A Tale of Two Titties

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month – still for a few more days. I am aware. Are you?

There’s no history of breast cancer in my family. That might be, of course, because many female members of my family didn’t live to an age when they might have developed it – thanks to rampaging Cossacks and assorted Nazis, but, for nearly the whole of February 1999, I believed I had it. I’d had cancer of the eye nine years before and I was sure it had caught up with me again. It went like this:

Thursday 28th January: Noticed a strange stain on my T-shirt, level with my right breast. Saw my GP straightaway, then later a consultant at the Cromwell Hospital (I will not apologize for going private: that specialist was seeing me after working all day in the NHS). Mixed messages: it’s absolutely nothing – probably a papilloma; you must have an ultrasound and a mammogram first thing tomorrow morning.

Friday 29th January: First mammogram. The most excruciating pain I had ever endured so far (and my pain threshold is very high). Mammograms save lives, but don’t let anyone tell you they’re painless: they’re not if you’ve got very small breasts and the machine doesn’t have much to squeeze; mine kept popping out and getting squashed in the wrong place. Of course, I misread the signs again (like, nine years earlier, when the person doing the ultrasound on my eye had suddenly stopped chatting): this time the young nurse went out of the room and came back with an older one; they told me some fib about lunch break. Yeah, right!

Saturday 30th January: First thing in the morning, the consultant announced they’d found multiple calcifications in my right breast and, according to the Marsden, it was most probably cancer, but, not to worry, he would remove those calcifications with a wire hook while I was having a mammogram and…. I heard the word “mammogram” and said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just cut it off?” “Erm, yes, of course, but there’s no need…” I stopped listening after that.

A little later, after he’d explained – and drawn on my breast – how he would cut me up, I left the tiny consulting room on my own. My partner was asked to stay behind on some pretext and was told that, in fact, they believed I had cancer in the other breast as well. I managed to find out a few minutes later: my brain wasn’t working very well at that point, but I wasn’t that stupid!

Mr L. was going on holiday somewhere exotic so he wouldn’t be able to perform the mastectomies until the end of the month. Did I want someone else to do it? No. I think they probably expected me to change my mind in the meantime, but I didn’t. From the moment I knew there was something the matter with them, i.e. on the way to the GP’s surgery, two days previously, my breasts had become the enemy; things that might kill me and I didn’t want anything to do with them any longer; I could never feel the same about them; I didn’t want to be constantly afraid of them.

I spent three weeks on Valium, very calm and contented, planning my death. I had a double mastectomy on 26th February. Two days later, Mr L. turned up brandishing a sheet of paper: it was the histology report. It said there was no trace of cancer anywhere. They call it a false positive. I call it a miracle.

I have never regretted my decision to have mastectomies. Sure, it would have been nice if I hadn’t had all those lymph nodes removed from both armpits, which makes me vulnerable to lymphoedema at any time in the future, if I’m not careful, but apart from that, no, no regrets.

I saw a documentary recently about Marsha Hunt, who's had breast cancer. She’s amazingly resilient, but she was criticized for being so relentlessly upbeat. They said other women might feel guilty for not being so strong and so optimistic. There’s some truth in that. People go on about “battle” and “fight”. Yes, you’re fighting a disease. Yes, you’re fighting for your life, but there is no shame in not being strong; there is no shame in giving up or losing that fight.

Anyway, I want to slap anyone who doesn’t advise women properly and clearly; anyone who tells women what they want to hear rather than the truth. How many women have died because they weren’t told, “If you only have a lumpectomy, the cancer will probably come back and you will have to have a mastectomy anyway, but by then the cancer will be more advanced and therefore more difficult to eradicate.”?

And what’s with reconstruction? It so often leads to complications. You’ve got cancer; why would you want to subject yourself to more – unnecessary – operations? I just can’t understand it. I won’t even say what I think of women who take the opportunity to increase their bust size.

By the time cancer is diagnosed, your body has to get rid of one billion cancerous cells. If, g-d forbid, it happens to you, don’t say, “I’d rather die!” That’s what you’re saying if you’re not doing your utmost to eradicate the cancer from your body – with the most radical means you have at your disposal.

[I owe the title of this post to the most hilarious show on BBC Radio 4: I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. I hope it doesn't offend anyone.]