Diary of a breast

Béatrice Maillard-Chaulin prefaced the book Cancer du sein.

Many oncologists refer to cancer as "tunnel". They say that they help us to go through it, towards a possible recovery. I do not completely agree with this image of the underground passage.

When you're driving on a highway and you reach a tunnel, you usually see a few  roadsigns like "switch on your dipped-beam headlamps", "reduce your speed". In short, anything to help you getting ready!

As for breast cancer, you pretty often enter the tunnel without any physical or moral preparation. Provided one drives a little too fast, the shock is even greater.

Everything rushes at the start of this obstacle course. There's a mass arrival of good tips. There's the good friend who has known Professor So-and-so's cousin very well, who himself is quite familiar with the brother-in-law of .... there is the other friend who knows a clairvoyant, .... there's the neighbour whose mother died 20 years ago from a breast cancer, there is ... .. there is....

There is, in the end, a pretty tough crisis to manage while being surrounded by advisers of all kinds, having difficulties finding the way, and having to make clear, quick and sometimes irreversible decisions. Not easy to deal with all this!

This is the book that I would have liked to find on my way the day I started to fight against the breast cancer which struck me, 8 years ago. And yet, no one can say that I lacked of information or care from the medical team who I had decided to trust and to whom I confided, during the treatment time, my poor wounded little body.

The rub is that there is often a serious gap between the pieces of information that you are given and those that you actually understand. Let's say that it's both a matter of time and mood. When a doctor explains something to you, you're not necessarily in the right state of mind to fully understand it. As for me, I'll always remember the day when Dr. Clough told me that my cancer was much more serious than he had expected and that my breast needed to be removed most urgently. That day, I felt like my neurones had brutally become fossilized. The nice Dr Clough could have explained to me anything he would have wanted, I couldn't understand anymore! It was the day after, or the following day that I wanted answers to the questions I was finally asking to myself.  Except that, my interlocutor was no longer there to give me answers, unfortunately!

Also, there are those who want to know as much as possible about their disease, and those who decided that they'd rather not fill their mind with technical details that doesn't seem essential to them. It takes all sorts to make a world. This book enables us to make our choice and to go "shopping" as we please in this "information supermarket".

 Through this approach, I feel like I'm finding again this respect of my freedoms which I experienced in the relationship I had with the team who took care of me. Never was I infantilized or deprived of responsibility. I might have been advised and surrounded, but I was the one toremain in control. Thanks to these "new-wave" doctors' behaviour, I was able to play an active role in this struggle we carried on together, and I am very proud of this. I'd like to thank them very much.

I have now two wishes to express. The first is that research made such progress that this book quickly became obsolete and that a new edition gave us even more hope. The second is that doctors like Dr. Krishna Clough or the other doctors who I met around him were cloned as quickly as possible so that all my hasslemates (past, present or future) could also meet them on their way. It's all I wish to them! That's how solidarity works!