THE PLAN FOR TREATMENT and more tests

End of May, early June 2012. I now passed from the ground floor area of the specialised hospital unit where all the preliminary tests are planned and carried out to the first floor where the breast cancer chemotherapy day hospital is.  Waiting room blues - full of women who all seemed to be of my mother's generation!  So many headscarves. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.  I don't belong here, I'm young (hmm, well, let's be honest, quite a bit over 40) and fit and HEALTHY!  Waiting room jitters.  Denial?  Actually I WAS extremely healthy from the strict vegan diet I was on.  My skin glowed, my hair shone, my joints and muscles were supple and strong. I had never felt better.  And my energy levels were soaring.

My newly-assigned doc:  Dra Nuñez.  Very, very confident, very no-nonsense, friendly.  They needed to determine EXACTLY what type of cancer it was, (boy are they good detectives, I really mean that).  I would have to go for loads more tests:  blood test, heart test, scans of different sorts with luminous liquids inside me.  (Shall never forget Eduardo, the technician /nurse? who administered a couple of these tests.  His humour and his friendliness made my neurotic nervous system calm down and cope.  And so many needles!!!)  Thank you Eduardo.

Once they had the results of these, they could decide which drugs to use. Scary fact: Dr Nuñez happily said they had a 60% success rate for all breast cancers and my type of profile tended to respond well (youngish and healthy, aggressive tumour, 3 out of 3 on the cancer richter scale).  Left her office afraid, it hadn't entered my conscious mind that I could actually die, but all the while there were tests it was like buying time, putting off chemotherapy, because I was already treating the tumour and the CAUSE by alternative means, and there were no decisions to be made. Decision making does me in. All I knew was that I DID NOT WANT CHEMOTHERAPY, I REJECTED IT FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY SOUL.  Had to find a way or myriad ways to avoid chemotherpay.

It's also a perplexing situation to be in - everybody is telling you you are ill, and yet physically you feel phenomenal, better than ever before.  I couldn't get my head round that one. The line between living in a fantasy or living in the real world, whatever that is, well, just living really. I wasn't ignoring the situation, I was doing all kinds of treatments, so why should I label myself ILL? The euphemism for illness is health challenge, and I started using this term (well actually I started saying health problem/problema de salud in Spanish) because the word illness carries so much negative weight.  The power of words and labels.