When I saw my surgeon for my follow up appointment after surgery, he was obviously pleased with how the operation had gone. The incisions were healing well, the margins around the tumour were all very clear. He smiled at me. ‘You won’t need chemo,’ he said. The moral of this story is, don’t take your oncological advice from your surgeon. However skilled they are, this is not their area of expertise. The oncologists I saw had a very different opinion.

I took that false confidence into my first meeting with the radiation oncologist. Radiation I knew to expect; three weeks of it instead of four because the margins were clear. We began, as usual, with education and detail. The registrar took all my facts again, I received another thick sheaf of paper to add to what I had begun to call my portable filing cabinet, a thankfully discreet bag from Bosom Buddies. Then the oncologist herself appeared, a young woman with long fair hair.

Everyone brings a demeanour with them when they walk into a room; they’re at ease, they’re ill at ease, they’re nervous, they’re self-possessed. Her first glance at me was serious. She took a seat and began to explain to me they had received the pathology results for the tumour. It had not reached my lymph nodes but had been active, its growth pattern one that would have seen it move out into the rest of my body. They had removed it but what else might be left behind that they couldn’t see or test for?  ‘It’s fifty-fifty whether you need chemotherapy or not. You’ll need to speak to the medical oncologist,’ she said. Her words were measured but her demeanour suggested she saw this as troubling.

I went home thinking again of the front cover of Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen and its drawing of a woman spectacularly taking a fall.

The medical oncologist was the same one I had consulted last time. I remembered her as a no-nonsense woman who was a stylish dresser. This being the time of Covid, we had a zoom session. Between her and her registrar, they laid out the situation. The tumour was unusual, an unexpected combination of pathologies. They could not tell if there were still microscopic cancer cells present. There might be, there might not be, there was no test to tell. If there were, they could reappear some years down the track as what is called metastasised distant breast cancer. ‘If they do, we don’t have a cure for that,’ said the oncologist. It would four sessions on the second tier of chemotherapy drugs. Horrible but by no means the worst possibility.

They spoke of it as being my decision, laid out the facts and the possibilities objectively but I could read the room; they saw the possibilities as troubling. I was reminded of both the sonologist and the radiologist I spoke of in my first blog. Without tests, they knew accurately what they were looking at pretty much as soon as they saw it. That kind of knowledge can only be gained by experience. To my certain knowledge, my medical oncologist is a very experienced doctor.

It is an odd thing, a precautionary gamble. Distant breast cancer might still happen even with chemo, it might not happen even if I do not have chemo. The percentages of those chances are low but they are possible. I write thinking of a line of William Blake’s poetry, ‘What is the price of experience?’ He goes on to write, ‘It is bought with the price/ Of all that a man hath.’  I couldn’t help but think that all the years of experience the medical professionals I consulted had collected between them meant they knew almost intuitively what they were looking at. I brought my own judgement to the decision. I said I would go ahead with chemotherapy, as another step along the way.