So unsure

Hi Anna Louise,

Tough times, the first months after diagnosis. Being thrown into the breast cancer mincer is very hard work, particularly if you don't feel like you have developed any relationship with the people who are treating you. The MDT thing tends to happen early on and only really comes back into play if your situation or treatment changes. They meet, have a talk about you, draw up a plan and then the individual specialists take over.

Always remember that you can back peddle and ask the questions that you forgot early on. This is all about you, a fact that can get lost in whole mucky business. Take a breath, and have a good think about what is pissing you off then start asking questions to fill in the gaps. You can also change practitioners if you really can't connect with your current one. We probably should do that more often--I went through four oncologists over ten years before I finally found one that seems human. Scientists are often very strange people....

Regarding the benefits of chemo, most oncologists use a program called 'Predict'. Predict takes into consideration your stage of cancer, other treatments (such as hormone therapy and surgery) and spits out a figure that indicates, as a percentage, the amount of difference chemo therapy may make to your chances of surviving five or ten years. Cheery stuff when the percentages can be miserably low--5-7%--but the expectation is that we want to give ourselves the best chance of survival by taking up any treatments that may help.

I don't think you will find anyone willing to give you a prognosis about whether or not this disease will kill you. Stage two means that there is a chance of cure, rather than just containment of the cancer so, from that perspective, you are in a reasonably good place. There are never, ever, any guarantees though and people who have been diagnosed with stage one can suddenly become metastatic, stage three can bumble along for years and years and not progress. I think it all comes down to luck, which is a pretty unreliable thing to make predictions on.

Regarding the hair, if you are felling really vulnerable with that can I suggest going to another town/suburb to shop etc where you are unlikely to run into anyone you know. That can be quite liberating and when you really think about it, a woman with no hair isn't such a novelty in this bizarre world we live in. Anyone looks twice at you, give yourself permission to give them the finger and move on--you'll never see them again anyway.

It's a shit of a disease and a real lottery. Be kind to yourself. Marg xxx