OK - this is a high speed run through of what's going on, and where we are at. Just to get everyone up to speed.
Hold onto your seats, it's going to be a bumpy ride......
20th Feb 2011 - found lump in left boob. Assumed (everything is always OK in my life) that it was nothing. Asked a few people who said probably a cyst - wait til your period - it's bound to disappear.
28th Feb 2011 - hmmmm - hasn't disappeared. Still very relaxed about it - it hurts, it doesn't feel like a pea or a bean or a golf ball (more like a swollen muscle) so surely just a cyst, but went to see GP anyway. He's sweet and calm and sure it's nothing (my age, my health, no family history etc etc) but just to be sure he'd like me to have a mammogram and an ultrasound. He asks me when my last mammogram was, and is amazed to hear I have never had one. Feel as though I haven't washed behind my ears or something.....
Am so sure this is nothing I don't even mention to J that I have a second appointment.
1st March 2011 - mammogram and ultrasound. Oh shit - a suspicious looking mass. Sudden interest from GP, and urgent appointment with Breast Surgeon (Breast Surgeon? WTF?) booked for that afternoon. Damn - had to cancel a lunch date but hey, thought it better to be sure rather than worrying unnecessarily over the weekend (I know, in hindsight, this is the point I should have woken up. In my defense, everyone around me still in "it's probably nothing" mode, so I was pissed off to be missing a jolly lunch....).
Cue appointment with breast surgeon Prof T. Prof T is a kindly yet totally urbane breast specialist who is also a plastic surgeon - not a bad combo if you need that kind of thing, but of course that didn't apply to me - he was just going to tell me it's all ok - what a nice chap.....
Lovely Prof T says that there are several cysts in my right tit, but they are nothing to worry about. However, in the left one is a very small lump, but which has suspicious margins (I haven't heard that combination of words since fourth form, when I used to write notes about the teachers in my margins....) so he wants to do a biopsy immediately. Again, he says, let's do it straight away to stop me from worrying over the weekend.
I immediately and suddenly wake up, smell the coffee and start to worry. He thinks I've got cancer. This is real, its not just me being a hypochondriac, he really really thinks I might have cancer. And I start to sniff, in what I like to think of as an elegant, Demi Moore kind of way, but have never been able to carry off.
10 mins of panic time in which to text the happy news to poor J while they prepare the room and then I'm suddenly behind the curtain with my boobs out. Something that looks (and later feels) much like an apple corer being poked into my boob to grab a lump of tissue and pull it out. A quick plaster and a handshake and it's all over - results in a few days.
J takes me home and we drive in a kind of shocked silence. I think we did. J is wonderful, as shocked as I am but totally there for me to do and react however I want to. My mind is in complete, Tourettes style overdrive (Shit! Cancer! Fuck!) but it seems to be happening to someone else.....
And of course, in reality, nothing as horrible as cancer (from now on referred to as The Thing - with apologies to Lisa Lynch - it's not a "Voldemort" thing - but more that cancer has so many preconceptions which I want to move away from) could possibly ever happen in my perfect life. Could it?
As serene and zen-like as ever, J xxs
No comments:
Post a Comment