What made it possible for me to decide on surgery was a wonderful meeting with the doctor I have now.Over many outpatient visits we talked about the tests and my condition, of course — but he also listened, genuinely, to the goals and dreams and things I wanted to do with my life.
“Let’s put first whatever feels like the benefit to you, in the life you are living now.”
Those words gave me the push I needed.
He told me he had decided while still at school that he would become a breast surgeon,
and true to that, he stayed close to the body and the heart a woman holds most dear, right through from the operation to the care of the scar afterwards. I am glad, now, to have met him.
My cancer treatment starts from here. I have been given the hope of going on side by side with him.
You hear a lot about the importance of a second opinion, but what I came to feel matters most is not the treatment plan alone: it is trust between two people, and how it feels.
I already had a respiratory condition — non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection with bronchiectasis — and had moved from a small hospital to a large one, so I simply carried on into the same hospital’s breast clinic.
The first doctor I met there naturally put treatment first, and the tests moved forward on the assumption of surgery.
From the start I had set my own goal: this was not the time to begin standard treatment. Why won’t you have the operation? Surgery, above everything else. Just ultrasound scans and monitoring, and being told it would be fine — and I ended up spending months where even going to the hospital felt heavy.
About six months in, I reported pain in my chest.
“That is nothing to do with the cancer, it is intercostal neuralgia,” he said, and another six months went by.
I was told to have the neuralgia seen at an orthopaedic clinic, so I went to the one near me — and was sent away, told that while I was under cancer treatment I should be seen by the specialists. They would not even take an X-ray.
By then, along with the pain, a dimple had appeared on my breast, and there was a large hard lump under my fingers, and the ribs were pushing out unevenly enough to see from the front.
Maybe there really is nothing for it but surgery — and the moment I told that doctor I would fix a date,
“Let’s hope the pain goes once you’ve had it done.” I said, wait a moment, you have been telling me all this time that the pain was intercostal neuralgia. It should be in the notes. As if shrugging off responsibility, he said,
“Talk to the nurse now,” and disappeared behind the curtain.
So I poured it all out to the nurse, in tears,
and from that day: no, I cannot do this. I cannot put myself in this man’s hands.
Everything that had felt wrong up to then hardened at once into certainty, and I stopped going to the hospital.
For the next three months I was like a fish returned to water, doing what I wanted to do, not thinking about the cancer at all. People would say “are you sure you’re all right?” and I would think, oh yes, that’s right, I have cancer.
About three months on, the hospital rang. It was the nurse.
“How are you? I found your notes left untouched with the pre-operative tests cancelled, and I was worried. We do not abandon our patients.”
She rang several times, and we talked.
And then: “I have found you another doctor. Please think of it as one more chance and come in.”
In a big hospital full of patients, someone would go this far for me. Warmth and hope came back into me, and the doctor I met when I went in after three months away is the one I have now.
From there, the tests began again.
Until then it had only been ultrasound; now, with CT and MRI, he went after the cause of the chest pain from the beginning.
This piece is not meant to condemn the judgement or the character of the doctor I parted from. I can see now that all of it was necessary, and I am grateful for it.
Cancer, with a smile is not an illness diary.
If my experience puts a smile on even one person’s face, or is of some use, that is enough for me.
Today is Christmas 2023, and I was discharged in time to be home for it. Inside the hospital there was a beautiful Christmas tree, and a concert in the chapel that I got to enjoy.
Thank you for reading to the end.
What the chest pain turned out to be, after a year and three months without treatment —
continued in the next piece.
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