D-Day

November 13, 2013

A few months ago, I noticed a lump in my right breast. My mum has had completely benign lumps before, as have a number of friends, and I'm not the naturally panicky type about medical matters, but I Did The Done Thing and took myself off to the GP. The locum I saw that day examined the lump and said that he thought it was just “nodular breast tissue”, nothing to worry about, and to come back if I did get worried in the future.

I went home, and duly didn't worry.

The lump got bigger, to the point where I could no longer put it down to nodular breast tissue. It felt like a muscle had grown in the fat on the outside portion of my breast – thick tissue, harder than the soft flesh around it.

The GP I saw this time was clearly concerned, and arranged for me to attend the local Breast Unit, where she said they'd be able to run tests and (at best) reassure me that it was a cyst, or something else benign. I still didn't worry.

So on 13th November 2013, I'm running late for my appointment. I'll attend the Breast Unit on my own as the worst-case scenario I imagine is that I'll have a biopsy and be sent home to wait for results. I call a taxi, leave the flat to meet it....and duly walk full-tilt straight into the door frame of the car as I attempt to get into it. I hit my head so hard that I fall unceremoniously onto the pavement, hurting my neck and back and worrying the driver.

A less optimistic soul might decide that this is a bad omen, give up on the day and go back to bed.

Not one to take a hint, apparently, I continue with my day. I'm still relaxed (if sporting a rotten headache by this point) and arrive at the hospital armed with a good book, a phone with various Facebook chats in progress, and a shopping list for dinner forming in my mind.

The waiting room at the Breast Unit is a strange sort of place. The majority of women who present with breast lumps have benign conditions and will be absolutely fine, but of course that doesn't prevent every woman (and the statistically rarer man) at the clinic from thinking “what if?” and worrying about cancer. Looking around the waiting room, I see every age and condition of woman. There's the young woman in the corner with her mum, making light of the situation but obviously unsure what the result of her day's tests will be. On the opposite side of the fence, the older woman looking tired but rather elegant in her headscarf, talking about her upcoming surgery with her friend. While I'm there, an elderly lady talks quietly to a nurse, crying, because she's just found out her breast cancer has spread to her liver, and is no longer curable.

Despite this, it's a stubbornly cheerful place, with smiling nurses and a team of cancer survivors relentlessly pushing tea and biscuits. Tea and biscuits will become a motif in my life. At one point I will come to suspect that “tea and biscuit therapy” is a little-known but universally effective cancer treatment, such is its apparent popularity in cancer treatment centres and support organisations.

As the day goes on, I have a clinical examination (that's having your boobs prodded and poked, to you and me), then I'm sent for a mammogram. After that, I'm given a breast ultrasound – younger breast tissue can be difficult to diagnose via mammogram due to its density – and when I ask the radiographer for some indication of how things look, her only response is a frown as she tells me “Well, I'm not very happy.”

I'm asked to return to the waiting room until my doctor, Dr. M., can see me. In the meantime, I send a couple of messages to friends on my phone. Beautiful Lisette, who has been through all of this before me and is through the other side now, cries with worry as I tell her that things are looking more dire as the day progresses. She virtually holds my hand throughout the day, and that means a lot to me. A small group of friends I call my Crazy Painty Peeps or CPPs, a fabulously dysfunctional but ultimately loving bunch of creatives, work hard to keep my spirits up as I gradually start to feel less optimistic about the day.

When Dr. M. calls me into her office, I take one look at her serious expression and tell her I don't like the look of this. She tells me that we have to talk about what happens next...and at that point, I know I should have brought someone with me. It transpires that there are some cases – and mine is included – where cancer can be positively identified even before the standard biopsy. The conversation goes something like this:

“So....you're telling me you think I have cancer?”

“Yes.”

“But I've not had a biopsy. Are you just suspicious, or fairly sure?”

“You'll have the biopsy today, but we're sure.”

“How sure? A little sure? Or sure enough that I should be telling my family and friends?”

“Put it this way: if your biopsy came back clear, we'd presume that we missed the tumour and would repeat the test, rather than presuming you were clear. As a doctor, I would be absolutely stunned to discover this was anything but cancer, and in cases like yours I've never known it to be anything else.”

At this point, I realise my mouth and throat have gone completely, arid-desert-at-midday dry. I pick up the plastic cup of water in front of me, then realise that my hands are shaking so much that I can't lift it without showering both of us. I carefully place it back down, using both hands.

I look at Dr. M. and speak slowly and clearly, knowing that if I don't hear it simply, I might find a way to twist things, to remember it incorrectly.

“I have cancer?”

Dr. M. looks at me, compassion showing on her face. She must have done this so many times before that it's almost routine, but for me it's a one-off, a bomb dropped into my life. She nods her head. Yes, I have cancer.

I
have
cancer.

I just sit there, watching my hands shake, concentrating on breathing and wishing I'd had the sense to bring someone with me today. At the same time, I'm glad there's nobody who loves me to see me like this.

I have cancer. How the hell did that happen? I'm forty years old. There's no cancer in my family. I have a six year-old son I love more than anything in the world, and I can't bear the thought of leaving him to grow up without a mother. I feel like I've been dropped into someone else's life – an alien landscape that's had all the colour suddenly drained out of it. It's a bizarre and deeply unpleasant feeling.

Everything's very quick after that. I meet a very compassionate and professional surgeon, T, who draws on me with a black Sharpie and sends me for biopsies. Whilst waiting, I call my partner Matt, but it's a bad line and he gets cut off thinking I've told him I have terminal cancer, calling back in a panic before I can reassure him that, at least for now, I'm not considered to be dying.

I have the biopsies, more mammograms to check that the tiny titanium tumour tags (alliteration improves any situation, right?) they insert into my breast are in the right place, then meet F, who is to be my breast care nurse. She's a jaunty, straightforward Irish woman and I like her. I just wish we'd met in rather different circumstances.

And I can't believe I have cancer.

I call my mother, who swears. My mother never swears. That alone stuns me almost as much as the bombshell diagnosis.

Then I go home, and I hold my son, and I sleep, having decided that I really should have taken the hint when the taxi door frame tried to kill me.