Lump: a story about breast cancer.
3.5 years ago, when I first got diagnosed with breast cancer my impulse was to try and pin down some of the emotional turmoil I was going through. I ended up reaching for a pen (ok a keyboard) and I started to write. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and the words poured out. Angry, scared, shocked, confused but most of all I guess, they were honest. I just wanted to talk to myself and my partner, David, about the blunt reality of what that cancer diagnosis felt like from the inside. Many, many thousands of words later we discussed making the private more public in the hope that it might help others so, quietly, somewhat covertly, I put it up as a blog, kind of hoping it would never be found. It was found and the comments from its many readers found a mixed response in me. I was delighted that my words seemed to hit the mark for so many people whilst at the same time being profoundly sad that so many others were going through similar emotional turbulence for whatever reason in their lives. I may not have intentionally written for anyone else, but it seemed I had anyway.
-
Now, 2 years down the line, we’ve decided to turn the blog into a podcast. Writing for the spoken word has always been my natural habitat so it does seem the obvious next step but how would it feel to step back in time, not just to re-read all those emotional outpourings but actually give them a voice, my voice? Would it open up too many wounds? It has been emotional and sad but at the same time, there’s nothing quite like stepping into your old footprints to realise just how far you’ve walked since you made them. I was a bit anxious about the recordings too, concerned how I’d cope with doing them on my own or if I’d need a hand to hold. In the end I decided to just go it alone and in practise it hasn’t perhaps been quite as bad as I thought it might, although with hindsight it would have been a kindness to Dave and Johnny at The Music Shed studios in Inverness to actually tell them what I was going to be talking about before we started recording! Over the course of several hours together and many shared tears, they’ve become firm friends and I’ve now added them to the legion of amazing people cancer has brought me into contact with.
Among them, although our friendship started before cancer formed an unfortunate overlap between us, is Ali McRitchie, Salon Director of The Head Gardener in Inverness. When we took a gentle walk together, discussing Ali’s own recent cancer recovery and I told her of our plan to create LUMP, a podcast from the blog, she immediately offered her sponsorship and support. With Ali on board suddenly LUMP felt real and most importantly, the right thing to do. I’d been nervous of our teaming up with a sponsor, concerned about finding the right fit for something at times so dark and difficult but Ali ‘gets’ every word I’ve written. The ethos at the salon is one which directly aligns with my own and Ali’s relentless fundraising and support for cancer charities, married with her first-hand knowledge of the challenges of diagnosis, felt like the perfect fit.
So now, all that’s left to do is to launch LUMP and push it out into the big wide world. The plan is to have the first 4 episodes drop on Friday 11th August then we’ll publish a fresh episode every Friday morning across the year ahead. The accompanying original blog will be re-published here. While I’ve been itching to noodle with them, on the most part I’ve stayed true to the original words I chose. They were how I felt at the time, so I’ve tried to stay true. That also means what you’ll hear and read is unapologetically sweary.
So, please do subscribe, comment, rate it, review it and share it with anyone and everyone who you know who has ever been touched by cancer.
Pen June 2023 x
PEN’S NOTES ON EVERY EPISODE HERE ↓
Ep.33: Cheat
Tears pour down my face as David drives us to the shop. I should be excited, elated and a small quiet corner of me is but right now, right at this very second, I’m broken hearted about what this trip and this purchase represents.
Ep.32: Love song to the lost
Looking back at the blog entries over the past few months I wonder if it all looks too relentlessly bleak. Themes of death and discomfort and frustration surface again and again. And of course getting cancer is pretty bloody bleak but – even if it sometimes feels like it haunts my every waking moment – it’s not the whole picture.
Ep.31: I’m here. I hear. I know.
A friend of ours has cancer. A fellow cyclist, someone I’ve spent many hours cycling alongside. Another fit, happy, life-loving, positive person has cancer. Another person who was floating through life thinking they’d be the last person on earth to get cancer, has got cancer. It’s the first friend to be diagnosed since my own diagnosis and I feel frozen.
Ep.30: Scattered
‘Where do you want to be scattered when you die?’ B asks out of the blue. It trips me up in more ways than one and I’m rendered speechless. I don’t know why I should be so surprised at the idea of B considering my death – after all there isn’t a day that passes without my testing the thought against the back of my teeth – and the parent in me feels duty bound to mine into why she’s asking the question but I’m not sure I can go there without crying.
Ep.29: FW
‘So’ David says, in between a gulp of beer and a mouthful of steak ‘I guess we could get married next year’
In a brief moment of calm after the storm of summer visitors and while lockdown is loose enough to allow such things, we head out for dinner at a local pub.
Ep.28: Get thee to the spare room!
As July rolls into August my inability to say ‘no’ to visitors means more and more people land at our door and I progressively become more and more exhausted – emotionally, physically, mentally, wrecked!
Ep.27: Ali
As I walk down the track there’s an adder basking in the sun near the gate. I pause, delighted by it, a kid again. I’d known there might be snakes on the croft but I’d not seen one in the wild before so to see this one up close is special.
Ep.26: Hard to kill
I’m not very good at looking at myself yet so the thought of having others look at me is a challenge. An appointment has come through for me to go back to the hospital to see my surgeon and review where things are at 6 months down the line. 6 months.
Ep.25: Mrs Grumpypants
‘And what do you think about your mum having had cancer?’
We were staying with my great friend Ghillie, sitting in her kitchen cutting up cheese and slices of ripe honeydew melon which B kept snaffling.
Ep.24: The art of not dying just yet
‘What are you most looking forward to?’ my mum asks me one day when we’re in the kitchen cooking. They’ve finally jumped through enough lockdown rules and red tape to feel confident to make the 10 hour drive from Cambridge to the north of Scotland without being stopped at the border and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my diagnosis.
Ep.23: Reset
With the easing of Covid lockdown David returns to work and my days start to stretch uncomfortably wide. The familiar sense that I should be doing something, anything, haunts me. I draw up a list of possibilities but none of them appeals. I disregard taking the bottles to the bottlebank because it involves lifting so that’s an easy escape, plus accompanying my pathological need to ‘do’ is the reality that I should be practising the art of ‘not doing’ if my back is to heal.
Ep.22: Mind v Body
Cooking dinner one evening a few week’s after surgery and suddenly my brain goes quiet. I tune in to my senses to try and work out what’s just happened, what’s different, and I realise that for the first time I can’t feel my back. Quite suddenly, like as switch being turned off, my brain decides to accept the shape and feel of what’s happened to my body.
Ep.21: Fragile
Lying in bed we can see the loch and each morning when we wake we stare at the view in disbelief and David says ‘another day in paradise’. As we inch through spring the sun rises earlier and earlier and I find myself up at 5, watching the deer graze in the field below the house.
Ep.20: After life
Its Easter Sunday and I’m sitting on the deck of our new house with a cup of tea and a hot-crossed bun watching the milky sunshine play on the loch. There’s just enough breeze to raise wrinkles on the surface of the water and it briefly reminds me of the wrinkles on my shrunken mis-shaped new breast.
Ep.19: Cancer v Covid
Its Tuesday 24th March, 2 week’s after my surgery and we’re due to move house on Friday. We have nothing packed and the removal firm have just called to cancel on us because last night Scotland went into lockdown and Covid-19 has moved from background noise to centre stage.
Ep.18: Get a life
‘FUUUUUUCK!’ I shout loudly in pain as I do as I’m told and sit up for the surgeon to inspect my back. The shock of it floors me and I pant. ‘I told you the hard work starts now’ he said, then sets out my goals for the day, up, a shower and into a support bra.
Ep.17: Surgery
There’s a small crowd in my hospital room as my surgeon takes out his thick black pen and marks me up. I stand, naked to the waist, hands on hips as he draws a line down my sternum and circles my left breast, ‘this is the do not cross line’ he says to a trainee doctor, Alice, who’s one of the crowd.