Interview 06
She is eight years past a diagnosis of breast cancer. She received a mastectomy and five years of treatment with tamoxifen. She received counselling to help her through cancer and depression, but now feels that cancer is behind her.
The interviewee is 8 years post-diagnosis from breast cancer. She had a mastectomy, which was very upsetting at the time. She needed to talk to someone about how she felt about her body, but that support was not offered from the hospital. She received a lot of support and one-on-one counselling from a local cancer centre and now volunteers for them on a fundraising basis so that people could have the same help that she had. She had depression prior to cancer, and just needed someone to talk to. Nowadays, she does not have any negative feelings about the mastectomy, and has accepted what happened.
She tried reiki, which was transformational and helped her refocus following cancer, and now she self-practices every day in the morning after doing a reiki course. She also found that it was good to go to the cancer support centre and meet other people who were all very kind, and who had been through the same experience. The cancer care centre closed through lack of funding, but core members of the team set up a charity which works with terminally ill patients in their own homes.
She also took tamoxifen for five years, which caused night sweats at the time, but she does not have any long-term effects from the treatment. Her breast surgery involved removing some of the lymph glands in her right arm so she needs to take care with physical tasks such as gardening and lifting heavy bags.
Although cancer and the mastectomy was a very difficult thing to come to terms with at the time, she has found that things get better over time, which she didn’t expect. Many things have gone back to normal, and she is happy that other people don’t see her as someone who’s had cancer.
Her message to other people is to hang in there and that things do get better.