Today we feel incredibly fortunate to be able to introduce you to the wonderful Katie who you may also known as @kates_cleavage. Katie is an English teacher and writer from Hertfordshire in the UK. Last year she was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer (with mets in her left hip) and now, in her own words, she is navigating stage 4 breast cancer at the age of 30.    

We hope you enjoy Katie's blog as much as we have. We're sure you'll agree that it so beautifully expresses those complex emotions that we know will be (sadly) so familiar to so many women in this community.

The Big Bad: Recurrence and Life Beyond It

"I want to start by sharing an excerpt from the memoir I penned during my primary diagnosis at twenty-one. I wrote over 40,000 words during my treatment; it was a means of navigating the unknown, of making sense of the changes I was experiencing. The last thing I penned, before abandoning the project for living beyond cancer, is below:  

‘Fear pulsates through my temples, pressing hard against my skull, urging my thoughts to enter my brain at a much faster pace than I would like. Here in the breast clinic waiting room at the University College London Macmillan Cancer centre I find myself repeating the same question repeatedly to myself and to my nervous father sitting next to me: what do I do if it has come back? I am wondering if my cells have begun again to fiendishly tangle together, like a pair of messy shoelaces, forming that suffocating mass inside my breast. Over the past year, I have experienced a multitude of phantom aches and pains. At one point, I went to my oncologist with a persistent tenderness in my ribs that an ultrasound deemed entirely fabricated by my fanciful imagination. On another occasion, I became entirely obsessed with a supposed swelling in my abdomen, which again did not prove to be a massive tumour crawling like poison ivy through my intestines. This is the nature of the fear that I am sentenced to live with for the rest of my life. The inconsolable fear of reoccurrence is enough to tempt you into putting an end to contemplations of a happy future. My fear is not especially unique, from reading other women’s blogs I have noted a serial trend in those entries made as soon as the wheels of remission start gaining motion. We ‘survivors’ make it our business to fixate on the probability of reaching the finishing line, of touching base at the house of complete remission.’

That was the last I wrote on cancer back then. You see, I wanted to step outside of that fear, relegate it in my mind. I suppose I mainly succeeded. For five years of remission I qualified to become a secondary English teacher, travelled, fell in and out of love, lived my life with a view to having a long future.  

The Big Bad did return though, in 2016 with a new primary tumour in my left breast. I felt somewhat frustrated that all that fear had come back to justify itself. The new tumour was found in my yearly scan: an essential part of the monitoring process after any cancer diagnosis. I will wrap this chapter of my life up by saying that it was dealt with via a second mastectomy and little else medically speaking. Caught early, I did not have to endure any further treatment. Part of me wonders whether this was a mistake. However, it does not serve me now fixating on this. One again I moved on, but emotionally the fear had resurged with this second diagnosis before thirty.  

In 2019, slap bang in a brand new year, I was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer. A dull hip ache sent me advocating for scans and investigations. This wasn’t easy, I had to have some very difficult phone calls to get the secretary to organise a bone scan. What’s more, it took four tests, including a bone biopsy, to determine that it was cancer. How do I feel now? Sometimes tired, sometimes scared, but mostly alive. Knowing that you will need to dedicate your life to healing, one day at a time, is overwhelming. But I like to think that it is not outside of the realm of possibility. Fear is life limiting, it poisons your present moment, and that is all we really have, cancer or no cancer. I am not immune to fear: it resurfaces with every three-month scan. Scanxiety takes hold but not when I do not let it. As I write this, my results are next week. Until then I will focus on what I have: a lively, life affirming classful of kids ready to learn with me, a safe home that I can return to a place of self-care, and a dream that keeps me alive. I will finish my book, but it won’t be about cancer. Not directly anyway."  

Thank you so much for sharing your wonderful blog with us, Katie. We can't wait to read more of your writing in the future!