A year ago today I found a small firm lump in my armpit, in direct line with a squishier one much lower down on my ribs at the bottom of my breast.
October 2nd 2014 my calendar reads, FOUND IT. The next day reads, Doc blah so what.
Because I’d got a false positive result from my first breast screening I had been given two mammograms and an ultrasound scan in April 2014, only 5 months previously. I was told then that the area of concern was fine, just overlapping breast tissue on the first screening scan. This was where I now had the lower lump.
In October, although my reluctant GP did refer me to the breast clinic in hospital I was sent away because neither the doctor nor I could find the lump on my ribs (I was mortified) and the doctor pointed at my armpit and said, “That’s a reactive lymph node.” He spent longer lecturing me about Angelina Jolie causing endless anxious women to clog up his clinic than he did examining me and no scans were done.
In December while on the phone to my GP I asked how long I should leave this reactive lymph node in my armpit to go away because it was still very evident. “Leave it six weeks, no, 12 weeks. Sometimes they never go away.”
I went back to another GP about 8 weeks later and got referred back to the same breast clinic. The first thing I said to the nurse and doctor was, “Look.” “Can you see these two lumps under my skin?” “Yes.” Finally.
That day I ended up having 5 core biopsies from a radiographer who said, “That definitely doesn’t look like a reactive lymph node.”
It wasn’t until February 23rd 2015 that my calendar reads, Bad day.
The firm lump in my armpit WAS cancer, how about that, eh? The squishy one was a group of cysts. The doctor told me that the first lump in my armpit I’d come in about was in a different place. No it wasn’t. He never touched my armpit and I couldn’t see where he was pointing.
All this carry-on was before the cancer removal process even started which was no less traumatic than trying to get it diagnosed. It’s absolutely flabbergasting that the health system designed to help people be well is grinding them down into used-up splats of their former selves, whilst still proclaiming success.
This shouldn’t be happening to anyone. Yet today the news channels inform us that GPs are being paid NOT to refer people for cancer tests. Read it and weep.
So here I am, one year after picking up my own cancer but my medical records say otherwise. I’m still here but what the hell has happened to me? The whole time I was made to feel like a paranoid, neurotic, hysterical, premenopausal fool. “We reassured her, we reassured her.” all the letters said.
I still have absolutely no idea how you can have two mammograms that show unaffected tissue in the exact area where a grade 1 invasive cancer of 6mm appears 5 months later (except it wasn’t diagnosed till 10 months later.) There was DCIS there they said after my surgery in April, so that evaded all the mammograms too. I guess.
I was kind of fooled by the softer cyst lump into thinking the doctors were right and the only way I realised that they could be wrong about the lump in my armpit was that when I searched online, “What does breast cancer feel like?” it said FIRM and sort of IRREGULAR or KNOBBLY and ATTACHED to underlying tissue. I could feel all this even in such a tiny lump no bigger than a petit pois. Seems like I was the only person in my horrid story who’d ever looked it up!