Angela’s story     February 2006

I love my bed.  I am usually in bed by ten pm.  Eight hours a night, girl, that’s me and I am right grotty if I don’t get it.  I remember it being a bit cold, I snuggled deeper into my duvet - I had just bought a new striped cover.  My ten year old daughter had rolled her eyes at it - it wasn’t pink or purple or black!  Nice though.  Nice and crisp and warm.  The wind was picking up and my next door neighbour had a wind chime in her garden - it started its tune - nice if you are on holiday in Bali, bloody nuisance if you are trying to get to sleep in rural Cornwall.  I pulled my legs up, stretched them out, pulled the pillow over my face, turned from my right side to my left and then lay on my front in the recovery position.

OEEEW!

                Something   pressed   into  my  left boob as I tried to relax. 

OUCH!  That really hurt!

I sat up, smoothed the sheet underneath me and found nothing.  I thought of the fairytale ‘The Princess and The Pea’. 

Definitely no pea.  I remember thinking ‘you’re not a princess then Angela’!  The thought amused me and I was smiling as I snuggled down.

             OEEEW!  There it was again.  This time I sat up and patted my t-shirt top – perhaps the ‘pea’ was stuck underneath. 

            ‘I will be the princess after all’ but my amusement turned sour as I realised the pain wasn’t from anything external - it came from within my boob.  It was really tender.  I didn’t remember knocking it or anything.  My fingers pressed the flesh - there wasn’t a great deal - just an average 36B but it seemed quite sore and then I felt it. The lump.

             Like a marble, just as hard, not moving, just there.  It wasn’t huge but it suddenly felt as if it had taken over my whole body.  I am sure my blood temperature went down ten degrees. My heart rate shot up. Initially, a hundred nasty thoughts flew around my head.  It felt like there was a melon in my throat. I didn’t move, not for about forty minutes.  The fingers pressing into my breast felt like they had turned to stone, too heavy to move and my eyes stared at a crack of light on the wall where the moon filtered through my flimsy curtains. 

            Then I remembered my mum and the many benign cysts that she had found and had removed when I was younger.  That was probably all this little lump would turn out to be - a harmless cyst.  I decided to check it after my period in a week’s time. If it wasn’t a cyst it was more than likely a menstrual lump.  Women’s breasts change shape and become lumpy and bumpy at different times of the month, don’t they?  I couldn’t feel my heart in my mouth any more.  How silly of me to think the worst.

             And that was that.  I hunkered down into my cosy bed once more and put the lump out of my mind.  My main cause for concern were the chimes outside my window, although now, I had to admit that they were sounding a bit more peaceful and melodic.

My period came and went.  I checked my breast but the lump was still visiting! 

‘It might have been a bit smaller than before’ I convinced myself.  I would look a complete idiot if I turned up at the doctors with a healthy (if a little on the large size) gland that I, Dr. Angela Paranoid, had diagnosed as cancer! 

I was definitely not going to tell my sisters or my mum.  They would make a mountain out of a molehill and they would have me under the surgeon’s knife before I had even finished my sentence!  I did feel a little more uncertain though.  I pushed some uncomfortable questions to the back of my mind and tried to ignore my thoughts about breast cancer.  My thoughts about people I knew or who I had read about with breast cancer.  Like Stephanie the secretary at my daughter’s school – she hadn’t even found a lump, a mammogram did that, and the result was that she had just had a mastectomy.  Or the lady in a magazine article last week.  Well, she was barely a lady, just eighteen and she had elected for a double mastectomy because of some breast cancer history within the family.

I would wait until after another period and monitor it once more.  If it was still there I would go and get it seen to, I promised myself.