Have the children forgiven you yet?

This is where I tell the story of the morning I was diagnosed with breast cancer and start to explore the years and events leading up to this point.

This piece of writing began as my final assignment in the Curtis Brown Creative ‘Write a Memoir’ Course in February 2002. It later turned into my submission to the Bridport Memoir Competition in September 2022 where it made the top 6%. This felt like an incredible achievement given that I was a novice memoir writer and had no idea writing competitions were even a thing.

We’d been living in Ilkley for a little over six months when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. This is one of hundreds of photos I’ve taken on the moor, this a favourite spot just behind White Wells Spa overlooking Ilkley.

Tuesday 17 April 2018, Airedale Hospital, Steeton, West Yorkshire

I’m sitting in a small waiting area at the breast screening clinic with four other women. I’ve been here since 10am and it’s a while since I’ve seen natural daylight. Tucked behind the clinic’s main reception area, we’re shielded from passing gazes and I’m thankful, because I don’t think I’m the only one struggling with the blue one-size doesn’t fit all hospital gown. Our chairs are tightly packed in a U-shape formation, there’s a low coffee table covered with magazines and newspapers and we’re sitting uncomfortably close to each other.

The other women chat across me about the imminent closure of the Keighley Marks and Spencer’s. I half-listen; half read my book while a low-pitch buzz fills my head. I self-consciously tug at my hospital gown, checking it still covers my upper body while my handbag, jumper, t-shirt, vest top and bra are stowed in a small red plastic basket by my feet. I’ve been examined by a doctor, had my mammogram. Just the ultrasound to go. One by one the other women are called away and I’m left on my own. Silence. I close my eyes and breathe in, two, three four. Out two, three four: trying in vain to release the knot in my stomach.

‘Harriet Mason? Do you want to follow me?’

I look up to see a nurse staring at me. I smile in reply, pick up my basket and quietly follow her the short distance across the corridor into the ultrasound room. Logically, I know I’m only a few paces from Andy and the waiting area where I left him hours earlier, but walls and corridors blur into one and I feel disoriented. I’ve lost my bearings.

The ultrasound room is larger than I expect but then my only other experience of ultrasounds are the 20-week pregnancy scans I had when I was expecting my children, and this feels very different. A sombre room despite the hum of conversation and squeak of Crocs as sonographers and nurses move around checking notes, opening and closing cupboard doors, moving equipment into place.

‘Come on in Harriet, just pop your basket over there and we’ll explain what’s going to happen.’ The nurse who collected me from the waiting area points to a chair and my stomach lurches through nerves and hunger as I lean over to put my basket down. I’ve never been great at eating before noon, my stomach seemingly only able to cope with mugs of tea until lunchtime, and today is no exception. I self-consciously straighten my gown as I stand up again

‘Can I just check a few details before we get going, is that ok?’

I nod.

‘Just pop yourself on the couch and lie down.’

I manoeuvre myself up onto the couch, answering her questions as I lie down, turning my head to the right and towards the ultrasound equipment, mentally ticking off how many people are in the room before turning back to face her. I feel cocooned, the natural cadence of my day suspended in this false light. Auto-pilot kicks in date of birth, address – my alternative vital statistics – all answered without blinking.

I leave it to the last moment before opening the hospital gown, aware that the sonographer is now sitting by my side, ready. Hands hovering above my chest, she’s forcibly shaking a half empty tube of gel above me; we give each other a smile and nod as a blob of gel lands on my right breast. There’s a tiny involuntary flinch when it first touches my skin before she firmly presses on the slim ultrasound probe. With slow, deliberate movements, she starts her investigation while I close my eyes. Because if I close my eyes I’m not really here, am I? And if I’m not here, this isn’t really happening.

‘Oh, Ilkley’s a lovely place to live, isn’t it?’

I’m aware of the voice coming from my left and I slowly open my eyes and smile, acknowledging the conversation starter. I start to answer but I find it hard talking while lying down. The words stick in the back of my throat, and I can’t find my natural voice, only managing a tight, ‘Yes, yes, it is. It’s lovely. We love it. We only moved there six months ago.’ I’m working hard to synchronise my brain, my thoughts and my voice, but the words that come out of my mouth feel clunky, unnatural. Not me.

‘Oh really, so where did you move from?’

‘Bournemouth, but we were only there for three years. We lived in Bath before that, that’s where the children were born.’

It feels important to make this point, that yes, we moved from Bournemouth, but that there was Bath before that. Like I need to claim it as mine, my real home?

We carry on chatting about what it’s like swapping the beach for moorland. Why we moved.  The words I use - redundancy and relocation - so clinical, unemotional. Transactional. So far away from the mental and emotional upheaval involved with leaving a home, friends and family. The tears and confusion. I picture our family, a team of Subbuteo players, picked up and plonked on the opposite end of the football pitch, facing the wrong way, wobbling but still having to carry on playing the game.

The nurse reminisces about her family summer holidays on the south coast, and no doubt there’s a joke about the different climates and clothing we now need. I’m sure I add how fantastic our three children have been, how proud I am of them. Because I am.

I rattle through my script without emotion, honed and repeated countless times over the past few months. I just hadn’t anticipated delivering it lying on a couch while having my right breast scanned. 

I’m acutely aware of my physical vulnerability. It’s the third time this morning that I’ve made conversation whilst semi-naked, and as the weeks and months roll on, this partial nakedness isn’t something I ever get used to.

The pauses between my words get longer, my voice squeaks to a halt and I shift my focus to the ultrasound probe, tuning into its rhythm as it moves around the clockface of my right breast. From the lump I found in the upper area above the nipple, over to my armpit where it carries out several probing circuits, back down below the nipple, and up again to its starting point where it repeats it lap. The sonographer takes her time exploring my armpit, angling the probe in different directions, applying pressure while staring intently at the impenetrable – to me at least - ultrasound screen. It’s the same when she gets to the area a few centimetres below the lump I’d found two weeks earlier.

Murmured conversations between the sonographer and nurses increase in volume, the woosh of the door as someone leaves the room, and I shut my eyes even tighter to prevent the tears I’ve been keeping under wraps from falling. The sonographer stops, puts the probe down and the nurse hands me some paper towels. ‘Well done, Harriet, use these to wipe yourself down. We’ve asked the consultant to come in and take a look. She’ll need to take some biopsies too, is that Ok?’

I note she says biopsies plural, my eyes asking the question my voice can’t manage. She explains that there are two suspicious areas in addition to the lump I found two weeks earlier and I freeze because I know that a lump in my armpit means my lymph nodes are involved, and if my lymph nodes are involved it’s much worse than I thought.

I was far too cynical to believe the GP when she tried to reassure me that the lump was most likely a cyst. I hadn’t believed her at the time, or in the weeks that followed, but neither had it occurred to me that the scans might reveal other suspicious areas. How naïve.

I lift my left hand to cover my face and turn away from her to hide the tears now running down my cheeks, pooling in the fold of my neck, dampening the collar of the blue gown. The nurse who’s been by my side throughout passes me tissues and holds my hand, ‘Are you ok Harriet?’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry. I just hadn’t expected you to find other lumps.’

Eyes closed, I picture the children in their school uniforms and wonder how they are, where they are right now. Walking through noisy school corridors? Sitting in classrooms, heads resting on their hands, writing, listening, learning. With friends, I hope. Completely unaware of where I am.

Shit. Why the hell didn’t I check myself sooner? Have I left it too late? Thank God I did check when I did. What if I hadn’t bothered.

I remember mum’s ultimately futile battle against the relentless march of cancer cells once they found their way into her lymphatic system.

‘Mum died only three years ago, and I miss her. I could do with her being here right now.’

It’s rare that I say these words out loud. Admit openly that I miss her, part of me feels stupid. A 46-year-old grown woman crying for her mum.

‘She died a week after my sister finished treatment for breast cancer. And then dad died four months after mum, and grandma died in the August between them. And we’d only been living in Bournemouth less than a year.’

It comes out in a rush, words disappear into each other, swallowed up into one long sentence because I can’t separate any of these events. I can’t mention mum dying and not dad or grandma. I can’t not mention the timing, that Ginny had breast cancer too.

But it’s mum I want.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, that’s a lot for you to go through.’

I’m quietly cry cross tears and try to work out what mum would say, and it upsets me even more because my memory of her floats just beyond my grasp.

There’s a blur of movement as the consultant walks in, sits down and explains what will happen with the biopsies and I feel the emotional weight of the past few years hit me. I turn into myself because I know how to do that. I know how to block out the noise and hide in plain sight. I silently thank mum and dad for all those Sunday mornings we spent tuning in and out of gospels, endless sermons and readings. All those hours sitting, kneeling and standing, letting the words and refrains wash over me. This ability to sit in silent contemplation learned at a tender age hasn’t left me, and I see it now for the gift it is.

Up until this moment I truly believed that Andy and I could withstand anything. Hadn’t we shown already that we were past masters in the art of resilience and change? Andy’s redundancies had come in quick succession, sometimes just 12 months apart. The news accompanied by an increasingly familiar lurch of the stomach and swearing before a deep breath and, ‘Ok we’ve done this before, we’ll do it again.’

We truly thought that blind faith and sheer bloody mindedness would get us through whatever life chose to throw at us. It had served us well until this point, hadn’t it? This stolid, relentless march led to us relocate twice in three years, moves that bookended mum, dad and grandma’s deaths. From our home in Bath, where the children were born and the longest, I’d lived in any one place to Bournemouth and our hopes of a clean start. A fresh start that was blown out of the water first with Ginny’s cancer, then mum, dad and grandma’s deaths but this now, this feels like it might be the final straw. I feel like I’ve brought nothing but chaos into my family’s life.

And how the hell do I tell the children now that I have cancer now? Because I’m already there, the words breast and cancer linger unspoken, hanging in the air, but I know. We don’t even live in our own home.

The sharp scratches of the local anaesthetic and the pain of the long biopsy needle perform an emergency stop on my spinning mind and slow my spiralling guilt.

‘We’re done Harriet, is anyone here with you?’

‘Yes, my husband, Andy. God, he won’t know about any of this. I don’t know where he is. I left him in the waiting area ages ago. Can someone find him please?’

‘We’ll find him.’

I change back into my clothes and leaving my red plastic basket and blue gown behind, I’m ushered across the corridor into a small room where Andy’s waiting for me with a hug.

‘It’s the bad news room isn’t it?’

We exchange wry smiles as we take in the pamphlets and cushioned chairs.  We’re in a holding pattern, circling, waiting to land back with the doctor before being given permission to leave.

I perch on the edge of a chair and stand up again. I’m fidgeting, pulling down the cuffs on my bobbled long-sleeved t-shirt, tucking my vest into my waistband, making sure my t-shirt is pulled down. Relieved to be fully covered again, the fabric a physical and emotional layer of protection.

Andy tells me he’s been in the waiting area the whole time, not knowing where I was, what was happening or if he had time to pop to the café to grab a cup of tea. I tell him that Keighley Marks and Spencer’s is closing, mentioning the broad west Yorkshire accents and we half-smile, feeling every bit the southern offcumdums we are.

It’s only five-minutes before we’re back in the room where we started our morning. I’m tired and running out of patience. Sitting opposite me is the doctor who examined me at the start, Andy is next to me, and we’ve been joined by Emma, quietly introduced as a breast cancer nurse who sits near the door. I hinge forward in my chair, angling towards the doctor, and I narrow my left eye – my blind left eye – I half-close it when I need to listen hard, a tick telling me what I already know, that beneath my skin, cells and tissue. Somewhere deep down I’m working furiously to calm my rising panic and sound reasonable.

‘Are you saying it’s cancer?’

The consultant has been talking about the examinations, scans and biopsies, but there’s something lurking out of sight. She doesn’t used the word cancer, but it’s there. I look to Andy and Emma for help because I don’t get it. I don’t understand what she’s saying, and words are my thing. I’m meant to be good at talking, listening – communicating, aren’t I? So why can’t I understand what she’s saying.

‘We need the results of the biopsies to confirm, but from what we’ve seen today. Yes, it’s cancer.’ Her eyes flicker from me, to Andy, to Emma and back to me again.

Pause

‘But we need the results from your biopsies to know what we’re dealing with. Can you come back next Tuesday. Emma can make the appointment for you now?’

In numbed silence, we leave the consulting room and allow Emma to shepherd us into another room. We sit with her for a few minutes, and she checks that we’ve understood what’s happened and what’s happening next. We nod, but I’m not sure I do understand. I’m relieved that Andy’s brain rarely switches off allowing me to partially switch out of this conversation. He sits forward, balancing a notebook and pen on his lap. I know he’ll ask questions I’d never think of and remember the answers.

He’s a problem solver par excellence with a memory to match, and at this stage I’m working hard to summon a fake, false confidence that we’ll be able to tackle what’s to come. We leave clutching an appointment card for the following Tuesday and I stare at my watch as we walk back through the hospital, and into the outside world. I see the hour and minute hands and watch the second hand. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. But none of it registers.

‘Is it ok if I call Ginny?’

The deeply rooted need to speak to one of my sisters is strong. Ginny, just a few years post-breast cancer treatment herself is the only call I make.

A week spent hovering above reality

I dampen the grains of guilt, anger and fear I felt while lying on the ultrasound couch and for the next week I hover a few centimetres above reality. I lean into the daily routine, thanking its familiar rhythm. The comfort of walking the same route to school with Saskia, the rhythmic pacing up the steep pavements with Bella our yellow Labrador to the moor. We pass houses we’ve viewed, houses I’d love to live in, always stopping at White Wells to look across the Ilkley rooftops to the slopes of north Yorkshire beyond. We have clean clothes. There’s food in the house. The children get to their various afterschool activities. I go to Pilates and whisper to Bren, my teacher that I might struggle with some movements and swallow the word biopsy as I point to my chest. Lying on my front half an hour later, I flinch. A friend on the mat next to me clocks this and whispers a concerned, ‘Are you ok? What’s up?’  I nod and mouth ‘I’m fine.’ She asks again after class as we head for a coffee, but I brush it off, change the subject and shut down the conversation. 

Beneath this regular, irregular week I tell myself. You’re ok. You can do this. You do change Harriet. You do resilient. You are resilient. It’s just another bump in the road. Remember what mum and dad taught you, ‘One day at a time, and if you can’t do a day, do an hour, a minute or second.’ You know how to survive.

I feel bubbles of resentment but refuse them permission to float to the surface. Resentment that I’ve had enough. I’m fed up with constantly battling life, relentlessly pushing forward against the tide of bad news. Constantly activating ‘one day at a time’ mode. I’m fed up with reflexive responses of ‘I’m fine’ because I don’t have the words to express how I feel. I don’t know how I feel, numb probably. Life is too raw. Too challenging. Too hard.

I fear that history is repeating itself. I’m not an alcoholic, neither is Andy but the decisions I’ve made, that we’ve made that I thought would protect the children and us from the chaos that defined my childhood hasn’t worked. I crave normal sized problems, a regular life yet I feel I’m on permanent high alert, flight, fight and freeze reside in my solar plexus, driving my reactions and responses. And as much as I crave an ordinary life, I’m not sure I’d recognise one or know how to live one. And so, I do the only thing I know how to do and that’s suppress these thoughts, and feel my invisible protective screen rise to encircle me.