You get to see an awful lot
of hospital departments once they decide you have cancer, and it seems that
barely a day goes by without an appointment of some sort, or a phonecall, or a
letter arrives. In my case, from the outset, every single time I've had any
sort of dialogue whatsoever with the cancer specialists, there has been at
least a little bit more of the bad news. The size and shape and colour and rate
of growth and seriousness and treatment plan has just grown increasingly
concerning, and significantly more serious by the day. Today, I opened the
letter from my oncologist, and I know enough about reading between the lines of
medical letters to understand the implicit subtext of the words "I was
sorry to inform her of the histology...." to know that it was going to be
yet another difficult day.
Luckily I was wrong! Mid-afternoon the phone
rang. It was Lisa, the Breast Care Specialist Nurse from the hospital. Finally,
a bit of good news. On Friday I had both a body and a bone scan, to see if
either of the big city cancers in my breasts had started to build little
suburban village cancers anywhere else in my body. Like any other rapidly
developing community, all these little cancer cells need somewhere warm
and cosy to live to enable them to carry out their work effectively, and
although it wasn't actually voiced, the feeling loud and clear in the
consulting room at the hospital last week was that my cancer would probably
have started to go forth and multiply uninvited across whole swathes of my organs.
I know the statistics, and I knew my odds weren't great. Although it is true
that many women in that situation can survive for several years, if it had
started to spread already, the average survival rate is only 18 - 24
months.
The good news? Both scans seem to indicate that
it hasn't started spreading. My immune system has kicked in somehow and refused
to grant planning permission to those cancer cell town-planners. This doesn't
mean I'm out of the woods yet, and I still need more major surgery, chemotherapy,
radiotherapy and several years of pills to take, but it does mean that I might
not die quite soon. This morning I thought I'd never get my granny bus
pass, this evening I'm allowed to dream all those unfulfilled dreams and they
might actually happen. Winning Wimbledon, becoming a Prima Ballerina, writing a best seller
about how I did them both together, tonight anything is possible.
Please don't ask me how I'm feeling because it
simply isn't all black and white. Of course I'm relieved, but that is heavily
tempered with fear, both of the treatments ahead, and the worry that they may
have missed something.
It also doesn't mean that the cancer hasn't
started spreading yet, because any new cancer would have to be at least half a
centimetre to show up on the scans. However the idea is that if there are any
tiny little clumps of cancer cells, the chemo will send it packing. Such a
shame that ring doughnuts don't seem to work in quite the same way.
As far as the chemo is concerned, I'm started
to really get in a tizzy over it. It's the thought of those needles that just
has me in a flat-spin, heart-palpitations, hyperventilating, adrenaline-racing
panic. Apparently I'm in good company, because both Alice Cooper and Jackie
Chan share my thoughts about needles. Our phobia even has a name all of its own
- Trypanophobia - which at least indicates that I can't be the
only person who lies awake in sheer, unadulterated terror night after night
about it. I've been so brave and brazen about naming my fear since I've had
cancer, and I have to say, despite all my fears that the medics would laugh
like crazy and think I'm pathetic, they have actually been very supportive. On
Friday I was given a "happy pill" before the blood tests and
radioactive dye was injected, and that did help quite a lot. On Wednesday this
week, I'm seeing a specialist intravenous expert, who can talk through the
various options with me concerning intravenous access for the chemo. The only
problem is that all the options involve somehow puncturing a vein, something
any sensible person should avoid at all costs because how can that possibly
ever be good for you?
Back to my good news. Having
spent the last 8 weeks learning how to take bad news on the chin again and
again, and somehow trying to get my head around it, it's going to take a while
to actually believe that things might turn out OK after all. The one bit of
hope that I treasured in all of the bad news was that they might have decided
that I was such a hopeless case that all this vein puncturing nonsense was
going to be a waste of resources, and let me off scot free. I would then, of
course, have embraced every iota of the alternative cancer therapies and drunk
green tea and tumeric until I had had enough to swim my way out of trouble. Now,
with the chemo, I'll probably throw it up before it can do any good. That's if
they can catch me with those needles first. Yes it has been a good news day,
but I just don't want to tempt fate by celebrating like their really will be a
tomorrow, until I know for certain that there definitely will be thousands of
them.
