammogram though, but apparently, and worryingly, it would already have been there.
Of course I knew then. They said they’d call me back for the results of the biopsy in about a week. “Results Wednesday”. I didn’t really need them to tell me. I’d lost my mum to breast cancer when she was just sixty-six years old, six years after her diagnosis. My sister had had it. My mum’s mum had had it. What were the chances it would have skipped me? Well quite good actually, as we later found out we don’t have any of the risky genes, but I didn’t know that then. The breast nurse told me that only one out of every eight ladies they saw in clinic for investigation actually ended up having cancer. Cold comfort if you’re that one in eight. And I just knew I was.
When my partner drove me to get my results the following week I was really calm. I knew what they were going to say. I just wanted to know what they were going to do about it. Paul was allowed to come into the consulting room with me, but I was way past red flags by that point. The male doctor turned slowly from tapping on his keyboard and looked me in the eyes with a solemn expression. “As you know, we took a biopsy from your left breast and sent it away for analysis. I’m afraid we found cancer.” My reaction took him by surprise I think. I didn’t cry, or fall apart, my attitude was very much, “OK, so now what?” A nurse was hovering with a box of tissues. She exchanged a look with the doctor. I got the feeling they thought I didn’t get it, or was in shock and would have a delayed reaction, maybe when I got home and it ‘hit me’.
Oddly, what I actually felt was relief. I’d always thought I’d get it someday, I just didn’t know when. And now I knew it was now. It was as if the other shoe had finally dropped. I’ve heard since that this is quite a common reaction, so I’m not sure why it so caught out the medical professionals dealing with me.
When we got back in the car I was quiet. I was thinking. Paul didn’t know what to say or do. I think it was harder on him. “Could you just drive please, but I don’t want to go home yet.” “Where would you like to go?” “Anywhere, just drive please.” So he drove. And I processed. When I was ready to go home I made sure he knew I didn’t want anything to change. I didn’t want him to treat me differently in any way. I wanted things to be ‘normal’.
I’d need an MRI, then a team of doctors with different specialisms would discuss my case and make a plan of action – which turned out to be 11mm lump, lobular cancer, HER2 negative, estrogen positive – wide area excision followed by 5 triple doses of radiotherapy over five days at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge (due to COVID they were dishing out higher doses in less time).
I wasn’t going to tell dad. My sister had kept her diagnosis from him – this was slightly easier for her as she lives in Sydney, Australia. I was living in the same house! But I knew, if I told him, and if he actually understood, he’d go into a flat spin. He’d assume I would die like mum had. Although half the time he thought I was mum. So, he wasn’t to be told. Not under ANY circumstances. Somehow we’d come up with a plan to explain my altered post-op capacity – luckily it was planned as a day-surgery so there’d be no tricky absence to concoct a story for.
And then a week before my surgery, he died. He knew nothing of COVID. He knew nothing of my cancer. He died, at home, in his room, with me and my youngest son at his side (my eldest sons had been with him all night and had only just left to get some sleep), my partner was rushing around different pharmacies trying to fill his emergency prescription.
I had my surgery, in a lovely private hospital where all the NHS hospital’s elective operations were being carried out at the time – possibly the only good thing to come out of COVID. They do excellent post-op sandwiches in private hospitals, and the honey and camomile tea is amazing.
The margins were clear. My sentinal node was clear. At my followup appointment the doctor mentioned the other ‘c’ word – cure. I was still working – no sick-leave (my choice) or furlough (not my choice) for me. I delivered a major employability skills project, from home via Zoom rather than face-to-face as originally planned. A lot of work had gone into the planning of that project, but boy was it a slog. I got zero satisfaction. I was so tired. The hormone therapy, for which I am extremely grateful, was nonetheless kicking my butt.
Then the world opened up again. I went back to managing my community building. But everything was different. I was different. I felt as though I had been an actor in a tv soap opera, playing a role for 40 years (since I’d left art college and got a proper job to help pay the mortgage on the little end-of-terrace house that my then new husband and I had just bought). I was an actor who’d taken a bit of a break, but then found that when she returned to set, she couldn’t get back into character. It sounds overly dramatic to say it, but it’s absolutely true, the old Leigh was gone. I was still alive. I still had my left breast – no mastectomy. I still had my hair – no chemotherapy. The doctors were saying words like ‘cure’. Yet I was completely different from the woman who had found that dent in April 2020 and had promptly forgotten all about it.
I started watching art videos on YouTube, then I started painting again. Not as therapy but because from the age of thirteen I have known that I am an artist. I practiced and practiced until I was the best artist in the school, achieved the necessary ‘A’ at A’level, to qualify for a full grant, got into art college… and then totally believed everyone who said I’d never make a living from art and that I needed to get a ‘proper’ job.
Now, in my late fifties and still sore from radiotherapy (it keeps doing its thing for years apparently), it was suddenly as plain as the nose on my face that I was still an artist, that life was short – sometimes very short – and that I was rapidly running out of time. Mum, diagnosed at age sixty, had died aged sixty-six, I was fifty-eight when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, and for a long time my mind wouldn’t let me make plans past the end of the year, let alone up until my sixty-sixth birthday, or beyond. I was becoming increasingly overweight and probably clinically depressed (although I never sought help or a diagnosis) and basically marking time until I died! OK, not probably clinically depressed, definitely.
Then in April 2021, just as I was beginning to feel a little better, and a tad more positive about things, losing weight, sorting out my diet, exercising, doing all the good self-care stuff, I had a pulmonary embolism. Probably due to the Tamoxifen – so I was switched to Letrozole. I felt like I’d been hit in the face with a shovel. Really? I mean REALLY?!! I actually said it out loud (genuinely). “OK, OK! I get it, body. Life is short. Tomorrow is not promised. Don’t put off until tomorrow what you could do today etc.”
Mum had been looking forward to her retirement. She’d been a secretary after school, then, when she married dad and had my sister and me, she quit her job to become a stay-at-home mum. When we were older she found a part-time job at the sweet shop down the road from our house, for ‘pin money’. She was looking forward to the day when she and dad would retire to the countryside. She had so many plans for the future. So many things she’d put off until retirement. Then the diagnosis at sixty and dead by sixty-six.
Mum was bitter and angry towards the end. Angry with cancer, angry with the doctors (who admitted they had failed her), angry with fate, and most of all angry with herself for putting-off all the things she had really wanted to do, and had only just started doing, when her long-planned-for future, her third-age, was abruptly snatched away from her.
After mum’s funeral I had promised myself I would not make the same mistake, and yet here I was – diagnosed with cancer – straight back to work – pulmonary embolism – same again. Still working in a job I no longer had any passion for, that caused me endless stress, that stopped me sleeping, that made me feel sick every morning, that I dragged myself to each day and where I watched the clock until I could leave. That wasn’t me, and it wasn’t what I’d promised myself. So I told Paul we needed to talk.
After I’d managed to convince him I wasn’t chucking him out, I told him that I was going to give up my job and become a full-time artist. I chose the end of September 2023 as my leaving date, hoping by that time that I would have been able to set us on a strong-enough financial footing and that we wouldn’t need to eat beans on toast for dinner every night (although I was more than prepared for that eventuality, because there was no way I was going to change my mind).
So that’s why now.
Why art? Well, I had the biggest teenage crush on Freddie Mercury. Freddie Mercury had gone to art college. I was going to go to art college. Teenage logic! It didn’t matter that I couldn’t draw for toffee. That was the plan. It was a plan I followed with laser focus, until I became quite good at art, and then really good at art and even when I loved art more than I loved Freddie Mercury (sorry Fred). I was an artist. It was simply who I was.
Does the world need another mediocre painting? Probably not, but who knows? The next one might be a masterpiece! Shouldn’t I get a proper job? I don’t have time for a proper job, because I have a vocation and, besides, the muse won’t let me. Thank you for your concern. Paul’s fine with it by the way. Positively encouraging.
Being an artist is not a doss. I used to fall asleep on the bus on the way home from art college I was so tired (and covered in charcoal or paint). Art is demanding, challenging, fulfilling, frustrating, transcendent, exhausting, energizing. Art is not a thing I do, it’s what I am, and who I have always been. It just took the messenger of the gods to give me the hint.
Besides, if I go and get a ‘proper job’ now, heaven knows what my body will come up with next to force me back into the studio! It’s simply not worth the risk.