A big week: part two – Mum

I asked Mum last week whether she minded me writing about her as a few weeks ago, she was keen to keep things quiet until she had had a chance to speak to everyone in the family.  Mum has actually been going through some health problems too.  Several weeks ago now she went for a mammogram as she thought there was a lump in her left breast.  Unfortunately, they told her that she didn’t have a lump where she thought, but that there was a problem with her other breast.  After a series of diagnostics, they took her in for surgery a few weeks ago and removed the problem area in a lumpectomy operation.  The tests on the lump showed that there were two areas of DCIS (http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page=3300) which is a pre-cancerous cell type.  Whilst harmless, if left to develop it will become a harmful cancer.   As there was more than one spot of DCIS, they have recommended Mum has a mastectomy to be sure it won’t return in a more aggressive form. 

Whilst Mum was staying last week, Dad rang to say that her surgery date had come through and we were all shocked to hear that it was set for today so she’s had very little notice.  I had a call from Mum last night and she and Dad had been in the hospital all day while they got her prepared for her operation, but they were out for dinner in Dundee having Mum’s last meal before she was nil by mouth.  (Ironically they had found a restaurant advertising pre-theatre meals!).  She will now be in surgery for most of today as her operation is very long.  She is having a reconstruction straight away, but rather than using an implant like mine, they are going to use tissue from her stomach to reconstruct. 

She’ll then be in hospital for about a week and once she’s home will need to rest for several more weeks.  Mum and Dad are both being really calm about it but we are all sending our love and best wishes.

The rest of the diagnosis: Part one

A few of you have by now spotted that I have new nocturnal habits.  I’m not an insomniac – it isn’t worry or anxiety keeping me up at night (although they occasionally have a tendency to surface when I am up in the night – but mostly not).  It’s quite simple really – I’m managing my pain with ibuprofen and paracetamol and each of these only work for about 4 hours, so at around 3 or 4am I always wake up in a lot of pain, pop a tablet and have to hang in there until it starts working.  Rather than wake Kim up I make a camomile tea, and do something productive whilst I wait.

So, you’ve heard about the eye cancer – that diagnosis was happening completely separately from the rest of it initially, and they got  tied together in recent weeks.  I have always found the diagnosis process one of the most stressful bits.  It’s not only 3 times I’ve been through it now – there have been several false alarms along the way too so each time you need to try and keep calm and hope you’ve got another false alarm on your hands.

This time around, I noticed what I thought was a lump whilst checking my breasts in the middle of the night towards the end of January.  It was just after I’d left my last job and just before our skiing holiday.  I called my consultant’s secretary on Monday morning and asked for an appointment and she set me up with one for the same evening.

I met Kim up at the hospital after he finished work and we went in for what has become a regular routine now.  ‘I think I have another lump’.  ‘Well let’s take a look’.  Cue a good poke and prod around my armpits and breasts and a look on the ultrasound.  He said that he didn’t think the lump I had found was anything to worry about – no signs of abnormality, but he was a little worried about an area of my breast that appeared thicker and showed me on the ultrasound where it was a little rougher than the rest of the tissue.   He said he’d take a biopsy to be sure.  I have had several of these now – a local anaesthetic is applied and then a really big needle is ‘staple-gunned’ in really quickly to extract tissue.  Usually two or three samples are taken.  They then get sent off to pathology lab for analysis.

Following this visit, the trick was to put it out of our minds until the results came in.  To be honest, I blocked it almost completely – the reality of it being cancer was just too crazy to think about- I was just about to start a new job, I had recently moved in with my wonderful boyfriend and the big ‘C’ was not going to ruin everything for me again.  So we went off skiing and forgot about everything.  On the first day back however, of course the anxiety kicked in again – when would I hear something?  I was soon to find out.

I started my new job on the Monday.  I met my boss and some of my new team and was immediately plunged into work as there was a big redundancy announcement to plan for and it was all hands on deck.  I got a call about 3.30 in the afternoon from my consultant’s secretary asking me to go in for an appointment that evening.  I knew what it meant and my heart sunk.  I called Kim and asked him to meet me at home and drive me to the appointment despite the fact he was working in Leicester.  After the previous time I was told the bad news and had to drive myself home I was not going to do that again.  Besides, there was thick snow still coming down and he was a much more confident driver in the winter weather.

I got myself home and called my new boss, who at this point had no idea about any of my previous history – I’d been saving that story for our first one-to-one so that I could explain the occasional appointment I expected to need off – not because I wanted him to worry about anything more serious than that.  Here I was however, end of day one, calling to explain that I was on the way to an appointment where I expected some bad news and that I also needed to go to hospital at lunchtime the following day for tests on my eye.  Luckily, I do have a pretty amazing boss and he reacted exactly as you would have hoped for.

So, at the hospital Mr B explained that the biopsy had shown cancer.   He said it seemed to be DCIS (in situ) cancer – yay- the best kind to have (which we now know isn’t true).   If you get breast cancer – this is the kind to get.  It is early stage and means the cancer has been contained within the breast ducts and has not started to spread out at all – therefore it can’t do any real damage.  He said it was a new primary cancer, not a spread of the previous one, which was of course very unusual.  Therefore, it was probable that the next steps would be:

• CT scan
• a sentinel node biopsy to check for spread to lymph nodes
• A mastectomy (with immediate reconstruction if it was DCIS, or with radiotherapy, then reconstruction if not).

Now, we stayed relatively calm through all this.  Probably because I have done all of these things before, and as hard as the mastectomy would be, I knew that 8 weeks or so out of my life was something I could handle and then I would be right as rain again.  Unfortunately all that was about to change once the scan results came through. 

More in part two!