Diary of a breast

Béatrice Maillard-Chaulin prefaced the book Cancer du sein.

Many oncologists use the term “tunnel” to refer to cancer. They say they are helping us to go through it to take us to a possible cure. I do not completely agree with this image of the underground passage.

When you are on a highway and you reach a tunnel, you usually see some signposts like "switch on your dipped headlights", "reduce your speed. In you’re prepared!

With reference to the breast cancer, you often enter the tunnel without any preparation, neither physical nor moral. Provided you driver a bit fast upstream, the shock is even greater!

Everything rushes at the beginning of this assault course. The good tips are flooding in massively. There is your good friend who is very familiar with the cousin of Professor So-and-so, who himself is quite familiar with the brother-in-law .... there is your other friend who knows a clairvoyant psychic, .... and pour neighbour whose mother died of breast cancer 20 years ago, theme is ... .. there is....

There is, ultimately, a good crisis to manage when advisers of all kinds surround us, you find it difficult to find our way around in and you have to must clear decisions, fast ones and sometimes irreversible ones. Not easy to deal with all this!

This book is the book that I would have liked to find in my way on the day I started my adventure against breast cancer that struck me, 8 years ago. Yet, we cannot say that I lacked of information or attention from the medical team that I decided to give my trust to and abandoned, during the time of treatment, my little bruised body.

The problem is that there is often a serious gap between the information that you are given and the one that is actually received. We can say that it is both a matter of time and mood. When a doctor says something to you, it is not necessarily easy to understand. For my part, I always remember the day Dr. Clough told me my cancer was more serious than he imagined and that my breast should be removed as a matter of urgency. That day, I felt like my brain had suddenly fossilized. He could have explained me all he wanted, the very nice Dr. Clough, I didn’t understand anymore! It was the next day or two days later that I would have liked to have answers to the questions I was finally asking to myself.  Except that my interlocutor was unfortunately no longer by my side to answer me!

And then, there are those who want to know a maximum about their disease and those who decided that they preferred not to clutter up their mind with technical details that do not seem essential. It takes all sorts to make a world… This book allows us to make our choice and go shopping whatever you think best among this mine of information.

Through this approach, I fell like I find this respect of my freedoms that accompanied permanently my relationship with the team who was looking after me. During my disease I was never uninformed or disempowered. While I was advised, surrounded, I was still the one who kept the control. Through this ‘new wave ' doctors’ behaviour, I was able to play an active role in this fight we had together and I derive much pride from it. I would like to thank them here.

I have two wishes to express. The first is that research would make such progress that the book quickly becomes obsolete and that a new edition gives us more hope. The second is that doctors like Dr. Krishna Clough or other doctors that I met around him are cloned as soon as possible so that all my comrades in hell (past, present or future) could also meet them on their way. That's all I hope for hem! Solidarity oblige!



Béatrice Maillard-Chaulin
Auteur de « Journal d’un sein » ( "Diary of a Breast")