The beginning - triple negative BC
I was pretty sure that 2014 was going to be a year of positive change and excitement for me. I guess I was almost right, but just not in a way that I would have expected in my wildest nightmares.
I had just moved my entire life to Melbourne from Newcastle, landed a great job, found a perfectly beautiful pink townhouse to live in with great flatmates and was ready to start embracing life as a Melbournite - bring on my fun new life of culture, dining out, art and live music!
Life had other plans for me though and everything came to a grinding halt when a lump I found in my right breast turned out not to be nothing as I expected it to be, but was actually triple negative cancer (although I didn't know this exactly until after my surgery - all I knew was the dreaded C-word).
I don't think I will ever be able to forget the tears in the doctor's eyes as she looked at the real-time scans and gave me the news - I almost felt worse for her than I did for myself. I mean, how terrible to have to tell someone that their life as they know it is over - what a heartbreaking thing to have to communicate to someone flat on their back with their boobs out covered in sticky jelly stuff and freezing their ass off.
And thus began what has honestly been the most challenging life lesson I've had yet in my 41 years on this planet. The shock and disbelief of diagnosis, the uncontrollable crying, the waiting, the never-ending tests and scans and needles, the anxiety of just not knowing what's going to happen or how I'm going to feel, the trauma of surgery and chemo, the loss of my beloved hair, the total and utter heartbreak of having to watch my family and friends watch me go through this.
I'm halfway through my chemo right now and I'm finally ready to start talking about it and learning from this experience. Because I'm determined that I'll take something positive away from this - not only will cancer not beat me, but I will come out of it this not just with some life lessons but as a better person - my life will really never be the same again.
