DIAGNOSIS round 2

May 2012.  Hospitals. Funnily enough, I've always liked hospitals  (and chemist's- how do you make that plural? OK, pharmacies - for that matter).  I mean, a squeaky clean place dedicated to healing, curing, caring for people. The comfy clean cotton clothes they all wear - the white coats, the croks.  Angelic nurses.  A place where they deal with the nitty-gritty of existence, very little of the bullshit you get in our every day life.  (Further down the line, I still believe a lot of this true.)   But up till then I'd never really been a patient before- only once, for one afternoon, which barely counts.  I might come back to that another time, because it was actually a very serious thing that happened to me when I was 30 but I was oblivious to the gravity of the situation, and we all know that's way preferable to being aware.

So Friday 18th May. Hospital, on the northern edge of Barcelona.  Referred there by the GP.  I get myself assigned to a doctor, whom we'll call Dr Jerez or Dr Granada or maybe Dr Huelva.  He programmes all the same tests as in the Delos clinic.  So the following week I find myself having another mammogram, another ultrasound, and ... oh shit!  another biopsy, on a breast that was still black and blue from the week before.  Let me say it again folks, the biopsy HURTS, although I have to say I am a bit of a cry-baby, but good golly miss molly, it really does hurt. You feel as if a group of miners have gone into your breast, rummaged around, mined the seams, and left you with the after effects.  Constant shooting pains along the ducts and glands to the nipple. Very, very painful indeed, although not totally unbearable.  And I hadn't felt the presence of the lump before, but after each biopsy you become acutely aware of what your breast is like inside.  Here's a picture for the non-squeamish.


So, then off I went, back to life as we know it, (maybe I should call the doctor Dr Spock?)  results would come within 12 days or so.  Still wasn't worried per se.  Eternal optimism.