I finished chemotherapy nearly two months ago. That feels like a sentence that should have an exclamation mark at the end of it. I finished chemotherapy! There. Better. Except I’m not sure it feels like that. For six months, chemotherapy was the organising principle of my life. Everything revolved around when I was having it, how I was feeling afterwards, and whether I could fit anything resembling normal life into the extremely narrow gaps of feeling relatively well in between. And then one day, I had my last one. I think I’d expected it to feel bigger. The last one…

I wasn’t checking my breasts when I found the lump. I would love this story to begin with me being a responsible woman diligently performing a regular breast check, immediately noticing a tiny change and booking a GP appointment. It does not. I was lying on my side one day and happened to feel something. It was small and hard. Smaller than a marble, but marble-ish. When I ran my finger over it, there was a definite point where the normal contour of my breast stopped and there was something else there. A lump. I thought: I should probably get that…