Today is the first anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis. This photo was taken of me soon after that day, when I’d just had my shoulder length hair cut short to prepare for losing it all to chemotherapy. I was facing an ocean, feeling like I’d been hit by a tsunami.
This time last year, I set off to my local hospital for an ultrasound and a “just-to-be-on-the-safe-side” mammogram. I’d had a sudden onset of an ache under my arm and had found a ‘hard’ area just under my collar bone. I thought I had a muscle injury. Work had been busy. I’d been lifting my tripod and camera gear a lot as I raced towards the end-of-year finishing line to complete work for clients. A muscle issue made sense. What else would it be? My GP wanted to rule out a cyst.
I wasn’t worried in the least. I had no history of breast cancer in my family. No cancer-like symptoms, except night sweats, which I’d put down to the start of menopause, and an overwhelming tiredness, which I attributed to the end-of-year fatigue that always seems to set in just before Xmas. I was fit, healthy, happy and active. Nothing to worry about at all.
Within an hour of arriving at my appointment, I was being told by a kind and gentle doctor that the pictures in front of him showed breast cancer. I had a biopsy on the spot. Tumour clips were also injected into me and a relentless storm of tests, scans, specialist appointments and treatment planning began. I could barely breathe.
This past year has shattered and upended my life. Changed me, and the people I love and care for the most, completely and utterly irreversibly. I see my life now as being divided into chapters- ‘Before Cancer’ (BC), ‘During Cancer’ (DC) and ‘After Cancer’ (AC). The ‘AC’ chapters are still being written as I continue to piece together a new life from the remnants of what cancer has left behind.
I am approaching my future, whatever that may entail, in the same way that I have been dealing with cancer this past year. With patience, with perseverance and an ocean of determination, to wade back into the water and come back to life.