It was a very strange experience.

I felt as though I was sitting in the corner by the window, it was rather like an out of body experience, and when I came back, you know, I came back to reality, I kept trying to put myself back in the seat I was in but I kept going back to the window again.

I think everybody thought I was taking it very well, I was very controlled. And fortunately I had a friend with me again because at that point I switched off completely.

I heard, I’ve always heard that people seeing a doctor can switch off from bad news, I actually didn’t realise I’d done it but I’d had one sentence came out of him and I completely blanked.

The fact is I was so shocked because I wasn’t expecting it whatsoever that I didn’t do anything.

I just sat deadly still and I didn’t know what to do. It was awful because no one was there and then they went out the room and they went into the office and they left me on my own in that little room and that’s when I burst into tears.

That’s when, that’s when the reality hit me.

And you get all these things going through your mind you know. How long have I got? That was the first question you know. Is it terminal? Am I going to die, you know? What are my chances? You get all these thoughts.

I think everybody must, you know, it’s just, and you just, it was so much of a shock to me and I’m so young, I’d been so fit for so long you know. And I’m not the one in the family that’s the smoker.

I do drink at the weekend but I don’t drink excessively you know. I eat fairly healthily, I keep fit. So why me, what have I done, you know?

So I thought’ “Well I must’ve been a bit of a bad ‘un in my past life. “I must you know, I must’ve done something wrong.” And I just, I wanted someone to blame really. And it’s, you can’t find anybody because no ones given you it, you know.

Well here I am at nearly 74. Much wiser after the event as usual.

If you’d have asked me a fortnight ago to try and explain just how I felt I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m very angry at myself because I feel I should have known better.

I think if I reflect now back on that fortnight it’s, I suppose, a similar thing to a bereavement, where you’re going through all the normal things and yet you, as if you’re a whole differently.

I have been really cross at myself and then I think I got from that stage to disbelief where I felt if I’d just kept on pushing myself, just do the ordinary every day things, it would probably go away anyway.

I was even stupid enough to put my hand and think maybe it’s gone. Well you know very well it hasn’t, but you do it.

I’m relieved now that I’ve got to the stage where I know exactly what is happening. I know that this is only the first stage. I’m quite confident in my mind that although there are so many people with it, you’re not on your own.

But I’m quite confident that everything that can be done will be done for me, and that is really reassuring.

I was just in a daze the whole time.

I was quite bottled up at the time. I didn’t talk to people about my feelings. I coped. And everybody thought I was coping fine, which I was on the surface but underneath I was in agony.

And I was lying awake in the nights thinking I would not see my children grow up, because the daughter who’d I’d just been weaning was, shed been born in 1981 so she was just over one year old when I found the lump. And my son was two-and-a-half coming up to three when I was having the treatment.

And when I say I bottled everything up, I bottled up my feelings. I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t talk to people about how upset I was. I didn’t even tell my husband much, that I was lying awake in the night.

I was frightened that my children would lose their mother at an age when they wouldn’t remember me. And having been on the receiving end of losing a parent I didn’t want that for them.

And peoples reactions to it were, cancer sort of “Ughhh!”, you know.

They don’t like, I mean a lot of people just don’t like mentioning the word.

Oh, I say, the oncologist didn’t. And, sometimes I felt some people avoided me because they didn’t know what to say. So that was, that was hard to bear really I think.

I mean some people were great but some people, and I mean it wasn’t that people didn’t want to help, they just didn’t know what to say. And so they just avoided it. And avoided me, which was difficult.

So I think it is more difficult when you’re younger, probably. And certainly peoples reactions to it are probably more marked.

I think the trouble is it is a very isolating thing having cancer. You, at the end of the day, have to go through it on your own.

But it does, I think also, it really makes you face up to the idea that we will eventually die one day. And you imagine you’re going to die sooner rather than later when you’re first told this.

I was quite surprised in a way that I dealt with it myself as well as I did. I think it’s very much easier if you think you’re going to get better. The fear is the overriding problem. I mean, the fear of the unknown, the fear of what you’ve got to have done, the fear of how much is it going to hurt or make you feel ill.

If you could just take all that away it would be pretty easy to deal with at the level at which I’ve had to deal with it.

I was fine I think at the beginning. I was very, I was really kind of being positive for everybody else because everybody else thought I was dying, you know.

And the cancer, [my husband] lost his mother with liver cancer and so I was saying, you know, “I’m really lucky” and “I’m fine” and, “that we found it so early” and all the rest of it. And it was only then, probably a couple of months ago, that I realised I wasn’t fine.

I was, well I mean I’m taking anti-depressants now. I was really, I got really depressed. I was just really flat and irritable and not sleeping.

Then I stopped talking to [my husband] about, everything was just too much effort really.

Whereas I was always somebody who would shrug off any illness, you know. I was never sick, never ever sick. And just being confronted with your own mortality I think is a scary business.

And it does change how you feel about life really. Because you can’t forget about it. And every morning I have to take this pill and you can’t, I just want it all to go away and pretend it’s never happened, but it has.

So I have to deal with it as best I can really.

I came home and just phoned everybody. I just wanted, I just wanted to tell everybody.

I don’t know why, there was no sort of “Oh dear poor me,” or, there was nothing like that. I just wanted everybody to know. And that’s when I had to deal with everybody elses emotions. And I think it was probably, I thought once everybody knows I can actually be myself, I can actually then start coping with it myself. If I’ve got to cope with everybody else for the next six weeks, it will be much more difficult.

Talking of books they’ve produced a book at the Breast Cancer Unit of women’s experiences of breast cancer.

And somebody loaned me a copy and I started reading it and I couldn’t relate to it at all because every single woman who had written in it their, it was all ‘shock, horror’ and, I just, in the end I thought am I abnormal?

Because I wasn’t in that ‘shock, horror’, you know. Never once was I like on the floor, devastated or anything like that. But I realised that it was real but I just wasn’t reacting in this ‘shock, horror’ way that most people anticipate.

So when he said’ “Yes, I’m sorry I’m afraid it is a cancer,” I thought’ “Ugh.” It is a slight you know.

Not because it was cancer.

I will not join in this great myth that it’s the most terrible diagnosis in the world, it is not, believe me there are some nastier illnesses than cancer. I wouldn’t like to have Parkinson’s. I don’t want to have a stroke. I don’t want to have multiple sclerosis. Cancer at 70, I’m 70 is like you know not such a terrible thing. It’s a slow growing thing, it’s easier to treat.

At the moment of being told I had cancer I remember thinking frankly, I thought’ “Oh bugger,” because it was a nuisance, because it was tiresome.

But I wasn’t, it wasn’t, I wasn’t overwhelmed.

I knew enough about the disease to know that I was not a candidate for immediate death and I don’t think a diagnosis of cancer is a death sentence anyway. I think this is one of the great myths. I’ve known too many people have done very, very well and are doing very, well.