Nobody Told Me I Would Have to Grieve Something I Chose

I said yes to the mastectomy in about four seconds.

The surgeon had barely finished laying out the options. One of them involved a higher chance of it coming back and I was not interested in that option. I have two children. The maths was not complicated. I remember thinking, quite clearly and almost cheerfully: take it, I do not need it, I need to be here.

I have never regretted that decision. I want to say that first, because what comes next sounds like regret and it is not.

The thing that surprised me

About five months later I was in a changing room in a department store, trying on a dress that did not fit properly, and I started crying in a way I had not cried at any point during the diagnosis, the surgery or the treatment.

I had not cried when they told me. I had been efficient. I had made lists. I had been, by everyone's account, remarkably good about the whole thing.

And there I was on a plastic stool in a changing room, grieving something I had personally requested be removed from my body.

You can be entirely at peace with a decision and still be in mourning about its consequences. Nobody told me those were allowed to coexist.

Why I did not say anything

Here is the part I would like doctors to hear.

I did not raise it with anyone for nearly a year. Not with my oncologist, not with my GP, not with the breast care nurse, who was kind and whom I liked very much.

It was not because they were unapproachable. It was because everything about the way the conversation had been framed told me that my job now was to be grateful. I had been treated. It had worked. My scans were clear. People kept using the word lucky, and they were right, I was lucky. Against that, saying "I feel sad about my body" seemed self-indulgent to the point of being offensive.

So I did the thing patients do. I decided it was not a medical problem, filed it under my own business, and got on with it.

What actually helped

Three things, none of them medical.

The first was my husband, who noticed before I said anything, and who handled it by not handling it — he did not reassure me or try to fix it. He just made it obvious, repeatedly and without discussion, that he was not going anywhere. I understand from reading around since that a lot of women are frightened of exactly this and a lot of us never ask.

The second was a woman at a support group, about eight years further on than me, who said: "Oh, the changing room. Everyone has a changing room." I cannot overstate what that sentence did. Up to that point I had assumed I was reacting badly to something other people managed gracefully.

The third came much later. A registrar, at what was meant to be a five-minute follow-up, asked me how I was getting on with my body. Not with my recovery, not with my treatment. My body. I remember being so startled that I told her the truth, and I remember her not appearing to find it odd or trivial.

What I would ask for

I am not asking for counselling to be compulsory. Plenty of women genuinely do not want to discuss it and should not have to.

What I would ask for is one sentence, said out loud by a clinician at some point, roughly along these lines: some people find they feel a real loss about this afterwards, even when they are completely sure the decision was right, and that is common and we can talk about it whenever you want.

If someone had said that to me at any point in the first six months, I would have saved myself the better part of a year of assuming I was being ungrateful. It would have cost them fifteen seconds.

That is genuinely all. Not a service, not a referral pathway. A sentence, offered before I had to be brave enough to ask for it.

This is my own story. I have not named any of the doctors, nurses or hospitals involved, and the friend I mention has given me her blessing to include her.