Yesterday I found out that a close friend of mine has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She is still in the sort of shock that I realise I didn’t really go through when I got my diagnosis two months ago. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I spotted something wrong myself (a change in the shape of my left breast) and I instigated having a mammogram. So when I got a recall I was horrified but not shocked. Secondly, as my surgeon Robert Carpenter said to me on our first meeting, I have been through it before.
Yes, I do remember walking around in a daze for the first couple of days after my Hodgkins’ Disease diagnosis at 17. I was just about to start my A Levels. I remember sitting in my first French exam thinking “what’s the point? I won’t be around to get the results.” Fortunately, that feeling was very short-lived and never returned. What was I thinking of? Of course I’d be around. Now, where was the next party to go to?
Thirty-four years later, I skipped the first train of thought and went straight on to the “where is the next party bit. I had my initial consultation with Mr Carpenter on a Friday evening. Did I still want to go down to Ramsgate that weekend? Martin asked. “You bet”, I replied. There were grandchildren to see and a party to go to. “We must carry on as usual until we can’t,” I told him.
My friend, who doesn’t want to be named, has never been through it before. She is very shocked and upset. I would not want to trivialise her shock at being told she has breast cancer. But relative to me, she is a lucky lady. Hers was caught extremely early through a routine mammogram. The doctor told her she was one of their “scan successes” because what the scan picked up was so small she was unlikely to have noticed anything herself for at least a year. I, sadly, was one of the scan failures. I had been on annual mammograms on a higher risk list and mine was not spotted.
I actually shed some tears when I thought about that. I should have been like my friend, caught early. But then I decided that due to mine almost certainly being caused by my previous radiotherapy, the outcome might not have been all that different whenever they detected mine.
The other reason why I’m sure my friend has been less able to cope with her bad news than I was, is that she didn’t have any emotional space left. She has been dangerously stressed for the past year with her job, which is putting ridiculous demands on her, and with coping with elderly and infirm parents. I’ve been worried that she was pushing herself too close to the edge for some time, so the cancer diagnosis must have seemed like the final straw! I, by contrast, was, at the point of diagnosis, in a very good place. Things were going well at work and at home. My parents are elderly but still quite independent. I was physically fit and healthy. I had the emotional space to cope with this.
Naturally, I phoned my friend and had a long chat. Part of her obviously knows that she’s lucky hers has been caught so early. She is scheduled to have a lumpectomy and probably two or three weeks of radiotherapy after that. But I urged her to take this as a warning. No one can take so much sustained stress without consequences. Her job, while on paper a rewarding one, is clearly not serving or rewarding her in any way now. The demands being made of her are impossible to fulfil and she is getting the opposite of thanks for all her efforts. She really, seriously needs to use this nasty shock as a positive opportunity to reevaluate. I hope she will.
