Oh and the other thing was that I had to consent to them doing, they were going to do frozen sections during the surgery because if it was cancer they wanted to do the correct operation and I’d agreed that they could take the other ovary, because I’d been advised that if one ovary had become affected by cancer then the other one probably would at some point too, or there was a higher risk, and that it would be safer if I’d decided that I’d had my children to have both done, so then I have to get used to HRT as well.

I felt at the time that I’d finished my family and I certainly felt that if I was at risk of cancer then I wanted to make sure that I was going to be strong and well for the children that I had. I think subsequently I thought maybe that decision might not have been one that I was altogether happy with, but to be honest I probably would have made the same decision again.

I think I didn’t really fully explore whether I could save eggs or frozen embryos or anything like that because I did have two little children and I had a very short time to decide. And also I thought, you know, I was married at the time and assumed that was my relationship and, so I think although I have considered the, whether or not that was the right decision since then, at the time it felt like the right decision to make.

The hysterectomy, I remember we were in this room with the surgeon and the oncology team and, because all this happened at the time when there was a lot of news reports and cases brought against gynaecologists, and he was saying about “well this is the chemotherapy you need and, you know, you might want to look at a hysterectomy,” but it was the way it’s put “you might want to look at a hysterectomy.” And then, you know, you dig a big deeper “Okay well what’s the best way of walking way from this? So if it’s going to be awful and sheer hell for a year as a family, how are we going to, how am I going to create the best chances of us walking away from it all?”

And, you know, it’s like “Well you don’t have to do it but, you know, to have the hysterectomy and to lose the next ovary would probably be the best thing, but the choice is yours.” And there was a reluctance to turn round and say it purely because there was all this litigation in the news at the time. And so it’s like ‘okay well I really think the only way round it is to have the hysterectomy’ and as soon as I said “Yes well have a hysterectomy,” they all went ‘phew’, you know, because it was just so bizarre, you could see the relief, it’s like okay well that is the best decision.

Well I think with the surgery there was no choice really. The one treatment decision that I was faced with, with the surgery, was in case it had affected the bowel, and this was another amazing thing about the team I had, that on the morning that I had the operation, I was first on the list, the bowel surgeon was also available, which is phenomenal, isn’t it? And I, when the surgeon told me that, I said I would not give consent to have a colostomy. I didn’t want that.

I thought if it had gone that far, and I had actually talked this through with a colleague who is at the Marsden and in fact I said What is, how do people die when they have a bowel cancer which they refuse to have a colostomy for?’ And she said, she told me what the implications were and, and I felt very clear in my head that I didn’t want, you know, if it had got to that point. So that was one decision that I made, but I didn’t, I mean it wasn’t necessary in the event.

I went back into hospital, they told me they were going to do a biopsy and I said, ‘I didn’t really want a biopsy, if they were going to go in and they found something I’d rather they did whatever they had to do then, just take anything that I could live without out and just get on with it. So basically that’s what happened. I had a total hysterectomy which removed everything, ovaries, everything;

She [the oncologist] told me that it would be only a few months if I didn’t have any chemotherapy, I would only have a few months and, that the chemotherapy that she was offering was a gold, what she said, her words were ‘Gold star treatment’ and that it was very well worth having. Because I’d explained to others I didn’t want to have, just have chemotherapy and not have any quality of life, having just watched my friend die of cancer, so, you know, I was very, that had only happened 6 weeks ago, so 6 weeks before I’d seen the gy, I’d seen the oncologist;

So I did explain that to her but she said it was, you know, I would only have months if I didn’t have it and it was a very very good treatment and it, and there was even at my stage, stage 3, there was a very good chance that it would, you know, it could get rid of the cancer altogether and, you know, theres, theres a very good, you know, theres a very good chance still; She had, she said she had actually discharged people that at my stage but she said everybody is different and, you know, but it is well worth having, having the chemo. It’s also a very kind chemo, the chemo, the carboplatin she said was very kind, you don’t lose you hair with it and, it’s, you know, it’s not one of those that makes you feel dreadfully ill, although it’s not pleasant. So I said, well I’d go away and think about it, and I went away and thought about it for a few days and then I went, I phoned up and said, ‘I’ll have it’, and I started virtually the next Monday;

We did talk about the different chemotherapies but my husband and I had already come to a decision about that. The present, or at least the gold standard was a combination of Taxol and carboplatin. I’d found out that the Taxol causes the more severe side effects but the research that they had to hand then was that it produced slightly better results if you used the 2 in combination. Although I believe NICE have recently brought out a new report on that. But anyway, the present gold standard then was the combination of the two.

Now for some women hair loss is not acceptable and they go just for the carboplatin on its own, which is, you know, fair enough. But with Taxol it is almost a certainty that you’re going to lose all your hair. I’d read that a cold cap could help prevent the hair loss but I thought if my hair’s just going to start thinning and look awful, I’d really rather just lose it all and have the benefit of having the Taxol as well.

What about treatment decisions, were you involved with your doctors in deciding what the treatments should be or was it just a case of them sayingthis is what you need?

Entirely up to them. I had no input at all into that. I don’t know if I, I wouldn’t have had any knowledge to be able to say yes’ or no’ to something and I wouldn’t have had the courage to say no’ to anything. Whatever he said to me I went along with, I trusted him implicitly. Still do. If he said to me now You need some chemo’ I would discuss it with him and find out why, but I’d go with it, I would definitely go with it.

I don’t think I personally couldn’t have done it any differently, I would have to trust him a hundred percent to know what was best for me. I wouldn’t, and if I didn’t feel like that with him I wouldn’t be able to be a patient of his, I would have found that very difficult, but straight away it was good and it worked – fortunately.