But I have thought, because I’d been told that my risk of developing DCIS in the other breast is now greater than if I hadn’t had it at all, I think three times greater, I have thought – although I think I would go for screening of the other breast – if they tell me I’ve got DCIS, now I’ve understood the condition a bit more, now that I’ve demonstrated to myself that to delay six months didn’t matter if it still wasn’t invasive, the same could be true. And I also have a starting point because I know that that breast, when that breast was clear, because my other breast, it was the first mammogram, I had no idea how long that DCIS had been there. Well I will know this time;

So it would be my intention, unless there was very strong, there had been further research and evidence to the contrary, but if they find DCIS this time I will be able to say “Well I’ll wait and well see or well perhaps go for a second mammogram in a couple of years and well see if things have changed much, because its likely to be very slow moving and I could afford to wait.” And I suppose I’ve just proved to myself that I could live with the uncertainty of that too because if I became too troubled by it, it would have to, I would have to reconsider. I think that would be my hope;

But I think now I would make that choice for the other breast but I wouldn’t necessarily go down the path of instant surgery, in fact I’m sure I’d wait and see whether a new treatment by then had been developed or whether my risk was very small;

I went for my first mammogram, I was called for my first mammogram and I must say, looking back, I was incredibly naive about it. I went really out of curiosity because I’d reached the age where I knew you had screening, you had mammograms and we had talked about them and I ended up in it innocently because I really went to find out what it was like because I felt so certain that I didn’t have any form of breast cancer;

I didn’t feel myself to have any of the risk factors that I knew about at that stage. I’m quite small so I knew that overweight people were slightly more at risk, theres no family history. I had breast-fed my children and all these things I thought put me out of the risk category. And because I didn’t feel myself to have risk factors I thought I was safe from breast cancer and I realise now that was an absurd assumption. But I somehow thought that if you weren’t at risk you were safe. So I only went out of curiosity, I didn’t really go because I had considered I would be affected. And as a result I don’t think I read the screening literature particularly carefully. I just went along.

While I’d been on holiday they’d obviously recalled me for a check and again I just assumed that was a mistake. So they offered me another appointment and in fact I rang them up and got a sooner one because I thought well maybe it’s better to know sooner rather than later. But that was still, I still didn’t really believe it was anything more than a problem with the x-ray or whatever.

I thought well this is just a mistake, there is, there has been some glitch with the process. Again it wasn’t going to be breast cancer. In fact I was joking with them because I have very small breasts and I just kept saying “Well they couldn’t find anything on the mammogram, that’s what it was, there wasn’t a breast there, I’m too small.”

So by then I was worried and you know I’d rung my husband and he had quickly looked on the Internet because they’d mentioned the word micro-calcification and they’d said that that could mean benign, it could be fine. But he looked up a site, he looked up some sort of site describing it and he came home more worried than I was. I was slightly rattled but he had seen that micro-calcification often did indicate a presence of cancer cells. So it’s a, I don’t know whether the [screening] literature really did prepare me very well. Thinking back I don’t think it did but I also don’t think I had the eyes to see it at the time because I felt it just wouldn’t apply to me;

The day that we received the results I was told that I had DCIS and they explained very briefly what it was;