Be a better advocate for your own health.

I was twenty-four when I first found the lump. It wasn’t like I was actively searching for it, because at that age breast cancer was the last thing on my mind. I was young, after all, in the prime of my life. I worried about things like the fine art of balancing my paycheck between my bills and a social life, or whether my thighs looked big in my jeans or there was enough makeup in the world to cover my latest breakout. I certainly wasn’t giving any thought to dying.

I was in the shower, enjoying the exotic scent of my new coconut body scrub, when I thought I felt something. Nothing obvious, just something. I prodded and rubbed the area on my right breast, just to the side, almost under my armpit, for a few minutes before I decided I was imagining things, because sometimes I could feel it and sometimes I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be anything serious, I reasoned, if I could only find it half the time.

So I dismissed it until a few weeks later, when I felt it again. I went along to my GP, only my normal GP wasn’t there and I was ushered in to see a twelve-year-old-looking woman with a waist-length braid who looked like she’d be more at home under a skipping rope. “It’ll be nothing. A cyst, most likely,” she said, in what she imagined was a reassuring way but actually came across as massively condescending.

“But what if it’s not?”

“Then there are a myriad of other possibilities. It is highly unlikely, at your age, to be malignant.”

“Are you sure you’re, you know, qualified?”

She’d smiled like she’d heard that a hundred times that day already and asked me to lie down on the bed.

She couldn’t feel it. I put my finger over it and she tried again. She frowned.

“If anything it feels like a slight thickening, rather than a lump. I think it’s hormone-related. Where are you on your cycle?”

“I don’t know, somewhere in the middle?”

“Come back and see me in a month, once you’ve had a period. If you can still feel it, that is.”

A month later not only could I still feel it, but it felt bigger. Harder.

My usual GP was back from her holiday, resplendent with a golden tan and an air of seaside-induced breeziness. I’ll never forget the way her smile slipped, and how her eyebrows almost met above her nose when she frowned.

“Oh, yes, I can feel it,” she’d said. “Let’s book you in for an ultrasound.”

She saw the look of abject terror on my face.

“Just to be on the safe side.” She smiled. “I’m sure it’s nothing more than a completely benign cyst.”

It wasn’t.

The lady who did the scan gave nothing away, although I searched her face for clues. I was still feeling fraudulent, like I was making a drama over nothing and sucking up appointment time that some poor woman somewhere with a real problem could have been using.