Well I went for routine breast screening, I was actually called, I was on holiday in Canada. I got home and I’d had my 50th birthday on holiday and there was an invitation for screening. So I went for screening and really didn’t think anything about it;

Working in screening anyway, you tend not to think too much about it. And then I got a letter to go to the assessment clinic. I didn’t read it; I didn’t read any of the leaflets. I had this attitude that it would be something wrong with the film and they’d just need to take more mammograms and so, I think I read the leaflets the day that I went for the assessment, realised that perhaps it wasn’t quite just going back for a repeat mammogram so went for assessment.

And went back to the assessment clinic, got the results on the Thursday afternoon. They’d already made an appointment with the surgeon for the next day so although it was slow to start with, I actually got, you know, things moving quite quickly;

And I went to see the surgeon on the Friday, after being told that it was malignant. His view at the time was that it was a relatively small lesion, unlikely to have spread but that he was going to do a wide local excision.

The longer that I was there the more I started to think ‘Right, theres something here. So when I went, they called me into the examination room, they showed me the first slide and they referred to it as ‘suspicious tissue. They didn’t talk about a lump, they said it was suspicious tissue and ‘had I noticed anything?’ And I said that there was nothing to notice, there was nothing there.

And they brought me into another room and that’s where the tears started because this other room had beautiful furnishings, lovely soft armchairs, a box of tissues in front of me and I thought, ‘Oh God yes this is serious. And they asked me had I anybody with me and I said ‘No but my husband is coming to collect me. So they – almost three hours had passed by this stage and they had booked me into hospital and they went outside to see if my husband was sitting outside. So he was outside waiting and as soon as he saw her coming towards him he panicked and he thought ‘Theres something wrong. So he came in and we were told ‘You’re booked in for surgery’;

I went in and the surgeon spoke to me and told me that I had a malignant tumour. And he got me up on the couch to examine me, and of course the first place he touched was, obviously where the lump was, but it was also where they had done the biopsy and I said it was very painful. And he said, ‘Oh right, that’s the only reason?’ and I said, ‘Yes’ that was the only reason and he then sat me down beside him and he said that I would be admitted to the hospital the following, this was a Tuesday, I would be admitted the following Tuesday;

He would do, he called it a partial mastectomy and they would take some lymph nodes out at the same time.

What prompted me was the fact that this Centre Manager, that the Manager of the centre, the business centre, where we had our administration offices and some of our training offices, was actually diagnosed with breast cancer and she was a year older than I was;

It was because [the Centre Manager] had actually been diagnosed with breast cancer. I think adding the whole thing – and I was coming up to fifty – and adding the whole thing together I just thought ‘I think I’ll treat myself to one for my birthday.

So they phoned me and they said that they – which was unusual but because of the circumstances – they told me that they’d found something a bit suspicious on the mammogram and they thought I should go in and have a stereotactic test, a needle test where they take tissue from the area affected and check it out;

So about a week later I actually went in and again I paid for this privately – I don’t have private health care, it’s just that I wanted to get it over with quickly. So I went in and had the stereotactic test, which was absolutely fine. I never felt a thing. So even though I was nervous going in, I had the ultrasound as well, I really was not in any sort of pain whatsoever, I never felt anything. They were extremely good, they gave me lots of local anaesthetic, not a thing.

The results came through the following week. And they came back as positive and I went in to see the Radiologist and he told me that it was grade five B, that it was an aggressive invasive cancer. But that it was only about sixteen millimetres in diameter and it was about four centimetres in my left breast. So I actually wouldn’t have felt it at all, it was just there;

We were about eighteen months since a two-yearly mammogram, and I read an appeal for volunteers for a thing called the Ibis Project, which wanted to test the effects of tamoxifen, so I volunteered for this. I went down to [the hospital], and before they actually start you on the project, they give you a mammogram, just in case theres anything there.

Within a week I’d had a needle biopsy, which is a thoroughly unpleasant experience that I wouldn’t recommend to anybody, but necessary, and the result of that was that it was a cancerous lump. A very small one, and not palpable by hand, so I really am extremely grateful to that mammogram, because it would have been another few months, possibly six months, before I was due for my next regular mammogram. These things can come so quickly in between;

What happened next? Oh then, of course, you get to the discussion as to what you are going to do, are you going to go for a lumpectomy, followed by, probably chemo or radio, or are you going to go for a complete mastectomy;

I was in America on an extended visit and I had another little problem and went to my mother’s gynaecologist to sort that out. And the doctor had said that he had a very fixed rule that women who were thirty-five or older had to have a mammogram with him or he wouldn’t treat them for anything at all. And being there and having an annoying problem I said fine, I’ll take the mammogram. But I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. I wasn’t even forty years old. So I had the mammogram.

Were you there on holiday, did you decide to stay longer?

No. The kids, when they were that age, had quite long holidays and I’d been here, I’ve been here now for sixteen years so I was here quite permanently. I was fully embedded in the English medical system having everything done here. I had just gone back to America for a holiday to visit my mother and my sister and I would never have had a mammogram here because I was nowhere near fifty. As far as I knew I wasn’t at risk at all. I had had my medical exam in October. Nothing had been found. There was no palpable lump. You could not feel anything;

The only reason I had the mammogram was because this particular doctor had seen so many breast cancers with young women that he had his own rule about it, and I had this niggly little problem that I desperately wanted sorted out and I thought if it meant taking a mammogram to get a medication for it I was going to be very happy to do that. It’s the only reason I had the mammogram because I just didn’t think that somebody my age with no history of cancer in the family had any reason to do it;

Came back to England. Didn’t think anything of it, just thought it was a really ridiculous thing to do and then I received a call from America that they had found something that was peculiar on the mammogram. It was probably nothing. It was a calcification and that these usually turned out to be nothing but that they felt quite strongly that it should be looked at by a breast surgeon. So I, it never even occurred to me that this could be real. I thought it was a mistake and absurd. I had no idea that women my age actually got breast cancer and if they did I thought it was entirely because of a genetic predisposition to it;

I then went to a breast surgeon expecting him to look at the mammogram and laugh and say don’t be absurd, you’re fine. Go away. And in fact that didn’t happen. He looked at it and said, you know, I think you need to have a biopsy, it will be a small surgery and that was a complete surprise. But I still, I don’t think it still hit me that this was a true possibility;

We were supposed to go back three or four days later for the results of the biopsy and I fully expected it to be absolutely nothing. Instead he called my mother and told her that it was cancer and my poor mother was on her own completely when she found out and she had to come and meet me somewhere;

We had an appointment to meet up for lunch and during the course of lunch she just burst into tears and said ‘You know the doctors called and it’s cancer’ which was to me completely, completely unthinkable. It just didn’t seem a possibility.

So then I was told that that they’d got rid of the cancer, everything was fine, to go away and come back in 6 months for another test. So I went back in 6 months and they did me another mammogram and I was on my own again this time because I just thought, oh this is routine. But, to cut a long story short, this, a second mammogram, revealed another cancer so I had to, I was told that I had to have a mastectomy [of my left breast];

He [surgeon] started giving me an examination and he found a lump under my right arm so I thought, this is it. Now, I’ve got secondary breast cancer and it’s come back into the right breast and I’m definitely going to die. And I’m going to have harsh treatment, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this. It was just the most awful time in my life;

And he came and sat beside the bed and he told me that it was a Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and I thought, well, what does that mean? What does he mean? Fortunately, my husband was with me and he said, ‘well, surely that’s good news because that means that it’s primary cancer. It’s not a secondary, it’s a different cancer?’ And the surgeon agreed, yes that was the case. It hadn’t been a secondary breast cancer; it was a Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and, again, I would just have to have some, some small treatments and I would be fine;