A Walnut

In the end I used commonsense and saved my comforting perfumes for the return home. No point in gassing the sonographer.

Yesterday was hard.

It was not as painful as the biopsy, but it was painful.

The Letrozole is working it seems; the results of the ultrasound resulted in the tumour being described to me as like 'a walnut late in the year.'

'When you see fresh walnuts, early harvested walnuts,' she said, 'they look plump and full, but when they get older, they kind of shrink, they wither. That's what this is doing. But I don't think it is going to disappear overnight, you might not need the marker. I think you should have it though. We want the surgeon to be able to find it, however small it gets.' She smiled. 'I can be a terrible bully' she continued, 'but I'm not going to bully you about this. I think you should do it, and I think you should have the mammogram afterwards, it will give us information about exactly how the letrozole is working on it. But it is up to you.'

I was here because I had made the decision.

And suddenly, as I lay there on some table/gurney thing staring up at the lights, I couldn't help myself. It all blanked out for a minute, everything I had told myself about modern science at its best and how it was all going to be OK, how fortunate I was, how I had neither reason nor right to feel bad, how I wasn't to pity myself because after all this was good for me, remembering Mark and W and others who lost their lives to this horrible disease. But suddenly, like a voice in the darkness I just heard myself think;

This is an awful thing that is happening to me.

And the tears almost came. I staggered away afterwards, well-nursed by R, who took care of me all day, fed me a massive yorkshire pudding with sausages and peas and gravy and a nice red wine and ice cream and chocolates. After such cherishing, I slept, believing I would be all right today but I am not. Today I am sporadically bursting into tears, today is the day that I can't look at emails or messenger or texts, today is the day I can't have conversations, today I cannot do. It's all sitting there, the stuff I should be at, there's no lack of it, and today I just cannot even look at it. Come this evening I am supposed to be leaving the house to fulfil an obligation and all I can think is I don't want to. All the muscles in my arms and chest ache and I don't want to do a damn thing. But what's happened is actually minor, so I should move forward and maybe it will divert me.

I have a few hours to bring myself round.

I know everything will be OK, but the feeling isn't in my bones yet. It'll happen.