New Diagnosis

Hi ladies, My name is Jo and I'm 44 years old and it's been just over 6 weeks since my diagnosis with invasive ductal carcinoma. When I first went to my GP, I had no idea that my life was going to be turned upside down for the second time this year. My sister had passed away only the month before on the 7th of May following a 14 month long battle with a stage 4 brain tumour. Brain cancer is an insidious disease that robbed us of a beautiful, positive, caring and gorgeous sister, mother, friend and wife. I guess in a way her illness was what prompted me not to ignore what I thought was something different about my left breast. I thought I could feel a small lump and when I laid on my stomach in bed, my left side felt different to my right. My GP couldn't be sure she could feel anything but wanted me to have a mammogram and ultrasound just to rule anything out. As soon as they did the mammogram you could see the cancer clearly on the screen and when they wanted to take extra scans and the sonographer says "make an appointment with your GP tomorrow", you know the news isn't good. Since then, it's been a whirlwind of scans, tests and surgery. The first surgery was a lumpectomy and a sentinel node biopsy. My surgeon was fantastic, he was very reassuring and I was positive that we'd get good results, since the ultrasound hadn't picked up any node involvement. Naively i thought as soon as I had surgery and radiotherapy I'd be back to work in no time. I was stunned and shattered at my post op appointment when my pathology results came back with good clearances on the tumour but 3/3 lymph nodes were positive for cancer. I had Stage 2 Grade 2 Breast Cancer. It now meant more surgery for an axillary clearance and then the next step would be chemo. So much for the blasé attitude I had going into the appointment. I was devastated. It's now been 2 weeks since my 2nd surgery and the results came back to show no other lymph nodes were affected. I know this was great news but it didn't really change anything about my treatment or my apprehensiveness about starting chemo soon. At the moment I feel like I'm in limbo, my oncologist appointment isn't until next Thursday, so I'm just hanging out until then. I'm not used to sitting around waiting. Maybe that's what this cancer journey is about...slow down and remember what is most important in life. I just wish my sister was by my side to hold my hand like I did for her.