By the time I had fought my way back to a life worth living and the hard years were behind me, I just wanted to live my life with my family. Me, my then almost eleven-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, my then almost two-year-old son and his dad David. I didn't long for anything more than peace and quiet with my people around me.
In March 2024, I thought a tenderness in my chest didn't change with my bike ride, it was weak and diffuse, but it was there.
I booked an appointment at the health center and was told that no lump was felt, I was young, I could be calm. I stood my ground and said that I still wanted a referral for a mammogram, which I got. Two weeks later I stood with my breast in the machine for the first time, not worried at all, it was just nice to be able to rule out that it could be something. They asked me to sit in the waiting room to wait for the results of the images, but instead I was called in for an ultrasound. There the doctors saw microcalcifications in the left breast and decided to take a biopsy.
Two days later I lay in another machine with my breasts stuffed into two holes in the couch. I had read that only 16% of all microcalcifications are malignant so I was not particularly worried now either. I joked that this was good with long nursing breasts and received praise for how positive I was while the robot's coarse needle dug into my breast and pulled out a piece that would now be analyzed.
My mother-in-law sent me and my fiancé David to a spa and I waded in the pool outside in the spring air, I was not allowed to bathe the area where they had done the biopsy. I remember how I longed for summer and how nice it would be to have found out that what they had seen in the breast was benign, that I was healthy. Now I would just have to wait for the test results.
After almost two weeks I received a text message about filling out my health declaration in 1177. My two-year-old was sleeping next to me on the couch and my daughter was in her room. David was playing golf quite a bit from Stockholm. I clicked into the website and looked for where I could fill it in somewhere.
Time and space completely froze when I suddenly saw words like "tumor" and "malignant" on the screen.
The tears started to flow and I gaped as if I were screaming without sound. Breast cancer. For me a death sentence. Would I die now? How could I die now? I remember the thought so clearly. "My son will not even remember me, he is too young for his mom just dies". I wrote a text message to my daughter's dad. "Pick up C, I have breast cancer". I don't remember if she left or how it was when my son woke up, nor that I called and asked David to come home. But when he did, I know that I refused to be weak, I used my lifelong trained ability to totally shut down and say what everyone wanted to hear. I calmed my surroundings, assured them that everything would be fine. At the same time I wrote farewell letters to my children and cleaned out boxes so that there would at least be a little order at home when David became a single parent. That time is today a fog of more biopsies, MRI, planning for surgery, positive covid tests and postponed surgery dates and so at last I was operated on. A wedge operation where they would remove the small diseased area. "A baggie" they said and dismissed my wish to remove the whole breast immediately to avoid more possible operations.
When you operate out a diseased part of the breast you want to get "clean margins", that is to say that all the diseased is removed. In my case there was more diseased than the examinations showed. Healthy lymph nodes showed that the cancer was only local in the breast, which was an enormous relief. One operation became four, and not even after the whole breast was removed were the margins sufficient. Therefore I chose radiation, because the medicine I would take for five years could give severe side effects and I might not be able to take it for the whole time the oncologist recommended.
On my son's three-year birthday I did my next to last of fifteen radiation treatments and lay still in the squeaking machine and thought that "this is not part of being a parent of a small child". I bought cake at Thelins outside Södersjukhuset and went home and celebrated my fine boy.
It was strange and sometimes tough to hear people's often well-meaning but tactless comments. "Nice that you got the cancer you want" and "why do you have hair on your head if you had cancer?".
I often felt that I maybe didn't have the right to be sad or participate in different forums and contexts because my cancer was not "real cancer" according to some.
At the same time my diagnosis was exactly breast cancer and I went through operation after operation.
Two months later I sought help at the emergency room twice for a strange feeling in the chest. After a night, over eleven hours of waiting, I finally managed to get a doctor to do a chest x-ray. After the x-ray she sent me home and said that "it was as I thought, nothing". The morning after a stressed person called from the emergency room and said that upon further look at the x-ray images they had found two blood clots in the lung. I had to hurry to a pharmacy and pick up blood thinners that I then took for a few months. I also had to abruptly stop the medicine that they said was so important to reduce the risk of recurrence, probably it was the one that caused my blood clots.
The breast that was radiated became more and more affected over time. Finally it was like a tennis ball in shape and size. My breasts were extremely asymmetrical and I had gained a lot of weight from medicines and from having pain in the body and difficulties using it as usual. It was incredibly tough to lose the body I knew in such a short time.
Today I am seen as fully treated and healthy. Once a year I am called for a check to see that the mammography is without remarks. I have operated both breasts and hope that they will continue to be at peace and fine. I will never be able to breastfeed again, which is a big sorrow since I don't know if I will have more children. Breastfeeding is sacred to me and among the best I have experienced in life. But for me it weighed heavier to have two identical breasts than the possibility of breastfeeding in the future.
No operation can fix my psyche. I am forever changed by hearing as a young parent of two that they "found something". It throws you out into an ocean of uncertainty, worry and death anxiety.
Being on sick leave for cancer is also an unpaid full-time job – doctor visits, contact with the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, planning and logistics.
Furthermore it is expensive and financial stress is added. But nothing else do I want from life than time and health for me and the people I love. Nothing will ever be more important than to be together, healthy and safe.
I have better and worse days. I feel an endless gratitude and humility towards life and the help I received at St Görans Hospital. But some days my death anxiety is so paralyzing that I cannot even talk about it with my closest or a psychologist. I am not afraid to die, not afraid of what comes after this life. I just so badly want to be along, I want to be here. I want more summers, mosquito bites and ice cream sticky children's fingers to wipe. More tired Tuesday dinners, nagging about homework and iPhone chargers. Sing power ballads in the shower, drink a cold beer on an outdoor terrace in the spring sun and hear David put the key in the lock when he comes home. Kiss foreheads goodnight, cry at the children's summer wrap-ups and Lucia processions. All this many thousands of times more.
I love this life, however it tests me, I love to be along.
If you think you need to examine something you don't recognize with your body – stand your ground. Your health is worth more than the good mood at the health center. No one is too young to be affected, but the earlier something is detected, the easier it is to arrange. Take care of yourselves and each other. Love!
/Fanny
