Today I cleaned my house and joined a secret group on Facebook that is for young women with breast cancer. Both of these things have been a positive step in the right direction, mentally.

If I am honest, I was not mentally considering that I might need chemo. I was playing this hand as ‘it’s a small tumour, it was found early, I will probably only need radio and then I can have that baby’. Chemo was not on the agenda. I had started to mentally prepare myself for a mastectomy if the cancer had spread to the surrounding breast tissue, and I was OK with the live tissue/liposuction option now offered for reconstructive surgery. But chemo – no. 

Which is probably why, when the oncologist told me I needed it, I treated the idea of poisoning yourself almost into oblivion as an option rather than a preferred treatment. Why would I choose to have chemo? That’s ridiculous. 

Oh, perhaps because if I don’t, I have a one in two chance of developing a secondary cancer within the next couple of years and I have three children who would be better off putting up with 5 months of their mother having chemo than her having several years of secondary cancers and possibly dying.

Then my friend Lesley turned up out of the blue (it wasn’t entirely out of the blue, because she had text me, but that would have involved me being upstairs near my phone and not wandering about downstairs going ‘Fucking hell, I really need to clean the house, where do I start? Am I capable of doing the stairs yet?’). We had a cup of tea, and then she said she’d do the stairs for me, and then she said ‘Shall I just do upstairs and then I’ll go?’ and when she’d done upstairs she said, ‘Shall I just do downstairs and then I’ll go?’ and then she ended up doing the whole house while I was dusting. Which was pretty amazing. And that got me thinking about how people do nice things for you when you’ve got cancer. 

Then my dad rocked up after the Pompey match with a box (yes, a box) of wine for me. He was only coming in to watch the scores and wait for a later train to avoid the crowds, but he brought a wine box with him. 

And the secret group I joined on Facebook, which I won’t say much about because it’s secret, so if they wanted their stuff publicised they wouldn’t have gone to that trouble, is full of women like me – and younger – who have breast cancer and it reminded me that I am one of many. Many, many, many  women who have to deal with this crap. So unless some oncologist somewhere down the line gives me a terminal diagnosis, I will henceforth be attempting to man the fuck up and deal with it. No more considering chemo as an option that I might do. Anything to help prevent cancer being anywhere in my body ever again is a blessing surely.