Biopsies and lumpectomies

Possible trigger warning – this blog contains a photo of bruising from the biopsies.

Continuuing my story about my cancer diagnosis and treatment. Click here if you want to read my previous blog.

I’m going to skim a little over the nitty gritty details of how I felt facing my mortality and revisit that later. Needless to say it wasn’t brilliant period of time. Instead, I’m going to write about some of the practicalities of what happened.

So in April 2020, as the country was still in it’s first lockdown, I went off work when I was initially diagnosed until I had a few more answers as to what was going to happen and an idea about my prognosis.

Everywhere was pretty much shut, I couldn’t see family or friends, so we spent a lot of time at home, going for walks, playing on the village green. I took a lot of time out for me, adjusting, trying to get my head around things. I focussed on self care, started taking photos of everything in case I wouldn’t be around to see my son grow up and he’d have something to look back on.

…and I went for more tests and more biopsies.

I think I had two or three in the end. In the discussion in the MDT (multidisciplinary team meeting) they weren’t sure if there wasn’t another shadow that they wanted to check out. Results took a few days, they’d discuss it in the meeting, so it seemed like I was up at the breast unit weekly for a while. I got really curious during one of them and started to ask questions and to see the needle and what they were doing – a little bit morbid curiosity and a little understanding to help manage fear.

The things I learnt were that younger women’s breast tissue is denser, and therefore slightly harder to scan and see what’s going on. The biopsy needle I’ve described previously, it’s like a little retractable grabber. They numb the site on the skin, so you don’t feel much, but it definitely leaves a bruise and aches for a while after. They then put the tissue sample in a little vial to send off for testing.

Ok, so excuse the close up of my armpit. It’s hard to include photos which don’t just flash my breast or nipple to the world. I cropped out my face in this photo too as I was massively sleep deprived (thanks to anxiety-based insomnia) and looked rough as a badger’s arse.

This was a few days after the biopsy. You can see the faint yellowing and bruising and the red mark of the needle.

I learnt fairly early on that my breast cancer was estrogen and progesterone positive – which meant that those hormones helped it grow. Since we knew it was in at least one lymph node already, my oncologist was already prepping me for surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. COVID was still a little unknown, many procedures were being cancelled, but I was a (mostly) healthy young woman, who was able to isolate and minimise my contact with others, so was fairly low risk. Many of my initial tests and scans were trying to ascertain sizes and spreads, which would decide if I had a lumpectomy or a mastectomy. To try and speed things up, they’d even booked the surgery date before they knew which it’d be.

…which just so happened to be on my birthday.

Cancer Research UK has some fantastic resources and easy to understand information on all the different types of breast cancer if you want to learn more.