Halloween 2018 was the day I received the phone call to say I had breast cancer. I was expecting it. I had been recalled from a routine mammogram a couple of weeks earlier. I had been shown the mammogram pictures, had the little white dots of calcification pointed out to me and had already had a vacuum assisted biopsy. I had a niggling feeling everything wasn’t going to be ok and even though I was outwardly being very positive, I kind of knew.
Of course there is a whole back story as to why a 44 year old would be having routine mammograms but suffice to say, this wasn’t the first time I had been recalled but it was the first time I had a really uncomfortable feeling sitting in the waiting room. No lump, no puckering, no uneven shapes, no discharge just a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
The actual phone call itself, was a waffle. The nurse effectively telling me everything but without saying anything. In the end I asked
“Are you trying to tell me I have breast cancer”
Yes she said – “Right” I said “am I going to die”
When she said no, for some reason I felt the urge to point out that actually of course I was going to die as death was the complete certainty of life. Poor nurse, still I am sure she can write a whole book around peoples responses to diagnosis. She proceeded to confirm that this cancer wasn’t going to kill me but I had things that needed to be done in the next day or two and I knew then, this was actually going to flip my life on it’s head and be a right ball ache.
And it really did, my life, my husbands, my girls, my family. I felt so guilty, that I was bringing this whole nasty cancer business back in our lives. We had already done this before you see, lived through nearly twelve years of my mothers cancer journey (ovarian not breast but hence the routine mammograms) So I smiled, this isn’t the same, I said. It’s going to be different. I wasn’t scared, I said but I really really was and I didn’t have my mum to help me through.
When I went to bed that night, I was pretty bloody frightened. Ironically, what I didn’t know then, was I was actually cancer free. A couple of months later, I would discover that there was no evidence of cancer spread, no evidence of a tumour – the assumption being that it had been fully removed at biopsy. But that knowledge was locked in the future and as far as Halloween nights go, 2018 was definitely the one which scared me the most.
Much love xx
The Frank Journals 