The day before I found out I had cancer, the hospital called me. Could I come in the following morning to get the results of my breast biopsies?
And I knew.
Or at least, I thought I knew.
Because if everything was fine, why did I need to come in?
Surely you don’t summon someone back to hospital, sit them down in front of a breast surgeon and personally tell them that they don’t have cancer. You send a letter. You make a phone call. You say everything is fine and everyone gets on with their lives.
I was being asked to come back.
So I prepared myself for cancer.
There were other possibilities, of course. Perhaps it was benign but needed removing. Perhaps there was something they wanted to monitor. I constructed various alternative explanations in which the hospital had perfectly innocent reasons for wanting to see me in person.
But I didn’t really believe them.
I thought, more likely than not, I was about to be told I had cancer.
But it probably wasn’t cancer
The strange thing was that, until then, almost everybody had been reassuring me.
When I first found the lump, my GP examined it. It was mobile. There was a little bit of pain. It was probably nothing sinister, but she referred me under the urgent suspected cancer pathway to get it checked properly.
About a week before I got my results, I went to the breast clinic. It was a one-stop clinic, so everything happened in a single visit. First I saw the breast surgeon. She examined the lump and thought it felt like a cyst.
Then I had a mammogram.
Then an ultrasound.
And during the ultrasound, they decided to do a biopsy.
I hadn’t been expecting that.
I’d gone into the appointment having been told the lump was probably nothing. Then I’d been told it probably felt like a cyst. I didn’t know what they’d seen on the ultrasound or why they’d changed course, but I knew that something which was probably a cyst was now being biopsied.
Still, afterwards, I was reassured. It was probably nothing. I was relatively young. There was no need to worry.
And I wanted to believe that.
Of course I did.
Cancer wasn’t something I worried about.
I’d had the usual assortment of coughs and colds and a thyroid with a somewhat cavalier attitude towards behaving itself, but nothing properly serious had ever happened to me.
Cancer happened to other people.
Obviously I understood, intellectually, that I was not personally exempt from the human condition.
But I think most of us carry around a quiet assumption that we are.
Until suddenly we aren’t.
I hadn’t told anyone
The morning I went back to the hospital was beautiful. It was winter and cold, but the sky was brilliantly blue and the sun was shining. I drove to the hospital. I found a parking space, which felt like a small victory under the circumstances. And I sat in my car. Alone. Nobody in my life knew I was there.
I hadn’t told my mum I’d found a lump. I hadn’t told her about the breast clinic or the biopsy or that I was waiting for results. Because what would have been the point?
My mum would have worried. Not normal, proportionate concern. Proper worry. The kind that stops you sleeping. And if the biopsy came back benign, I would have put her through all of that for nothing.
If it was cancer, she would find out when there was actually something to tell her. And I would tell her in person. I hadn’t told my sister either.
I could have told my best friend, but even that had somehow felt a little dramatic. Everyone had told me it was probably nothing. Announcing that I was being investigated for cancer when I probably didn’t have cancer felt like making an unnecessary fuss.
So I hadn’t told anybody.
Instead, sitting in that hospital car park, I turned on my phone and started talking.
A beautiful bad day for bad news
That video is now on my TikTok.
At the time, I didn’t know whether I would ever post it.
I was terrified. I had been terrified. But by that morning something had shifted. I felt numb. Dissociated. As though it wasn’t actually happening to me.
There was still a small part of me looking for another explanation. Maybe it was benign but needed removing. Maybe there was something they wanted to keep an eye on. Maybe there was some entirely mundane reason why a breast surgeon needed to tell me the results in person.
But every time I went around the possibilities, I came back to the same thing. They had asked me to come in.
All the reassurances were still there: it’s mobile; it’s probably nothing; it feels like a cyst; you’re young; it’s unlikely.
But now there was this one fact I couldn’t explain away. They had asked me to come in.
I think that’s why I have always preferred preparing myself for the worst. If I walked into that room expecting to be told everything was fine and instead heard the word cancer, the distance between those two realities would be enormous. If I prepared myself for cancer and they told me it was benign? Fantastic. I would have been delighted to be wrong.
I know what happens next now. The version of me sitting in that car didn’t.
At the time, all I could do was sit there, look out at the brilliant blue sky and the winter sunshine, and try to prepare myself to walk into the hospital.
It struck me as a beautiful day for something so potentially awful.
A beautiful day for bad news.
And eventually, there was nothing left to do but go inside.