Living in fear !

Many thanks for the article, I will read it through slowly, but a quick scan confirms that old truism - if you are going to get cancer, your best shot is to be healthy first! Clearly that’s not going to happen with everyone, and the older you are, the more chances you have of something else not being quite right - complications from underlying ailments affect almost every illness and effective treatment, including novel Coronavirus. And as cancer may be particularly aggressive in younger patients, who may be otherwise very healthy, it’s not a heartening position. The major difficulty is for patient and medical practitioners to work out what is worse -  acceptance of treatment with limited information or scaring off any treatment by too many worst case scenarios. At the time, I may have refused treatment if I had been told that I would certainly get lymphoedema and an arrhythmia. I knew there was a chance of the first, not much about the second. Modern treatment of lymphoedema means that it has very little impact on my life. Many people in their late 60s (my age at diagnosis) get an arrhythmia without the benefit of breast cancer, and mine has responded well to treatment, again has little impact on my life besides taking a couple of pills daily. Not having all the treatment I had for cancer may have resulted in a recurrence (none to date, seven years) or of course my death. I don’t believe I was well enough informed to make those decisions by myself at the time - more easily done with hindsight. I now understand that life is inherently dangerous, safety is a bit of an illusion. Accepting that is not easy, but it definitely reduces the incidence of living in fear!