Breast Cancer in October

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

According to one website, 46,000 a year in the UK receive the devastating news that they have breast cancer. In addition to this there are further thousands of people who discover lumps in their breasts that are thankfully benign. They can get on with their lives in the relief that they do not have to contemplate months of intensive and invasive surgery and treatment to eradicate this hopelessly cruel disease. For now anyway.

According to another website, in the UK 1 in 9 or 11% of the female population are going to contract breast cancer at some point in their lives. The risk factor increases with certain modes of behaviour, like smoking, or with genetic links, like another female in the family having the disease or by a parent carrying the gene from one generation to the next.

If you drink one glass of red wine a day, you could possibly be reducing your chances of getting breast cancer. If you drink more than two units per day of wine, you increase the chance of getting it.

Talk about getting the balance right!

This October is no different from any other October. More women will receive the news that they do not want to hear. Some will be in their twenties, some in their seventies and plenty in between. Some will be able to eradicate it before it has invaded the lymph glands or the bone. Others will not be so fortunate. Some will go for years without any trace of the disease returning, and just at the point when they feel they have got rid of the little bastard, it will return, proverbially biting them on the bottom.

Some women will learn this month that secondaries have invaded their body in places where it is seemingly impossible to fight, and life sentences will be passed down with immediate effect. Others will be given a glimmer of hope; an indefinite sentence that could feasibly linger over someone for decades. Bizarrely, they are the lucky ones.

I cannot empathise. I haven’t got the disease. Not yet, though obviously having smoked for large chunks of my adult life and having a diet rather high in red meat puts me at the higher risk end of the scale.

When I say I cannot empathise, I don’t mean that in a harsh way. I don’t mean that I am unwilling to empathise because that is far from the truth. I wish to empathise. It is just I have no real experience of what it must feel like to be told that you have breast cancer, or indeed any other form of cancer.

I simply cannot imagine how I would react, how I would feel, what I would do, how I would cope.

Instead, I can sympathise with those that do, and do my best to support them and their loved ones during this devastating time.

On the 4^th October, a friend of mine sent a general message via Facebook saying “send positive thoughts, prayers, blessings, light a candle, elemental strength links or what you happen to believe to help M”.

On the 16^th October, he reiterated the request. “Radiate positive thoughts, prayers, meditations, best wishes, Reiki treatements to M in hospital medical unit again”. He continued later n the day to say “Well done NHS staff that are willing to wear name badges in A&E, I take my hat and shirt off to you all. People have mentioned and some have complained that we have so many doctors in this country from all over the world. Why do you think this is I ask? Because our NHS is the best medical service in the world”.

This morning, he has sent another message saying “M is resting comfortably in the hospice; a place of tranquillity and caring beyond our wildest dreams!”

She has but a few days left to live.

Last Saturday, I was sitting here in exactly the same position and time as I am currently, wallowing in my own self-pity. I received a text which said, “Unfortunately I had some bad news yesterday. The boxing gloves are back on for Round Two of the cancer fight! My bad back has turned not to be what I wanted it to be! A few more weeks of test and then surgery to kick start treatment. Thanks in advance for all your help”.

I spoke to her on Tuesday, having tried to phone her on Monday – not wanting to phone whilst her children were around.

She’d had a mastectomy in 2009, followed by the usual chemotherapy and radiotherapy. She’d been cleared of the disease in November last year only to find out this month that there were secondaries on her lower spine.

Apparently, she said, I can do without my spine – or certainly one vertebrae. The doctors are going to remove the offending section, pinning her together with metal sticks and just wait in the vain hope that it has not spread to further parts of her body.

She said she could cope with anything. She could bear the pain of surgery, the nuisance of radiotherapy but she couldn’t bear the prospect of more chemo, though of course will have it if it enables her to live long enough to see both of her children reach their teenage years.

On Thursday, another friend who had had breast cancer discovered that a cancer that was already known to be inoperable had spread to her brain and the only treatment on offer was for “comfort”; not a solution and certainly not an eradication.

Her life sentence has been confirmed and she is resolute and determined to manage to outlive this prediction.

All three of these women are special human beings who have a determination and strength that I fear would fail me in similar circumstances. They have all tried to continue with their lives, taking the treatment, putting themselves in the hands of the experts, travelling from hospital to hospital to get the sort of treatment and second opinions that they needed.

All three of these women will continue to strive for the very best that life offers them in however long they are given.

However long they are given? What a silly phrase. It makes it sound as though they all have a predestined outcome with a time and date as to when it will all be over.

Another friend of mine organised a sponsored walk recently to try and raise money for a hospice in my home town. His brother died of cancer a few weeks before I lost my Dad. His brother was a very special person who had been very close to me at one point in our lives.

Why did I want to support this? Because I have seen and heard about the outstanding care that people dying with cancer receive in such places and I just want to be able to do something in my own way to support more help in this area.

Another friend is one of the lucky ones that I mentioned earlier. She had a lump that was clearly irregular. After a month of doctors visits, tests, hospital checks, they found it to be benign but she still needed to have an operation to get rid of the damn thing. Last Friday her unwelcome guest was removed. The relief is palpable in every expressive tone in her voice and every line on her face.

Another friend who I spoke to last week said that she had not had her annual mammogram for over two years now since moving out of the country. I actually had a real go at her, telling her that she should not be so idiotic and complacent as to ignore this potentially life-saving check up as frequently as it was offered to her.

So there we have it. Breast Cancer Awareness Month in a nutshell!

What can you do?

Give people space, make them know that you are thinking of them, think positively, support the people closest to them in the way that they want to be supported, and not the way you think they ought to be supported.

I’ve clearly not got the balance right in some instances and have successfully intervened in others.

I want to be able to help all of these people in whatever way I can but I do not want to intrude on their grief.

My friend with the imminent vertebrae operation just wants me to talk to her. She wants to be treated normally. The friend with the life-sentence passed on her this week has said the same; grateful for the people around her who treat her as the person that she is rather than seeing her as a terminally ill patient whose brain allegedly escaped her as soon as she was diagnosed.

All of this has made me think how many more people there are out there who have their own interpretation and experiences of October’s Breast Cancer month.

In some ways, it doesn’t affect me and millions of others at all. In other ways, it is forever prevalent because of the people that it does affect.

All I do know is that if other people have similar stories of Breast Cancer Month to me, then there are many of people who are, one way or another, being shaped by this disease playing a role in their lives irrespective of whether they are the invaded, the carers, the cared for or merely a bystander.

And do we enable people to prepare enough for these situations? Our schools are full of children and young people who when asked what their biggest fear is, respond most commonly with something to do with loss, bereavement and separation.

I’m damn sure I haven’t learned how to deal with it yet, or even the threat of it.
We brush grief under the carpet with a sturdy and stoical sweeping gesture that helps nobody. We ignore the helpless feeling of insecurity that overwhelms people when they are confronted with the possibility of losing the people that they love most in the world, and we carefully wrap it all up in a pink ribbon that announces to the world that we have done the best we can.

My friend who has a couple of weeks to live is in a good place. Her partner is angry though. He has screamed viciously at people who are trying to help; frustrated and devastated by the fact that this woman who has been so significant to him over the last few years has been slowly slipping away from him, and he knows he is helpless to do anything about it.

My other friend says her partner doesn’t speak but she has the tidiest kitchen ever because all he does is keep washing up! A Taurean of a certain generation!

We need to address this, however painful it may be, enabling people to talk, to trust and respect one another whilst recognising that sometimes even the more thoughtful ones get it very, very wrong.

As for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, then long may it continue, or long may it be deemed unnecessary.

It is fine to dress everything up in a pink ribbon if it continues to highlight the problem, if it helps to eradicate this disease but let’s not stop at the fight against cancer. Let’s look at how we deal with the responses too. Let’s try and think about the wider needs to deal with the shit that life throws our way.