Why?

A few weeks after I was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2013, I felt like my entire life was becoming a non-stop series of hospital visits, medication side-effects and new therapies and symptoms to tolerate and adjust to. When I saw friends, the conversation would invitably meander around to the state of my boobs, the fact that I was going to lose my long, red hair, or just their understandable curiosity about my condition. I started to feel like I was being swallowed up by this life I'd never asked for, so I asked a breast cancer survivor friend, P, an important question:

“Is there any way to get through all of this without becoming Cancer Girl?”

P said no. There wasn't. She said (very kindly, I might add) that the same thing had happened to her and I'd just have to cope with this chaos taking over my life, at least until the main part of my treatment was over.

So that was it. Like it or not, I had to get used to the idea of being Cancer Girl for the next year and a bit. They say if life gives you lemons....so I decided to see what humour and interest I could extract from this apparently unavoidable situation. There was more of it than you might imagine.

I'm going to put some of it into this blog. Whether it makes you laugh, cry or feel some connection with your own circumstances - and if you're currently living with cancer, my heart goes out to you especially - I hope it does anything but bore you.

I'm not putting my experiences in chronological order, at least not at this point, but rather writing a series of vignettes - little things that fascinated, upset, amused or otherwise struck me during my Life After Diagnosis.  I hope you'll read my words, and find some distraction in them.  At the very least, I hope to illustrate how one person - me, the only person I can speak for - feels about her diagnosis and cancer treatment in general.