Positive? me?

“As I lay in bed I couldn’t help but wonder, will breast cancer kill me?”

This is what it has been like to be sick in bed, my body taken over by the effects of chemo and my mind going places it’d never been to since my diagnosis. I am now officially scared. Fearful. Terrified. And a bit depressed. Is this the end of positivity?

When I was first told I has breast cancer  it was all about getting to grips with the fact that so unexpectedly, at the tender age of 30 my “im sure it will be nothing” lump had turned out to be malignant. And that it had spread to my lymph nodes. And that I had to undergo surgery. And that chemotherapy would follow. And that as a result I may lose my fertility. And that I  better sort out some embryos – sorry we do not freeze eggs on the nhs – so go and chose the potential father of your children out of a list on the european sperm bank website. And that 6 weeks of radiotherapy would follow chemotherapy. Oh lets not forget being on herceptin for 1 year and on tamoxifen for the following 5.

So yes, having all of these things to think about, I did not have much room for anything else. I only thought about mortality when I had to undergo tests to see if the cancer had spread to my bones or brain (which would have made it terminal). But that was about it. After finding out that it hadn’t I felt like this: “great! it’s ONLY breast cancer!”.

Fast forward 4 months and I’m like this: “F***, it’s breast cancer!”, “F*** it had spread”, “what if it comes back as a metastases (go and find what that means) and it kills me?”. Because once I have dealt with all the above stuff and I am settling into chemotherapy, I am having more time to think. It is when you spend hours in bed, unable to read, unable to watch tv, unable to play on your Nintendo ds, just laying there, feeling sick and horrid that those thoughts start entering your mind. Death is something you are fighting against.

Before you get cancer, the idea of a doctor telling you something along the lines of “I am afraid the biopsy has CONFIRMED that…” is that most scary thing ever. Being told that you have cancer can seem so so so scary it can send shivers down your spine.  After you have cancer, a cancer diagnosis is not so scary anymore. It’s a secondary cancer diagnosis that it’s the scary one. Because that one you cannot cure (unless you do a “spontaneous recovery”). It comes to take you.

So as you can imagine, I am quite scared at the moment. Life feels very fragile. Is this it? i sometimes think.

Oh and given that I posted photos of my haircuts, I thought you deserved to se what I look like with no hair at all. I quite like it, but do not go out in public with a bald head. Don’t want people staring at me! It has since grown and I now have baby hair. It may keep on growing or it may all go again. We’ll see!