If You Were My Wife....

So, after three weeks of waiting, I finally saw Mr-Breast-Cancer-Oncology-Guru last night to discuss my chemotherapy schedule.

His office was at the top of a gorgeous old Harley Street house. All knee deep, pale grey carpets and polished mahogany, plus the biggest, plushest Christmas trees you've ever seen. There's a lot of money in breast cancer, it seems.

He took a piece of paper, drew a line down the middle and wrote on the top of one side positives, and on the top of the other negatives.

He started with the positives, listing things like size of tumour (relatively small), aggressiveness (mine's a lazy bugger, apparently), type (hormone positive), lymphs (clear) etcetera. It was a fairly long list.

He then moved onto the negatives. He paused, dramatically, over the right hand side of the page, then said..... "Nothing."

Nothing.

He said "If you were my wife, I would not give you chemotherapy."

(By the way, I checked. He does love his wife).

He continued, "in your case, chemotherapy would improve the prognosis by less than one percent."

On that basis, it seems crazy to poison my body (yet again!) for three months, don't you think? Like using a sledgehammer to crush a grain of sand.

I do need a course of radiotherapy (starting next week, I hope), and ten years of hormone therapy, but that's all (relatively) straightforward.

Incidentally, he did ask me how much I drank. I was thrilled.

"Nothing," I replied.

He looked shocked. "Is that a lifestyle choice?" He asked. I confessed that I had, in the past, drunk a little too much (Mr SM was trying not to snigger), so had decided to pack it in completely.

"Very wise," he says "liver disease is the next ticking time bomb amongst middle aged professionals. We see it all the time."

Things are looking up, my friends. I could be past the worst by the New Year.

Big Hugs

SM x