Hi grannyp I am saddened to hear of your continued anxiety, having been cheered to see you rally and steel your resolve and positivity following your earliest posts. I SO understand where you are coming from with your frustration at this awful waiting. I have been there. My delays started right from the word go with an excruciatingly tardy referral and diagnosis process. I was reading fulsome reports on this forum of timely pathways and faultlessly slick procedures whilst sitting at home waiting, quietly despairing and chewing my own arm off to the elbow. I waited almost ten weeks from referral to surgery. And, as you know, that is ten long weeks without treatment visualising the worst scenario. Like you, I then waited almost three weeks for results, where I learned that the SLNB had been positive. The pre-op ultrasound had sugggested otherwise. There followed another two months before further surgery for a full axillary lymph node clearance. Then COVID stepped in to further complicate the process. I had my one and only meeting with an oncologist on the day that Lockdown was announced, a surreal ‘Mary Celeste’ encounter when pandemic-modified treatment options were lobbed at me from a suitable distance. I have found checking the Nice guidelines to be a depressing and dispiriting process. I know that I have slipped through the net on several occasions but I can do nothing about it now. I am now on the other side of all that so I choose to let it go and move on from here. I have accepted that the system is not always perfect, that some receive more timely treatment than others (it shouldn’t be so, but it is), that cancer services are struggling in a pandemic dominated arena, that guidelines are just that - not hard and fast cut-off points that signal definite triumph or disaster, and that everyone is doing their best in an impossibly difficult situation. I’m probably not sounding very positive. But positivity is what I want to give you. I want to give you a galvanising hug of solidarity and promise that you will soon be looking back on this unbearable period of anxiety with a sense of acceptance and equilibrium, knowing that your team have been thorough, are doing their absolute best for you, and that your future treatment is reassuringly mapped out. Your positivity hasn’t done a runner. It is just lying low for a while. Do take heart from what Jaybro says. She always makes sense. Pat x
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