Understanding Breast Cancer
Chapter One
Introduction 1
As a health journalist I thought I knew a lot about cancer and my own chances
of getting it. Looking around my long-lived, relatively cancer-free family I blithely
assumed I was safe. It's true that my father died of lung cancer at the age of 59,
but that was after a lifetime - starting at 13 - of chain-smoking. Oh, and his sister
died of cancer, but she was also a very heavy smoker, so I never felt that counted
either. I concentrated, instead, on the fact that all four of my grandparents lived
well into their 80s or 90s, and that my mother is a miracle of fitness who survived
a major car crash on a bridge holiday in France a couple of years ago at the age of
87 without a broken bone.
Well, I was wrong. I was sitting in the bath one Saturday night in March 2002
when I felt a shooting pain in my right breast. It felt - in retrospect at least - as
though I was following a neon arrow pointing to The Lump. At first I thought I
must be mistaken. But no, it did seem like a definite lump. That night I slept fitfully
and every time I woke I reached again to feel for it, hoping that perhaps I had been
mistaken. It was an agonising wait until Monday morning, when I went to the GP
as an emergenc ... read full excerpt from Understanding Breast Cancer ebook
