On my way out of the oncologist’s office on the day I was informed that I needed chemo, a nurse had handed me the phone number of someone “very discreet”. A week later, I walked into a boxy room on the ground floor of a nondescript building in central Madrid. There was no signage outside. Inside, I detected the whiff of something antiseptic. My interlocuter was a man dressed in the white coat of a lab technician, but who spoke in the soothing tones of a practised undertaker.
I was at a store that specialised in high-end hair systems. These are custom-made wigs, secured to the scalp with tape and glue that are worn day and night, removed only about twice a month to be washed. I was told that, if I so wished, I could return to the “clinic” and wait in a mirrorless room while the “prosthesis” was cleaned, so that I would never have to see myself without hair, until my own had grown back. No one, the man said sotto voce, would have to ‘suspect’ anything.
To have cancer could cause one to step gingerly along the streets of deception. The mother of a classmate of my younger...
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