Don't worry about a thing, 'cause every little thing gonna be all right...

Day 14

General status update

Hair: cowering, frightened, waiting for the axe to fall – but still attached.

 

Nausea demon: giving me the occasional poke in the stomach with his pitchfork, just for fun, but otherwise much concerned with the preparatory reading for his OU course – he settled on the Diploma in Counselling, in the end. I put it to him that surely tormenting was rather more in his line, and he blushed and muttered something about broadening his skills portfolio, which has a certain economic logic to it: he can start tormenting people first, and then charge them a fortune for advice on how to cope with it.

 

Chemo Muse: continues to be completely manic – am beginning to wonder whether she might be a Bacchante in disguise.

 

Sleep, lack of: so, so tired – tired but wired, a bizarre combination.

Fingertips: still a bit numb – am worried this may become permanent. It’s called peripheral neuropathy, apparently.
Toes still seem ok, though.

Heightened sense of smell: it’s like having a hearing aid in my nose, and not in a good way.

Anxiety level (1-10): can’t slow down long enough to be anxious, frankly.

State of mind: much improved after going to see the Hobbit this afternoon, my first proper outing since Day 1 of chemo. Ignore the critics, it is entirely wonderful: there is husky-sledding, only with rabbits, a very moving hedgehog resuscitation scene, and I cried at the end. What more could you possibly want from a movie?

 

 

(picture posed by a model, in 1910; these are NOT my actual breasts)

                                                                   

I always got on very well with my breasts, until the day I began to suspect that one of them might be planning to kill me. 

We had co-existed harmoniously ever since they first appeared, and they had never given me a moment’s trouble; it never occurred to me that this state of affairs might ever change. My breasts have never had to work for a living: I don’t have any children, so they have not been troubled by the exigencies of breastfeeding, and have until now led a fairly cosseted existence - I do like a pretty bra. They are a good size, a nice shape, and have functioned primarily as a source of pleasure.

 

From the moment I found the lump in my right breast, however, whilst soaping off the chlorine in the shower after a swim in the pool at the Charing Cross Hospital Sports Club, my attitude towards my breasts changed, radically. We became somewhat estranged, once I began to suspect that one of them was harbouring something potentially lethal - It felt as if I were walking around with a hand grenade strapped to my chest wall.

A video still plays constantly in my mind of that life-changing moment, three months ago now:

My fingers moving across the soapy upper slope of my right breast, the sudden awareness of something hard beneath the skin, that felt like…. a lump. Surely not? I’m not a lumpy person.

My fingertips running over my breast again, feeling the resistance under the skin. The undeniable presence of a small, but clearly discernible, lump.

 My fingers pushing it and prodding it, again and again. It wasn’t tender, it didn’t hurt, it was just there, the size of a Marks & Spencer wasabi pea, perhaps, exuding  lumpiness, having apparently sneaked in and taken up residence in my breast whilst my attention was elsewhere.

My first, insane, thought that the lump was muscle I had developed by swimming so many miles in the pool...

Yes, the process of denial began right there, and would continue for some time. I wasn’t unduly worried, or at least told myself that I wasn’t, knowing that in middle age women’s breasts tend to become more lumpy, and that 90% of those lumps are benign; that most breast lumps are harmless, fluid-filled cysts, or inert bits of fibrous matter. A friend had recently told me about how, whilst working in a remote part of Nepal, she was forced to fly back to London to have a breast lump investigated. It proved to be innocent, and she took the opportunity to stock up on marmalade and Marmite, before flying back to Kathmandu. She had found several other lumps over the years; all had proved to be benign.

Another friend, a legendary swooner in medical environments, often at other people’s hospital bedsides, had told me how she lost consciousness with her breast clamped tight in the mammogram machine:

 ‘It’s not much fun passing out with your left tit squashed inside a giant sandwich toaster’.

Her lump was ‘Just gristle, nothing nasty’.  Another false alarm.

Of course, I knew of people who had had breast cancer, but no one closer than two degrees of separation. It had recently struck me as odd that in spite of the fact that I was always reading about the disease in the media, I didn’t personally know anyone who had suffered from it. Given that 1 in 8 women in the UK will contract breast cancer at some point in their life span, usually at the latter end, it was inevitable that one day someone in my circle of family and friends would get it.

I had been confident, however, that that person wasn’t going to be me. For a start, I come from a long line of vigorous Fo women who have lived to their late eighties or early nineties, completely compos mentis and in good physical shape, without chronic diseases; I remember my maternal grandmother redecorating her own bathroom in her early eighties. None of them had died of breast cancer.

 In a lifetime of competitive hypochondria combined with general good health - Big Sis Fo and I have spent many happy hours over the years googling and discussing our various symptoms - breast cancer just wasn’t one of the diseases I had chosen to major in; it hadn’t even made the short list. I was pretty sure I had some kind of rare auto-immune disorder, not amenable to simple testing, and quite possibly the beginnings of a degenerative neurological wasting disease, but breast cancer wasn’t even on the agenda.

 Still, the lump didn’t go away, and you need to check these things out, so I made an appointment with the doctor. He took my history, examined me, found the lump, and told me that there was almost certainly nothing to worry about, whilst simultaneously writing out an urgent referral note to the Breast Clinic at the Charing Cross Hospital, which the receptionist faxed to them immediately. They would see me within 2 weeks, he said, and that is exactly what they did.