Angelina Jolie, Breast Lumps and the Big C

I’ve never been that fussed about Angelina Jolie as an actress, but I like how she uses her profile in positive ways. Her work with the UN has been admirable and her choice to publicly announce her mastectomy was inspired. I’m only sorry she was put in that position. To hear those statistics, 87% chance of developing the same breast cancer which killed her mother, must have been terrifying. What she chose to do in having a double mastectomy, proved what a great mum she is. She has put her children first and made her only priority being around to take care of them and see them grow up.

The huge amount of media coverage has shot back into my mind’s eye some dark memories I have from a few years ago. I remember clearly the minute I found a lump in my left breast. It was a Saturday tea time in August 2009 and I was bending down searching through my many pairs of shoes looking for particular ones and reached round to scratch under my arm. You know that feeling when you get a good itch and you have to keep scratching it? So I was doing that around my lower armpit for a few seconds when something felt a bit weird. I traced my fingers over the area and there it was. I said aloud, ‘typical’.

I’ve had a lot of illnesses in my life, I have a black humour about it all, but the second I felt that lump I didn’t feel like looking on the bright side, of reaching for the positive, most likely scenario. I felt sick to my stomach, even if it was most likely perfectly innocent, I was engulfed in a fear and dread I’ve never experienced before.

The next day I’d committed to attending possibly the worst event I could have that day. I was at The Race for Life to support my friend running in memory of a loved one she had lost to the Big C. Everywhere I looked people were talking about the killer disease, the consequences of it, the emotions, the empowering songs and slogans designed to make people feel better about having it or having lost someone to it. I couldn’t say anything to anyone but it was a God awful day trying to be positive and upbeat when I felt like I was holding down vomit.

I went to see my GP the next day. I lay there with my arms above my head as she poked and prodded this funny little lump to the side of my left breast. It was sore and humiliating, but was a piece of cake compared to what was coming round the corner. I went into work after being told to expect an appointment with the breast clinic at the local hospital. The doctor said the odds were on my side, with my history of cysts (another fun journey I went on) it was probably one of those. But that’s the funny thing about finding a lump; your head never accepts the best case scenario, the likelihood of statistics. Time stops and life isn’t normal until you find out exactly what it is, until you get a definitive answer to the nagging question.

I called the hospital every day in a daze, hoping for a cancellation. I was making mistakes at work, late for things, wearing flat shoes (at that time in my life heels were standard) and wading through life at half speed. I was acting like an entirely different person and I needed this limbo to be over one way or another.

Eventually after a few weeks my perseverance paid off and I found myself lying on a bed topless with cold gel smeared all over my underarm, exposed, humiliated and so alone. After my ultrasound I was taken to get a mammogram which is essentially a tool of torture where my breast was squeezed in between two cold metal plates. I remember the searing external pain being a good representation of the jumbled wire of thoughts going through my head.

She sent me home for more time to sit on the sofa and stare at the wall. I got a call the next day to come in for a biopsy. I just wanted to run away, to forget about all of it. I couldn’t believe this was my lot in life, a twenty something brought to her knees once again by a vicious illness with no respect for my plans.

I had decided to tell my family, I felt bad about worrying them, but from a selfish point of view I couldn’t cope with the stress and worry on my own. I didn’t have a boyfriend, and even though they were all hundreds of miles away, I needed to lean on them to get me through it. I thank god for them every day.

I think they call it expiration, the biopsy. Whatever it was, it was searing pain, like someone stabbing me with a branding iron. They said I had anaesthetic but I don’t believe them. She said to me when it was over and I had tears streaming down my face, don’t worry we’ll get the results to you in a week. At that point I just couldn’t take any more, I felt like a little girl, I was terrified and I had no one around me to look after me, to stroke my hair, to tell me everything was going to be ok. What if this was it? What if this was the ultimate in bad news? I wasn’t even sure I had been in love let alone had a chance to do all the other things I wanted to do. My sister had only recently lost her dad, my brother his best friend. I was their big sister, I couldn’t do this to them too.

The worse thing at a time like this is to think too much, so thankfully work got really busy that week and by sheer coincidence my auntie and little cousin were down for the weekend I was due to get my results. I didn’t want my cousin anywhere the hospital, my auntie was insistent she be there, so we compromised and they stayed in the coffee shop a street away. I remember the frozen look of fear on her face. Despite her saying lots of upbeat things, her eyes didn’t back her up.

I walked to my appointment with feet like lead but somehow made it to the waiting room, which was my own special kind of hell. There were a few women nervously clutching at their boyfriends and a few more with wigs and headscarves telling tales about their treatment in loud animated voices. I felt sick to the stomach and one woman just got up and ran out of the room. When they called my name I couldn’t get up, the receptionist had to point me out to the nurse as I sat there fighting back tears. The nurse came over, helped me up and took me by the arm into the consultant’s room. This must happen a lot, I thought.

To her credit the consultant knew pleasantries were unnecessary. Within three seconds she had uttered the word benign; it rhymes with fine I thought. I burst out crying and I hugged her barely listening to the explanation of me being a “cysty person”. I ran out the room still crying hysterically, those poor women in the waiting room would never know if it was good or bad news I was running from.

I called my mum and brother immediately and I swear the sun instantly appeared just for me. I ran to my auntie shouting ‘its fine, its fine’. The relief on her face told me what I’d never doubted, as a family, we do everything together, and we feel everything together. I am incredibly lucky.

That night we went to see Hairspray, the most life affirming, upbeat extravaganza on stage. As the canons shot rainbow confetti at the end it felt like it was all for me! I’ve never known such relief and release as I did that night. To have been wound like a spring since that Saturday tea time was excruciating and the thought of it ending up any different, as it does for so many women, is not something I can handle. It was the most terrifying time of my life, but taught me two things, to be smart and check your breasts regularly. If you catch it early, the odds are much better. It also taught me how lucky we are to have the NHS. Those Drs, Nurses, Consultants, technicians and receptionists were amazing, and between them and my family I’d never have got through it.

So in honour of Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy, in honour of everyone racing in this year’s Race for Life (http://raceforlife.cancerresearchuk.org/index.html) and in honour of yourself, please please please check your breasts!