‘I was going to be fine, I thought. Until I wasn’t’: Surviving breast cancer – and life after

It was a hot Thursday afternoon in June when my phone rang at work. It was an unfamiliar number. After perfunctory greetings, the voice at the other end said, “The results of your biopsy are back. I’m sorry to tell you, you have breast cancer.” Being the overachiever I’m told I am, I had not one, but two types of breast cancer – invasive and DCIS, which is present in the milk duct. Everything else the voice said just faded out.

After speaking to the disembodied voice, everything was a blur – oscillating between fast and slow.

Cancer is a crushing diagnosis and everyone deals with it differently.

Slowly, as I began to replay that phone conversation in the privacy of my own home, the weight of what I’d heard became unbearable, even as I shared it with my family. The irony of my situation didn’t escape me, because when I was a lab scientist I had collaborated on breast cancer-related research. I realised I was slipping into my lab scientist mode – it was usually what I did when confronted with difficult situations. I decided to view the future as a complicated experiment with some variables within my control, others dependent on my doctors.

The first step...

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