When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2021, a stranger messaged me on Instagram. “You might not be ready to hear this yet,” she wrote, “but breast cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
She was right; I was absolutely not ready to hear that.
In shock from the news, I had been hurled into a barrage of invasive tests, endlessly prodded and poked and jabbed with needles. I’d been told that I would lose my hair to chemotherapy, my right breast to surgery and that, aged 40, treatment would plunge me into early menopause. The idea that I’d find anything positive in this absolute shit show would have been laughable, if I could stop crying long enough to laugh.
Perhaps surprisingly, although the news was a shock and treatment was brutal, I didn’t actually think about the possibility of dying initially. With the naive optimism of someone who has never before had to face her own mortality, I was certain that breast cancer was totally survivable. This belief was informed not only by high-profile survivors like Kylie Minogue and Sam Taylor-Johnson, but also by my own nan, who had breast cancer twice and lived to 98. And it’s true that the statistics are really positive. While the number of diagnoses is sadly rising (around 57,000 every year in the UK), survival rates are also increasing as treatments improve. Three quarters of people with breast cancer will survive.
But over time, something shifted in my perception of the disease. During treatment, I kept hearing of brilliant women dying of breast cancer. The journalist Sarah Hughes, who had kindly shared advice when I was diagnosed, died two months later. The actress Helen McCrory died while I was going through chemo, and singer Sarah Harding just after my mastectomy.
My initial fears – around losing my hair, my breast, my fertility and my identity – started to seep into a darker fear that I couldn’t say out loud, not even to those closest to me. I tried to reassure myself: my cancer was caught in time to be treatable. I was one of the lucky ones.
It was 18 months of treatment in the end, starting with chemo, then mastectomy surgery with full axillary lymph node clearance, followed by radiotherapy and, to round it off, six more months of chemo. As I neared the end, feeling like a shell of my former self, I had a disconcerting conversation with a surgical registrar.
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May 25, 2023 at 01:00PM
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My Breast Cancer Diagnosis Taught Me A Lesson Everyone Should Learn - British Vogue
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