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.

 

 

I swam, and I swam, right over the dam...

Day 5

 

General status update 

Nausea: continuous, all pervading, vile, but controlled. Just about.

Hair: nice and shiny and, more to the point, still attached.

Anxiety level (1-10): will the nausea ever abate, and when will the other side effects start to kick in? WHEN??

State of mind: quite chipper, considering. I got TWO parcels this morning. And I’m losing weight. Obvs.

 

 It came as a huge surprise to me recently to discover that the famous Charing Cross Hospital is not located in Charing Cross, as one might reasonably expect, but here in Hammersmith, on the Fulham Palace Road.
 

Who knew?

 This solved a mystery that had puzzled me many years ago when, shortly after graduating from Oxford, I was working in my first, quite dementedly inappropriate, career as a corporate banker at Citibank, in an office near to Charing Cross. I knew that the hospital must be somewhere in the vicinity, but however many streets I wandered down in my all-too-short lunch hours, I never seemed to come across it. Now I know why.

 

My first introduction to the hospital earlier this year was not as a patient, however, but as a swimmer. I am useless at sport and have tried, and failed, at various ways of keeping fit, including running, which served only to ruin my left knee, and gyms, which always made me feel deeply oppressed by their sweaty, airless claustrophobia, the endless hamster-wheel futility of the stationary bikes, and all the hyper-fit, effortlessly skinny young persons in skin tight lycra constantly checking out themselves, and occasionally, others, in the wall to wall Mirrors of Shame. Been there, done that, wasted countless hundreds of pounds on very expensive and highly under-utilised gym subscriptions.

 So, in the end, I just walked. And very enjoyable it was, too.

Before my return to London last year, I had been living for some time in a converted camel barn, in a small town called Ayvalik, on the north Aegean coast of Turkey. There, I would rise early to avoid the summer heat and, just as dawn was breaking, walk with my dog Freddie (a street dog who turned up one day and simply refused to go away) up into the pine covered hills that surround the town.

 

 

In the spring, when it was cooler, we would trek for miles over the hills to secret places where no one else ever seemed to go (the Turks aren’t great walkers, as a nation), and find acres of wild flower meadows -

 

 

 

 

and spectacular hilltop views over the Aegean towards Lesbos, (which lies just off-shore, despite being Greek).

 

 

In winter we would collect kindling, and pine cones, for sweet-scented fires in the Camel Barn. It was wonderful. And great exercise.

You can’t really do any of that in Hammersmith, unfortunately, although I did my best with daily treks along the Thames towpath from Hammersmith Bridge to Barnes Bridge and back, which is about 4 miles; being by the river also gives you access to a feeling of open space and fresh air otherwise difficult to find in west London, although it’s a pity you first have to negotiate crossing several major west London arterial traffic flows just to get to the river from where we live.

Anyway, that problem became moot earlier this year when I started to experience pain in one of my feet whilst walking. I went to the doctor, expecting a magic and instant cure, as you do, and was more than a little miffed when he suggested it was just a touch of arthritis, the kind of normal wear and tear to be expected at my age (WHAT?!?!?) He suggested taking some paracetamol. It didn’t help much, so an alternative form of exercise needed to be found, fast, before I expanded to a size where I would require my own postcode. I was casting round desperately to find some other form of exercise that would not either injure me or bore me to death, when I suddenly thought of swimming. Easy on the joints, pleasant, and extremely good for you in general. I hadn’t swum for years, but was reasonably proficient as a child. Sorted.

I asked my partner R, a long time resident of the area, if there was anywhere convenient nearby to swim. The reason R lives in Hammersmith is because he used to be Reader in Medical Ethics at Imperial College Medical School, which is based at the Charing Cross Hospital - although he has long since moved on to full professorial glory elsewhere. But because of this he knew about the staff sports club at Charing Cross, also open to the public, which includes a tidily sized 25 metre swimming pool.

The very next day I walked down the Fulham Palace Road to the hospital – a pleasant, although traffic-haunted walk of about 15 minutes - and joined the sports club.

And then I swam, dear readers, I swam and I swam and I SWAM.

Quite unexpectedly, I found myself to be a natural long-distance swimmer.

What I have always thought of as my freakishly wide shoulders, and concomitant good upper body strength, enable me to get in the pool and just keep on swimming for considerable distances, without any difficulty at all. I’m not particularly speedy, and I’m never going to win any races, but I can keep going on, and on, and not feel too tired at the end of it.

This was both a revelation, and an absolute joy. The first time I got in the pool I swam forty lengths – a kilometre – and the second time 64 lengths – a mile. Swimming induces me in a feeling of meditative calm, as I move smoothly though the water, feeling it wash over and around me in a liquid blue trance.

I enjoy swimming so much I suspect that in a previous life I may well have been a trout.

As I spent more and more time in the pool, I started recording my total distance swum, so that I could imagine I was swimming the English Channel, which at its narrowest is about 18 miles wide. Over the course of this summer I got, notionally at least, to Calais, and started on the way back. By the end of August I was up to about 24 miles, and still going strong. By this time I was feeling a little confined by the pool and wondering about venturing into the wild, by way of the Serpentine, or perhaps the Hampstead ponds. I was also beginning to develop a possibly over-ambitious plan to swim the Hellespont, famed in myth and legend,where Leander and later Lord Byron swam.

The Hellespont can be found on the narrow watery divide between Europe and Asia, on the Bosphorus, a fast-flowing channel of water that runs from the Black Sea down to the Mediterranean, splitting the city of Istanbul in two along the way. One of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the Bosphorus is shut down for a few hours once every year on August 31st, to allow a group of lunatic swimmers to take part in the Hellespont race, swimming the couple of miles from Europe to Asia through vicious currents and swarms of stinging jellyfish.

That might have been a swim too far, but the idea was enticing, and I continued to dream my aqueous dreams of swimming in open waters. At the end of the summer, however, just as August was shading into September, something happened, down at the pool. I was in the shower, soaping off the chlorine after a particularly energetic 2 mile swim, and feeling pretty much as healthy and glowing and virtuously exercised as it was possible for me to feel, when I noticed something odd.

There was a lump, on the upper, inner part of my right breast, quite high up, and close to the skin. Not huge, but Very Definitely There. There was a lump in my breast.

And what was my first thought on discovering that lump in my breast, what was the very first thing that came into my mind?

‘How weird is that? Doing all this swimming is causing me to develop muscles in my breast..’

Ah, dream on, pre-cancer and pre-chemo Caroline, dream on.

Delude yourself - while you still can.