Interview 13

Age at interview: 41

Age at diagnosis: 39

Brief Outline: Diagnosed with breast cancer 1999. Underwent a mastectomy and was given chemotherapy, radiotherapy and Arimidex.

Comments that she fits into none of the risk factor categories and is critical about media reports on the causes of breast cancer.

Having found the information, having read the Imperial Cancer Care Book on breast cancer, which I really do think is highly informative. And you look at the risk factors. I didn't fit into any of them.

So to me cancer is a nasty disease that can strike anyone.

And yes, there are things that people can do to help themselves, such as not smoking (I gave up 11 years ago or so), but you certainly do need to start to help yourself once you are a victim of cancer.

And to enable you to do that you need to have the correct information. You will find all sorts of things in the media which can be quite scare mongering, on hair dyes, on whether or not you breastfed, on whether or not you had terminations.

I'm not sure that any of these things are factual. I would strongly suggest to people that they disregard them completely. Don't allow things to frighten and scare you. Stick with the experts. Stick with what it is you know.

Ask the necessary questions if something, if you're overwhelmed by something, you think "that could be me" or perhaps, you know, "I shouldn't do that" or whatever.

And I mainly have time to do or I've made time to do the things that Ive wanted to do and that I've been putting on hold for years.
 

Discusses some of the positive ways in which breast cancer had changed her life.

And I do not think for a second that that life stops with cancer. In fact for me, in many respects, life began with cancer.

I was only turned 40 when I was diagnosed with cancer and I had this thought in my head, as many women I'm sure do, that life begins at 40. And I had many plans of what I was going to do and what was going to change when I would come to 40.

I think it would be fair and true to say that they may not have materialised if it were not for the fact that I was diagnosed with cancer.

I can do, for instance I recently bought a guitar, I bought a keyboard, I want to learn how to play. I read a lot more than I have done in the past, I read more for pleasure. I get my housework done at an early time in the day. I look forward to my days.

I plan my days which I've never had the opportunity to do before because it was chaos doing a full day's work, I worked for the County Council.

Explains some of the benefits and difficulties of being involved in support groups.

We're all able to share our fears, our highs, our lows, our information gathering. We all watch out for each other in that if we find anything of interest that may help somebody then we use it.

The vast majority of us keep folders on information that we gather and we exchange books and all sorts of things and we do have a good time, we do have a good laugh. A lot of those ladies now I would say that they are very dear to me.

We lost one recently and of course this is the reality of the disease. We will lose particular people along the way. We are sympathetic, we miss her. And I say a prayer for her because that's as much as I can do at this point in time.

But we know that we gave it our best shot whilst she was with us and that it's not us. This is the reality of the situation and this will happen. It's the nature of the disease.
 

Comments on the supportive hospital environment.

I was petrified going in on that first day. I didn't know what to expect, you don't until you've actually experienced it. The medical team were fantastic.

They explained as much as they possibly could to me and offered me things like the cold cap to see if we could save some of my hair.

So I went in, my sister came along with me, and we started the procedure.

It's a nice friendly environment and the nurses were wonderful.

I was determined that I was going to laugh through it.

We brought some crosswords, we met a lot of other ladies in the same position as myself, some of them a lot more sicker than I was, some of them less.

We turned it into a positive experience.
 

Discusses her experiences of Arimidex.

Because of the pulmonary embolism that I suffered, my oncology team felt that tamoxifen perhaps was not the correct drug for me for the after care cancer treatment.

So it was decided on Arimidex.

I was a bit daunted in the beginning because we had heard a great deal about tamoxifen and how in actual fact it was now a wonder drug enabling people to live longer with breast cancer.

But I was assured that this one was equally as effective.

I was having the hot flushes and they are pretty unpleasant.

You can be slightly irritable coping with that but again as time goes on and once you know what they are and you are at ease about them, you just let them happen.
 

Describes the shock she felt about having a mastectomy.

I left the hospital and returned for the 29th November, which was a very short period of time.

In the interim I had been told that there was no way that they could save my breast, that the tumour was quite large for a breast tumour, it was 5.2cms, that there was dottings about the back of the breast, so it just was impossible to save it.

So it was decided on a radical mastectomy.

I had that on the morning of 29th November with 15 lymph glands removed from under my right arm, along with the breast. I returned, I recovered rather quickly.

It was a shock because then I was confronted with the fact that I really was, I was disfigured at this stage. And even though they did everything in their power to try to prepare me for that it still is a shock.