4. The corridor of many doors

Life is a corridor of many doors. Behind each one is an opportunity.

That’s what I’d like to think, but on the Corridor of Cancer, the doors tend not to open onto opportunity.

I don’t know about your hospital, but the breast clinic at mine was a series of doors off a long corridor which is perhaps why a metaphor of corridors was helpful to me in trying to understand what happened.

I went, one sunny spring afternoon, to get the results of a biopsy I’d had a couple of weeks earlier. Of course, I was just going to hear that there was nothing to worry about and I would be walking away into the late April sunshine feeling guilty I’d wasted everybody’s time. Not so. The air was suddenly thick with words I didn’t want to hear.

There are pre-cancerous cells ... mastectomy advised ... another biopsy just to be sure...

Pre-cancerous. The mind tries to make sense of it all. Pre-cancerous. That means it’s not really cancer yet. What a hand-hold that little prefix was to a woman sliding down into a crevasse!

Mastectomy. That seems a bit drastic. But if I have a mastectomy I won’t need chemo and radiotherapy. Thank God, those words have always filled me with terror.
The spring sunshine made our faces glow and mine felt hot, trying as it was to contain those prickly tears.

Although having the first biopsy had been an uncomfortable experience which had left me exhausted and in pain, if another might help in the avoidance of something so drastic as a mastectomy, it was to be welcomed. Of course, looking back now, I realise how the mastectomy was probably inevitable, but who loses hope so early on? The second biopsy was to see how widespread the cells were.

You will notice that I have written quite a lot already and the word ‘lucky’ has been silent. I can’t keep it quiet any longer. You see, in all of this awful news crashing around my ears, I was lucky, am lucky, that the Consultant Surgeon broke the news in such a kind and understanding way, diminishing the brutality of the solution with its advantages, the key one being reconstruction of the breast. I am lucky that she is one of the kindest, most skilful women I have ever come across and is at once reassuringly down to earth whilst at the same time highly capable in being at the ‘cutting edge’ (excuse pun) of breast surgery and reconstruction.
Laden with leaflets about DCIS – Ductal Carcinoma in Situ - and introduced to my Macmillan nurse, I thought about corridors. I had expected to walk in one door, marked ‘All clear and nothing to worry about’ but had been ushered past that to the one marked, ‘Early stages, treatable, likely to make a full recovery.’ I realised that in the shadowy imagined corridor were many doors; the signs on each became progressively more depressing, and there at the very end, I could just make out the dull sign marked exit, terminal, death.

I shivered as if the icy draught which blew from that direction was keen to remind me of just where I was. I glanced up to confirm the sign - early stages, treatable, likely to make a fully recovery - was the door I had been summoned to, turned the handle and stepped into the startling light. I closed the door, eager to escape the ominous passage I had stood in, sighed with relief and allowed the warm sun on my skin to soothe me. ‘Thank you, God.’ I whispered. ‘for it being this door, just one down from the all-clear. I saw the other doors and know where the corridor leads. I’m lucky. Thank you.’

Outside, beyond the window, that Thursday afternoon after Easter, nature was rampaging through the fields, spray-painting the landscape with letters of vibrant yellows and intense reds.

‘Resurgam.’ she had written. ‘I will rise again.’ I read.