October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and each year everything turns pink. Despite my dislike of the colour I understand the reasoning behind this and accept that it’s a great way to raise money for the charities involved. The trouble is that however pink and fluffy you make it cancer still kills far too many people. According to the charity Breast Cancer Now roughly five in every 100 people with breast cancer already have secondaries when their cancer is first diagnosed. It is roughly estimated that a further 35 out of every 100 people with primary breast cancer will develop secondary breast cancer within 10 years of their first breast cancer diagnosis.
Today is Secondary Breast Cancer Awareness Day. It annoys me that there is only one day in a whole month of pink warriors championing survivorship that is dedicated to the only kind of breast cancer which kills. I had planned to do lots to help raise the profile of this day but I’ve been unwell for nearly two months and I’ve spent the last nine days in hospital with pneumonia. All my plans and best intentions fell down in the face of such a serious infection which is painful, debilitating and frightening. As I am now inching myself along the road to recovery I wanted to take a few moments to write about secondary cancer and what it means to me.
Having cancer can at times be lonely and terrifying. Living with a life-limiting illness pushes me to reach levels of endurance that I hadn’t thought possible. We normally associate endurance with feats of strength like running marathons or climbing mountains but for me it is a daily endurance that is required. Every day I have to wake up and remember again that my body has turned upon itself and might self-destruct. It is like living with a bomb inside me. I don’t know how many moments are left on the clock. This is true for everyone alive but not everyone has an illness that forces them to confront their own mortality each morning anew. Cancer has required me to endure painful and debilitating treatments and their ongoing aftermath. If I had been told at the beginning all that I would have to go through, everything I would have to surrender, then I would have said it wasn’t possible. I would have told you that I didn’t have the strength, the resilience or the courage to do it but sometimes we only learn of the existence of our deepest resources when we have to dig down for them.
I know many women living and dying from secondary cancer. They are strong, funny, smart, dynamic people who don’t want to be pink and fluffy but also have absolutely no desire to be regarded as tragic figures to be pitied for their misfortune. What they want is to be given the best chance at the best life possible. For some that means fighting to access drugs in a political tug-of-war between the government and the drug companies. For others it means ensuring they can get the right support to live and die with dignity. I feel immensely grateful to know these ladies, they have become dear friends and I know I can tell them everything I am going through, both good and bad, and they will stand beside me in joy and in sorrow. Like me they have been forced to learn of their own powers of endurance. For me, today is not just about raising awareness of this disease but also about raising awareness of the women living with and enduring the disease.
Life In Extremis 