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…

The morning after I found out I had cancer, I woke up and, for perhaps one or two seconds, I didn’t remember. I’ve had that feeling before after a horrible break-up. You wake up and everything is fine. You’re just you, waking up on an ordinary morning. And then you remember. There is this horrible drop in the pit of your stomach as reality catches up with you. I had cancer. And that day I had to tell my family. I’d managed to keep the whole thing to myself until then. Nobody had known about the lump, the breast clinic,…

There was nothing left to do but go inside. I left the car and walked towards the breast clinic through what seemed like miles of hospital corridors. I waited in the main waiting room. There weren’t many other people around. Eventually, they called my name. I walked into the consultation room. There were two people waiting for me. And I knew. I’d spent the previous 24 hours constructing increasingly implausible explanations for why the hospital might want to give me perfectly innocent biopsy results in person. Two people rather ruined that. There was the consultant breast surgeon. And there was…

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…

I should probably start by explaining the name. I am indecisive. Not about everything. Give me something important to decide and apparently I can manage it. Give me two perfectly acceptable options for dinner and suddenly we need further information, a pros and cons list and possibly an independent inquiry. So: Maybes. Mistress of Maybes actually began as an attempt to become slightly more anonymous on the internet. Given what happened next, that is quite funny. In the summer of 2025, I was at a work event where we were playing one of those games in which you’re given a…

A note from August: I originally wrote this in April, in the middle of chemotherapy, for an earlier version of this website. I’ve moved it over largely as I wrote it because it turns out there’s something quite interesting about reading what I thought was going to happen before any of it actually did. Some of this aged better than others. I have cancer. Boooooo. I have at least 6 months off work for chemo and surgery and radiotherapy etc… yay? Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who is capable of rest and recovery and just relaxing. I always…