I feel a gentle nudge on my shoulder. It’s 6.14am. A nurse has woken me up for my obs. I had only got to sleep just after 3am. I was thinking through the night. Over and over – on loop – from the cannula going in, to the anesthetic, to be woken up, to being back in my room. Why does everything seem darker and more real in the night time hours? By the time my blood pressure is being checked, I swear my heart will beat out of it’s chest and through the window. I wait for the nurse to notice my obs are too high or too fast. She doesn’t. Inside I am on full speed, full volume, and even this machine cannot see it. I am the only one who can feel the full force of my anxiety and fear.
Nurse after nurse, question after question, until the bed appears at my door with a young, smiley porter who has done this countless times before. Watch a middle aged bald woman, struck with fear, trying to put one foot in front of the other. I see the bed with the big blue blanket on it with handles. This is what they will use to lift me from this bed trolley onto the theatre bed. When I will be out cold. I lurch inside and my guts twist and knot. Lying on this as I am pushed through the ward, makes it seem so real. I cannot move. Paralysed with what is about to happen to me. My husband is not here. I am scared, and I am lonely. I have to man up here and take this head on and calm myself down. This is crazy. I am not meant to be here. I was never meant to have got breast cancer. I had not planned for any of this. Yet, here I am ‘first up’, at 9.02am on 1st December 2020. Some advent calendar opening – a lumpectomy and lymph node biopsy.
As COVID is here, no one can be on the same corridor as you. So as the porter expertly manoeuvres me around the corners and turns, everyone stands out of the way so we can pass. We have to wait for a few moments as the corridors clear – and people move away. They stand silently as I am wheeled past towards theatre. I feel like I am in a hearse, making slow passage past silent mourners. It is knocking me violently sick. My toe nails are curling under my skin I swear. I am sweating.
I look to see the sign ‘Theatre’, hanging off the hospital roof and wince when we turn into that corridor. This whole process from ward to theatre takes about 3 minutes. This is just about the right time for my entire body to crackle and buckle under the pressure of the anxiety. In less than 10 minutes I will be being cut open. In less than an hour they will know whether there is any cancer in my lymph nodes.
I am put into a small room, with three people. The anaesthetist (who I met earlier this morning), and two others. One does all the paperwork and checks again for the 56th time I am Heidi Lester and it is my right breast getting operated on today, and a lady who has the most kindest eyes, and despite the mask, I can see her face clearly. I tell her I’m scared. She doubles the warmth and I relax a little. She administers all the drugs that will help me get through this with as little pain as possible. She talks me through what will happen and how I will feel, as the cannula goes in. Now this was something I was dreading. I am so tired of injections now, and these usually mean chemo – so the associated flicker of dread curls into my veins. But they behave and the cannula goes in well today. A good start I tell myself. They all normalise my fear with compassion and kindness. I wish this had been my experience from all the other health professionals I have encountered since November 2019. But I get it here – where I am most scared and for that I am grateful.
She is right. The saline goes in – the morphine goes in and I feel a little kiddy, then whoosh……. in goes the anaesthetic and down come the eyelids. I want to see the time, so look towards the clock on the wall and watch it disappear as I go under and into the hands of people I have never met. It was 9.09am.
I am in my kitchen, arguing with my eldest daughter. She is telling me I have done too much throughout my treatment and I need to stop work. I am furious at her. Does she not know that by continuing with my work role, has meant I have kept sane, focused and normal. My job is so dear to me – being alongside other human beings, supporting them making sense of their incongruence and distress has been the antidote to cancer treatment. I have thrived in my role and it has added to my positivity about getting though my cancer diagnosis. And yet, here she is, telling me I must stop work now and heal and get better!? I am raging. How bloody dare she? How bloody dare anyone tell me how to be and what to do when they have no idea at all, what it feels like to be me. My eyes flicker open. I am blinking in my view. I am not in my kitchen. I am in the recovery room, and I am waking up from the anesthetic. I am not angry at my daughter. I am woozy, light headed but solid at the same time. I am not moving. I am still. I am hearing voices. I am hearing the nurse ask me if I am OK. I am hearing the nurse tell me the lymph nodes were ‘negative’. I burst to life. My ears are sharp and ask her again, what they found. ‘Negative lymph nodes’ bounces back at me. I ask her again. She replies again. I ask her one more time. ‘You don’t have a drain’, she offers back to me. I hope she knows I am one step in here and one step back in my thoughts before the operation. I am here I know that. It is over. I feel that. I look at the clock. 11.09am. It’s exactly 2 hours since I closed my eyes. I am numb yet on fire. I am in no pain and slowly start to feel the different parts of my body come back to life. I can hear the nurses fluttering about me but can’t quite compute the language. I hear bits and pieces. I feel like I am looking down on the scene and watching myself come round. So weird. Nothing bad or scary. Just strange sensations pulsating through me. She asks if I want to ring my husband and they seek out his mobile number. I am handed the phone and met with his familiar voice. He is holding his breath for the news. I tell him I am feeling OK and the lymph nodes were clear of cancer. He cries and cries down the phone. I can feel the relief in us both, I can’t cry. I want to but nothing comes out. It’s like a part of me has been turned off, and they are firing it back up, but it doesn’t quite kick in. I can’t get my lung capacity right, so the nurse is urging me to take deep breaths in and out. A mask goes on over my face to help but still I don’t give her the readings she wants. This goes on for what feels like hours. It’s minutes. But I am breathing myself dizzy here and getting no where. I know it’s the effects of the chemo – my lungs have been battered and they work part time now. I urge them to fire up so I can get out of here and back to my room. They eventually turn up, and the same smiley porter appears at the end of my bed and wheels me back the way I came.
This moment is what I have been waiting for for months. For the operation to be over and no cancer to be found in my nodes. I am still coming back down from the anesthetic, but I do make a mental note to take a picture in my mind of this very moment. I blink. Image stored in my brain. I feel like I am lying on a bed of candy floss. Light and weightless. There is no doubt at all that both relief and gratitude are playing their parts in this. I am full of elation and really feel I could walk back to the ward myself. I feel I could even walk home! I am now planning on getting out of here. I am fully awake and feel very well all considered. I expected to feel sore and slow but I am not. Painkillers are working I am told, and will continue for the next few days then I may well feel soreness and tightness. Paracetamol will soothe this, so it’s not going to feel too bad.
But right now I am full of positive, electrifying energy and it needs a home. I am buzzing and smiling and starving! The op is over and I am feeling good. I am no longer laced with anxiety and fear. I am bouncing around in my baldy head, excited about sharing my news with my family and friends. It feels like Christmas in my head. I have just opened a gift of life and it had my name on the tag. How lucky am I right now. I am so so blessed that I am writing this here and sharing this with you all. I am lucky. No cancer was found in my lymph nodes and whether it was there before and been fried by the chemo doesn’t matter to me right now. It is not there now. It is clear, and I have no drain which means I ca get the hell out of hospital and back to my family. I want a glass of wine.
Even as I speak and type to those who have surrounded me in support, eagerly telling them I should be coming home tonight….I know in my gut feeling I won’t be. I have started to feel my hunches again – those strong feelings in your stomach that indicate what is really going to happen. I stopped trusting them after my diagnosis and trust me. You feel nothing when you are pumped full of chemotherapy. So, I am not surprised when my Consultant pays me a visit early evening and tells me it’s late now so it’ll be best to stay in. We have the added pressure of COVID now, so being discharged too early carries a price. If I did get out too early and something was to go wrong with the wound etc, I would need a COVID test to get back onto the ward again. It makes sense but inside I am gutted. I am fine and want to go back to my own bed. She tells me she was very happy with the operation and has a look at her handy work. It is here where I see what has happened to me earlier on in the day. I have no bandages and dressings at ll. I am swollen and both of my wounds are glued back together. I have no stitches either. I don’t want to look down, but she encourages me too and amidst the human super glue and pen marks, is a very blue tit! My breast is bright blue – Smurf blue. I am told this will fade within 4-6 months. Something else I had no clue about. The blue mark is there as the dye was used to locate the lymph nodes for biopsy. It is surprising as to how much I was not fully aware of before the operation. It actually looks quite funky and already a mixture of purple and yellow colours are joining the blue… a mass gathering of colours are emerging. Still, no pain at all. I am sat in bed watching Netflix and waiting for food. I am now absolutely ravenous and could murder a Big Mac. It is 5.45pm. Still grumpy at not being able to leave, I settle myself down for the night, tuned in to the growls of my stomach telling me it’s empty.
It is over. I have been cut open and what needed to be checked has been. I am not in any major pain – can’t twist and turn but that is all that I feel. A few friends who have had an operation similar to me all told me this – that I am worrying for nothing and this is the easy part. Anything is easy compared to chemo. I lay awake, looking at the ceiling and the bare room, feeling warm but not tired at all. I am wide awake with the sparks of the day and what it means to me and my family flying out of every thought I have. My head is so loud and nothing I can do stops it’s rumble. Two friends phone me, and I am laughing. I am laughing at stupid things we are all saying and the colour of my tit. I am laughing for the first time in months. Really laughing. The type of laugh you feel on the hairs on your toes. I can’t get my breath as the chemo residue shows itself. And I do not care at all. I am wheezing like a kettle at the thought that right now, I have had my operation. I still have to wait for the results of the lumpectomy, where a 2 cm piece of breast tissue was removed. My tumour was chemo sensitive so had been shrunk by the treatment. It will take 3 weeks for the results from the pathologist to come back to tell me if there was any cancer left in the original site. But right now – in this ward, on 01/12/20 at approximately 20:19 I do not have this in my head at all.
Maybe life – my life will start to come back, and I will laugh once more.