Yesterday I had my yearly mammogram. My fourth since being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007. It was a perfectly fine experience - as perfectly fine as it can be when your breast is jammed into a cold vice and you’re totally immobilized, rendered powerless, and at the mercy of a cold, hard machine… The nurse then did that incredibly rude thing where they wordlessly disappear for five minutes (to look more closely at the images presumably)… and you’re sat semi naked in a cold room, staring at the silent, heavy machine in front of you, wondering what it saw… hardly breathing at all.
Driving home, I became aware that I was crying. No, it was more pathetic than that, it was weeping! I didn’t know why as my mind was a total blank, my eyes fixed on the road and the sat nav which read 11 miles from home… and then ten miles from home… nine… eight… seven… and I remembered parts of the journey home on the day I was told I had cancer. Mind flipping from a total blank then fast forwarding to an imaginary bald, poorly, suddenly limited future. In the four years that have passed so much has changed. If you’d told me then that I’d even be here in four years I’d have kissed you… I wouldn’t have kissed Dr at Hospital who seemed to take great delight in telling me if I’d left it much longer, it’d have been curtains within six months. Thanks Doc. Even the promise of twelve months back then seemed more than I could hope for. Because in the very early days when you first find this stuff out, you don’t quite know how it’s going to pan out and information is fed to you in dribs and drabs as the results of tests become known…good news it’s early, bad news it’s a particular type blah blah…and so it was I moved from a big question mark to statistics that suggested if I went down the full on treatment route, I’d have something like an eighty six per cent chance of still being around in ten years time… OK, pretty high odds then better buckle down and hand my veins over…
Words like ‘chemotherapy’ and ‘radiotherapy’ and ‘lumpectomy’ and ‘oophrectomy’ (all translating as ‘oh heck…to me’ as it started to sink in). Six months of my life passed in a blur… a blur of being sick, feeling vulnerable, spitting out falling hair and feeling slightly sorry for myself and also, if I’m honest… just slightly ashamed. Ashamed of how I’d got myself into this situation… feeling very much like a dolphin caught in a net (maybe not a dolphin more a big, ugly pike with a hook through my top lip)… suddenly seeing the world through a prism; the infected and the uninfected and all the while trying to posit myself away from this group I’d found myself in – I didn’t fit the profile, wasn’t (madly) over weight, didn’t drink (much), didn’t smoke… so why, why had I got myself into this mess and why did I still think deep down that it was something that I had done to myself…
As I rolled up my sleeve for my first lot of chemo, I heard, ‘good job you don’t have children’ from one nurse, as if the situation would be all the more ‘tragic’ if I had; as if I’m meant to think myself lucky for never having had children, the crassness not even registering with her that that’s now an impossibility with chemo making me infertile… Fast forward to chemo number five, collapsed veins and seven failed attempts to cannulate me and any kindly reassurance has given way to irritation and condescension ‘your veins just aren’t playing today are they missus’… stabbing at another vein, oblivious to the pain and big fat tears that are streaming down my face…
And then, before you know it, you’re shot out the other end… body a nuclear wasteland where I’m told nothing nasty can grow at least not for a year or two… and then let’s see what happens… as if they sit back after blasting you to bits and cross their fingers really tightly hoping it’s done the trick…and so far it seems to have done (fingers crossed still really tightly).
But let’s be clear. For all the war analogies, there’s no battle to be fought here, there are no heroes present and there are certainly no angels at the hospital… there are just people getting on, doing a job, some better than others… just like there are people getting on with having cancer… not fighting it, just living with each tired moment and seeing what it brings, good news or bad, it’s just a lottery and this is where I’m at four years on. I am in that waiting period again, waiting for results… waiting to see what my body is doing in this post nuclear state… hoping it’s found a way to replicate its cells in an orderly fashion and not go renegade… and to that end I’ve tried my best to help it along. My kitchen resembles a herbal food store and I realize how very lucky I am to be able to afford to buy the green power drinks and supplements I feel I need to give my body the best chance. I’ve moved from the early days of no dairy, no sugar, no this no that, to moderation… to sensible eating really, lots of fresh (organic if affordable) vegetables, fish, chicken, salads, filtered water… and limit the things I just know don’t agree with me (so little sugar, limited diary, very limited red meat and no processed or microwaved ready meals). And my relationship with my body has changed. I seem to have moved from seeing it as this massively imperfect, sometimes slobby flatmate that I can’t live, can’t live without, something that’s always just there, neither dynamic nor offensive (well sometimes)… to now seeing it as something I have a symbiotic relationship with… like caring for and nurturing a plant that feeds me… listening to how it feels, trying to do things I know will make it smile… and that’s been a revelation. Like so may things have been a revelation. From the way we all play our part in this ‘cancer industry’; those brave, pink ladies doing their bit on their ‘slut walks’, to the docs knowingly over prescribing meds that may well leave you with a chronic heart condition (whilst knowingly admitting the pharmaceuticals have no interest in testing drugs over shorter periods of time and hey if they leave you with a heart condition, well there’s always another pill to fix that)… I’ve felt jaded and bamboozled, confused and dumbstruck by the amount of conflicting information there is out there… the best you can do is weigh it all up, make your own mind up, ask questions, don’t be afraid to keep asking until you understand as much as they do at least (which sometimes worryingly feels like it isn’t much at all)… though I love my oncologist for his honesty (and patience!).
One mile to home… and so this is where I’m at. Hoping for more good news, knowing that if I get it, I’m one of the lucky ones, not one of the ones who valiantly fought it and won… Those that find their cells don’t behave are no less valiant, they haven’t lost a battle, they haven’t let themselves down. And this is where I think the feelings of shame come from. Our language and reactions to cancer is so steeped in victim/sufferer winner/loser analogies, it’s no wonder if you feel you’re on the losing side of life, you start to wonder where you went wrong. I now know I didn’t go wrong. I just got unlucky. But even seeing yourself as ‘unlucky’ can kickstart so many false notions. These things just happen I guess but they happen when certain conditions are present, this much I have learned… best we can all do is not see ourselves as outside of this and view those with cancer with pity… cancer is on the increase…. the profile of the overweight drinker/smoker is not helpful, there are many, many things that depress our immune systems and make them vulnerable to cell damage and cancer (for my part I’ve felt emotional stress, processed foods, lack of sleep, cellular dehydration all potentially played a part in creating the perfect storm conditions)… my advice would be balance – work but don’t over work, laugh a lot, have quiet times, offload as much stress as you can and be honest with yourself about how stressed or how tired you might be feeling, take holidays and if you can’t, just take time out regularly to do things you love, drink booze now and again (pref red wine – in moderation) and drink lots of filtered, preferably alkaline water… oh and eat your greens… all good sensible advice that your mother probably taught you.
To anyone who’s just got the news and is just starting out on all of this, know that like everything, the bad days will pass and good days will come again…and though cancer has no real upsides, you definitely feel the good days so much more acutely… it’s living in cancer’s shadow that I feel takes some mastering.