My diagnosis had come off the back of a phone call asking me to get to the hospital as soon as possible, so I had assumed that there might be more urgent, terrible calls, and sat by my phone in my house and refused plans, in a really normal, healthy way.

I cancelled my gigs and told work I would be taking a sick line, and everyone was nice about it. I cried a lot. The television was generally on, and books were open in front of me. I bought some yarn because I thought it would be the time to learn how to crochet, which I’ve still not used.

Even at this point, only a month later, I feel a bit embarrassed saying this, because I now feel a lot more reassured that it will be fine and my cancer is entirely treatable. But for a few weeks, I think I was quite sure that I was going to die. And if not now, this time, I had at least found out how I was going to die, eventually. When I said anything even close to this out loud, people were generally upset or appalled, and quickly corrected me, which I understand. It did feel like I had to sit in the feeling on my own.

I don’t think I understand this period of time or the effect it had on me, yet. Something fun to talk about in therapy, or at a party if things really dry up.

The first follow-up appointment after the diagnosis was an MRI. This is carried out to take more detailed images of the area affected, which are then used to help determine a treatment plan. I had never had an MRI before, but a friend reassured me that it’s just a bit uncomfortable to lie in the same position for a long time, and it’s very loud, but not painful. This intel turned out to be correct. A nurse fitted me with a catheter in the crook of my elbow, which she explained would be used to inject contrast fluid into my veins, highlighting tumours or lumps on the screen so that they could be analysed more easily.

I was brought into the room and invited to lie face-down on a bed with a sort of massage-table pillow. My hips and legs were raised slightly. If you’re thinking that sounds a bit undignified, you’re spot on. Take a look at this helpful illustration from the Mayo Clinic of a miserable woman with hingin tits:

Now we’re all on the same page.

A team of three radiographers - three felt like overkill, but maybe they just went about all their business together, like The Fates of Greek mythology, or The Supremes - got me positioned, hooked me up to a tube containing the contrast fluid, and gave me a little ball to squeeze if I wanted to stop for any reason (bit kinky). The radiographers left to watch through a big window in another room, and my bed slid backwards into the huge tube, like a reverse Pringle (which is, coincidentally, my favourite position).

It wasn’t as claustrophobic as I feared, because as previously mentioned, I was in DJ Isaac Pose (face down, ass up) so I couldn’t actually see the top of the machine or how close it was. Even with the advance warning, it was incredibly and uncomfortably loud. There was also a sort of Doppler effect when the scanner, or alarm, or whatever makes the noise, got closer to my head, which was disorientating. As promised, it wasn’t painful at all, but I was quite light-headed and achy when it was done.

--

Having any appointment at all felt productive, but shortly after arriving home, I felt a new wave of dread, or rather a stagnant, standing puddle of dread that I walked into with socks on, because it didn’t go anywhere. It just clung to me. I had no other appointments lined up, and no information or plan.

It’s important to point out that in this first month or so, I didn’t really know anything about my cancer except that I had it. I didn’t know if it was a so-called ‘good one’ or a scary one. I knew the size of the lump was fairly small, and that it didn’t look like it had spread to my lymph nodes, but that would be determined by the results of the MRI. I didn’t know what hormones or proteins were involved, whether it would be easy or difficult to treat.

For this reason – I would recommend not saying ‘thank God you caught it early!’ to anyone who has received a diagnosis until you’re 100% sure this is the case. Quite often, you don’t really know, and when you find out, it’s never quite early enough.

In this time, I called the Macmillan helpline, the Breast Cancer Now helpline, and my nurse team several times, just to ask what was happening and what I was supposed to do. The results from my MRI would take a couple of weeks – I burst into fresh tears every time someone told me this, for some reason. I sincerely felt like I knew I didn’t have weeks, and no one else understood that, because they only had years of study and training in oncology, and I had a 2:1 in Spanish and a gut feeling.

Every nurse I spoke to was patient, understanding, and let me cry. They gently advised me to avoid forums, support groups, and cancer community pages for the time being – it wouldn’t be helpful to compare myself to other people’s stories, when I didn’t have the full picture of my own, yet.

It felt like nothing was happening, and nothing anyone said in the meantime was correct or reasonable.

What was happening was that my medical history and the results of my biopsies, mammograms, and MRI were being compiled and taken to an MDT – a multidisciplinary team – made up of oncologists, pathologists, specialist nurses, surgeons, radiologists – to look at all of the evidence and determine the correct treatment plan for me, specifically. Having this explained to me was reassuring, but I am Scottish, and a woman, and the number of people involved did remind me to be mortified at causing a hassle for everyone. I went from abject desperation for answers to ‘och yous have got a lot on, it’s honestly fine pal, cheers anyway xx’ in a matter of seconds.

I knew the date the MDT would take place, so it was a matter of time until someone told me whether it was surgery, or chemo and surgery, or chemo and surgery and something else, or if the cancer had miraculously disappeared through sheer Thinking About It, which no one else has ever done before, but there’s a first time for everything.

In the meantime, I received a call from the Fertility Preservation team. I sort of thought I knew that chemotherapy can make you infertile. The reality isn’t as simple as that – people can and do become pregnant after chemotherapy – but chemotherapy often involves a medically-induced menopause, and can affect your reproduction in the long-run.

I had thought the call from the FP team meant that someone, somewhere had decided I would be having chemotherapy, but this was set up as soon as I was diagnosed and would have happened no matter what my treatment plan was.

I could freeze my eggs or freeze an embryo (my egg and my partner’s sperm – if you know him, sorry to bring it up). This would involve a lot of consent forms and injections and appointments. I was told this would delay my treatment by up to a month.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, a month is not a very long time. A month would absolutely be a safe length of time for me to delay treatment – if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have had the option.

There was not one cell of me that could bear the thought of waiting another month. And that should have been it – I don’t want children. Or more accurately, I love kids, but I don’t want to be a mum, and I don’t want to make that their problem. I literally wrote a whole show about it, which you can see at the Edinburgh Fringe (hopefully – don’t ask me about it yet).

When it came to saying so out loud, now that it would be a decision and not an opinion, I felt completely hollowed out. There was nothing in me that I could form into an answer. I sincerely don’t think that I was devastated, or speechless with grief – it was closer to shock. I just couldn’t think of words that would go together, one after the other, that would end up even close to what I was trying to express. I cried a bit more.

The consultant was extremely clear, comprehensive, and kind, but I do remember her saying, “I know this is huge. You don’t have to decide this today. Someone will call you on Monday.”

It was Friday.

My gut reaction was to decline any sort of fertility preservation treatment – I didn’t want to be pregnant, and I did want to start treatment as soon as possible, so the choice was clear.

I’ve always had an internal alarm clock that runs too quickly and beeps every few seconds – tells me there isn’t enough time, that I’m going to miss the opportunity, that I’m going to be late, that I need to act now. I was afraid that I was running to this impossible schedule again. I kept thinking of myself a year from now – proud of myself and my body for everything I’d gone through, soured with resentfulness for making too big a decision too hastily.

My friends reminded me that I have politely corrected anyone who has ever assumed we were planning to have kids. My partner reassured me that I have always absolutely shit the bed over the thought of being pregnant, and that it’s pretty much the last thing I want to do at any given time. They all told me to trust myself, or to at least trust that any future version of me will understand that I made the decision with the truths that I had available. I decided not to go ahead with any fertility preservation.

That said, if you ever find yourself in this position and you feel differently about kids, this is absolutely a conversation you can have, and support from the FP team was included as part of my treatment from day one.

Shortly after the date of my MDT, my nurse called and confirmed that the lump was quite small, that there was no evidence of it having spread to any lymph nodes, and that it was oestrogen and HER2 positive.

As far as I could decipher and now describe back to you, with you all bearing in mind that I have no medical training, this means that the cancer growth is maintained by the hormone oestrogen, and has a higher-than-normal level of a protein called Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2 (HER2, when she’s at home). Oestrogen positive cancers tend to be slow-growing, and HER2 positive cancers tend to grow more quickly. I assume this cancels out to a sort of average, but I didn’t ask.

The nurse explained that I would be undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy – meaning that I would also be having surgery at some point, but they were going to do chemo first. This would hopefully shrink the cancer so that later surgery was a much smaller procedure and would minimise damage to my breast.

I had sort of emotionally prepared for this – when I got my diagnosis, the consultant explained that it was quite likely I’d have some form of chemotherapy – but even so, and I think reasonably, I burst into tears, again.

I didn’t take in much of the conversation, and afterwards, I was surprised to find that the overriding emotion I was feeling was anger. Who had decided this, on my behalf, without ever asking me? Why would anyone assume that I would prefer months of illness and an early menopause over a mastectomy and weeks of recovery?

I felt utterly furious that my breast, the breast that, owing to this treatment, would never even feed anyone, could be considered more valuable, more worthy of being protected, than my bones, or my blood, or my immune system, the things that sustain me.

It’s a nice boob, it’s a cracking boob. But it’s not more important than I am, and just because she’s made a bid for power in the last few months, she would do well to remember that.

I said, “I’m just going to tell them I’d rather cut the whole thing off.” And I did.

Once again, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time, I was humbled by the expertise and patience of my specialist nurse. She explained to me that chemotherapy was selected because there are drugs which specifically target HER2+ cancers with great efficacy, and have very good outcomes, but which can only be administered as part of chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy also treats your entire body, so if any rogue cells have wandered off, still too small to be picked up by testing, they’ll also be destroyed, which was appealing. I hadn’t mentioned that I was convinced that every headache and itch was evidence of spread, but I think the she knew.

I’ve yet to do more research on it, because I fear what rogue survival statistics will do to my brain, but I have done some light Googling. It seems that historically (and we’re talking cancer research years, so the ‘80s), HER2+ cancers were more aggressive and deadly, so some clever people, to whom I will forever be grateful, did a lot of research into combatting them. They succeeded and these cancers are now considered extremely treatable. I can’t really get my head around the sheer luck – the threading of some cosmic needle – of this being the time that was given to me, and having an extremely scary disease mere decades after they found a way to sort it out.

So. I’ll start chemotherapy next week, and I will have a course of drugs administered every three weeks, six times – eighteen weeks total. Allowing for a few instances of appointments being rescheduled for reactions, low blood cells, what have you – I should be all done by my 31^st birthday in September.

I think I’m feeling much better about it. I know I am. I also got my period last week and cried at the thought of it being my last one, so we’ll see how it goes.

I had a second biopsy, to check some lumps that were flagged during the MRI. They were benign, and one was a fibroadenoma in my right breast. I think this is the lump I went to have checked originally, alerting everyone to the cancer - a rogue agent warning me of my boob’s hostile takeover attempt? Or self-sacrifice? I may never know.

It’s very tense between my breast and I. Time will tell if our relationship can ever recover.

I asked on my Instagram story this week for any questions anyone had about the whole process. Here they are!

How did you know it was a different lump and not just a normal boob lump?

I didn’t!

I really don’t want to frighten anybody, but if there’s one bit of advocacy that I bring with me out of this, it’s to not assume anything new is fine. It probably is, but not definitely. When I called my GP about my lump, I told her I’d had fibroadenomas before, and it was probably another one. When she felt it, she said it was probably a fibroadenoma, but she would refer me to the clinic, just to be safe. I think everyone was sure it would be absolutely nothing until the boob was already gelled and we were looking at not-nothing on the screen.

Lumps are usually fine, but if you have anything new or anything has changed, I would urge you to go and get it checked. It might be helpful to keep a ‘map’ of your boobs and their lumps so you can track any changes that you notice during your monthly squeeze.

How has it affected your everyday life? Are you signed off work?

Yes, I’m off work entirely. I’ve stopped gigging for now, because I keep thinking mid-sentence or mid-hangout, ‘oh, God, I have cancer’, and getting a bit sad and weird, which is an alright thing to do in front of pals, but not so fun to a paying audience, and completely unappealing in front a stag-do who honestly never wanted to listen to a woman talk in the first place.

This has had a considerable impact on my income, and my social life, but I think more than anything, on my sense of self. I’ve always been embarrassingly keen to stand up and talk – please refer to my Kirkintilloch Junior Public Speaking Award – and I can’t imagine having people look at me or listen to me just now. I’ll bounce back, but I’m still very much on the smacking-into-the-concrete bit of the bounce.

I have a part-time day job, so I have statutory sick pay, which has been wonderfully reassuring. For a long time, like most self-employed creatives, it was the goal that one day I would earn enough money to not have to have a day job. I even felt like a bit of a failure for still having one. Now, I can’t see myself ever quitting some kind of permanent employment unless support systems for self-employed people suddenly improve. This will limit and impact the things that I can do creatively, but being skint because I have cancer will impact my physical and mental health more.

On a less miserable note, I’ve been enjoying sci-fi and ‘alone-in-space’ films, which is new for me. Something about taking on a potentially deadly mission, spiralling into a vast and terrifying unknown, putting your faith entirely in science, is suddenly relatable and appealing. Or maybe I just like Ryan Gosling and that fucking rock.

Are you able to still write comedy and take joy from it?

My immediate response to this question was no. I can’t write about anything that isn’t being confused and miserable, which isn’t great comedy fodder.

However, I’ve felt more inspired to write than I have in a long time, and I keep trying to write stuff that is sincere and thoughtful, but it feels more insincere and put-on than joking about it. I would never have described it as joy, but I have found it extremely comforting and cathartic. So, the answer is yes, very much so, and thank you for making me think about it.

Having since seen the scans of my cancer, it’s a weird, murky, ill-defined shadow, lurking off to the side and ruining the vibes for all my gross-in-normal-way boob lumps, like a drunk guy who keeps trying to fire in to the girls’ night out.

I had a biopsy, which entails a small incision being made in the skin under local anaesthetic so that a large needle can be inserted, and tissue is drawn out for analysis. The needle is attached to a sort of spring-loaded contraption, so a breast biopsy feels a bit like taking a caulking gun to the ribs. The needle makes a loud clicking noise which is startling, but it’s not painful, just uncomfortable.

I was sent home and went about my life, which in this instance, included a visit to The Nook by SAMH - a cracking new walk-in mental health initiative in Glasgow. I wanted to speak to someone because I was feeling some strain around work and interpersonal wellbeing, or something. Now I sincerely cannot remember what I was complaining about, so we’ll take that as a win.

I was diagnosed officially on the 2^nd of April, so I have to believe they knew on the first and waited the day.

That morning, I slept in past my partner going to work. He’d opened the window, and from the bed, I could only see the sky. It was much brighter and bluer than it had been in a long time. I remember feeling very fresh, and safe, and grateful, and making a point to tell myself that this was a nice day and I was going to be alright.

Looking back on my phone, the call asking me to get to the hospital came in at 11:13, and the next call is outgoing to my partner at 11:49, to tell him I had breast cancer and ask him to come meet me. All very quick.

As anyone in a medical crisis would, I called my other half, and then Monkey Barrel Comedy club, where I was booked for seven shows over the weekend. I said I had to contact work urgently, because they’d have to replace me, so the consultant asked where I worked. I said, “It’s a comedy club. I’m a comedian.”

She laughed a bit and said, “yeah, you’re probably not going to do that tonight,” which I thought was fair but redundant. It was the closest I’ve ever come to a genuine Pagliacci moment in the wild, if the great clown Pagliacci had incredible breasts and was ‘probably not going to do that tonight’.

In explaining the diagnosis, the consultant kept saying things like, “your breasts are so young and dense”, and, “you have large, young breasts”. Weird time for her to crack on, but it has been a while since anyone’s said it. I do remember thinking my boob looked amazing on the mammogram when they showed it to me. Obviously, it was sort of the inside of the tissue of my boob, not the nice outside skin bit, but it was - you’ll just have to take my word for it – extremely shapely.

The mammogram itself was another new experience for me. This entails your breast being compressed between two plastic plates so that it can be photographed through x-rays. It is not painful, and physically isn’t very uncomfortable, but it does require a technician positioning you physically and scooping your breast and armpit into place to get a clear picture. You also aren’t allowed to wear any deodorant because it interferes with the scan, and it turns out I sweat a bit when I find out I have cancer, so I was more concerned for the technician’s discomfort than my own.

In my entire life of having boobs, and enjoying other people’s boobs, I have never seen one in this position. I didn’t think it was possible for a boob to be so long. Looking at my own nipple was like spotting land through a telescope on the bow of a wayward vessel. It was too far away and I felt a bit sick.

They took a blood sample to do genetic testing (I have no history of breast cancer in my family), and sat me down for another chat about next steps, which I didn’t really take in. Helpfully, I was sent the entire conversation in a printed letter about a week later.

At the end of all of this, I went home to await further instruction without knowing much more about the cancer except that I had it. I had a Chinese and watched Jesus Christ Superstar, which in retrospect was an odd choice, but it was Holy Thursday and I was feeling very forsaken.

With Jesus falsetto-screaming in the garden of Gethsemane and me falsetto-screaming internally from my couch, this seems a narratively appropriate place to close act one of the diagnostic drama.

My breasts and I will return in part two, to discuss MRIs, fertility, and landing on chemo.

With love and a big squeeze,

Kathleen x