Younger Women Together

Last weekend I took part in a two-day event called Younger Women Together. It’s hosted by Breast Cancer Care for women under 45 with breast cancer. I was nervous about attending because I didn’t know anyone there, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to Talk About Cancer For Two Whole Days…. but I reasoned it was a good opportunity to meet other women in the same position. It was. But I also surprised myself with how emotional I found the experience: I laughed a lot, but I also cried. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Day one began with a medical presentation by an oncology professor about drug therapy, and led into some break-out groups discussing cheery subjects such as early menopause (hello hot flushes and low mood) and breast reconstruction. Yay. Thankfully, the day finished with laughter yoga, which is just as ‘new age’ as it sounds but effective. Any session in which I end up lying on my back on the floor laughing hysterically gets the thumbs up from me.

There was just time for quick swim in the hotel pool (which didn’t irritate my radiotherapy burns as much as I feared) before dinner. I sat with a tremendously entertaining bunch of women and had a fantastic conversation about things that did NOT involve cancer. It was awesome. With a combination of thinly-sprouting hair, headscarves and wigs we probably looked a little strange to our fellow diners, but it really didn’t matter because for the first time in ages I didn’t feel like the odd one out.

Day two was when things got a little emotional for me. And when I say emotional, I mean proper full-on tears-pouring-down-face-breakdown. I walked into the break-out group discussing body image believing I was ‘totally fine’ with my one-legged, one-boobed decrepit body (“Who cares what I look like? It really doesn’t matter…”) but once I listened to other members of my group talking with great honesty about their difficulties in accepting their new shapes, and the effect on their relationships, I was hit with an overwhelming sense of grief for my own losses. And as the tears flooded down my face, and someone offered me a tissue, I realised I was not going to stop crying and I had to leave the room.

At that point, the old me might have gone home to lick my wounds alone. But this time I stuck around, and talked it out with one of the professionals on hand. And I did stop crying, eventually. And I went back out and talked some more with the other women who totally understood why I was having a meltdown. It felt – if not good, exactly – cathartic.

So what did I learn? That there is strength to be found in sitting in a room alongside twenty other young women  – all with families, and loved-ones, and jobs and a whole lot more of life they want to live. That alone was worth the tears.

New do

Bev

Post-chemo crop

Beverley (aka The Wig) has had a hair cut. She’s gone from long and glam to an angled bob; what’s she’s lost in length, she’s gained in style.

I took her to Andrea’s Hairoom, run by Andrea Long – a hair loss specialist with an extraordinary talent for matching heads to hair. I went in feeling self-conscious in a scalp-covering headband, and came out wearing a swishy blunt-cut wig that actually feels like my own hair. Only better.

She also gave me the confidence to go and get my own multi-length, patchy, post-chemo hair cut at the hairdresser (“it will look immediately thicker”) so I now have a boyish crop which is a zillion times better than my messy bandana/toddler ponytail look of old.

I have a wedding to go to tomorrow, an occasion I’ve been looking forward to for months but didn’t know whether I’d be well enough to attend. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to stay awake past 9pm or sustain much of a conversation, but I do know that – with or without Bev – I’ll give it a good go.

 

Thumbs up

I didn’t ring the bell. When it came to ‘the moment’, I felt too self-conscious.

So instead I got the radiographer to take this classic ‘thumbs up’ posed photo and went to John Lewis to buy an over-priced Neom candle (scented to ‘de-stress’) and ate a rather soggy Pret sandwich (crayfish & avocado since you ask).

I know how to celebrate. 

Ringing the bell

There’s a bell fixed to the wall of the radiotherapy reception, in front of a painted rainbow. It’s for patients to ring when they finish their last radiotherapy treatment; mine is tomorrow. When you shake the bell, and its chimes ring out across the department, fellow patients look up from their dog-eared magazines (Countrylife/Chat/Bella circa March 2012) and clap and smile. There’s a sense of “we’re all in this together” and an anticipation of a time in the future when they will get to ring the bell too. But I don’t know whether I should do it.

You see, the end of radiotherapy is not the end of treatment: I will continue to have Herceptin injections every three weeks until January; will be starting on the dreaded Tamoxifen which will bring its own set of early menopause-related symptoms; and will need further surgery to remove the port from my expander implant. And then there are the psychological after-effects of treatment – the anxiety, the dread, the fear of every ache and pain that might signal a return of the disease – and I know from experience that these take much longer to subside than the fatigue and the general malaise of cancer treatment.

Also, I wonder if ringing the bell is disrespectful to patients waiting in the reception queue for treatment that will never end; for the metastatic cancer patients who will have endure radiotherapy and chemotherapy and other drugs for the rest of their days. Do they want to stop and cheer for someone who gets to finish treatment?

But then I wonder whether I am (as ever) over-thinking things. Perhaps a more optimistic, hopeful person might see ringing the bell more simply: the marking of the end of one part of treatment; the beginning of another phase.