Hello all,  Great comfort simply reading these posts. You are all so caring about each other, who are complete strangers.  Cancer embraces all doesn’t it.     I’m 80 last Feb.  Saw the consultant who will operate only yesterday, 10th May.  She’s horrified it’s tsken so long.   Mammogram 7th March.  No letter till 25th March, THREE weeks to tell me to go a hospital 40 miles away for further investigation.   I live near Salisbury, 3 miles from Stonehenge.   Then 2 week wait for THAT appointment.   They did a another scan-mammogram, then a biopsy.   Then ANOTHER two weeks for result appointment.   It is cancer.   Then another two weeks for appointment yesterday at my local hospital.  Red tape, red tape.  I had all the above done AT my local hospital in 2010 my first breast cancer.   Did not have to go to the hospital 40 miles away.  “Oh its all centralised now”.  As if that’s better, when it’s a 1000 times worse and so stupid.   So yesterday just a bit more explaining was done.  It’s only 6cm.  In 2010, on the opposite side, it was 9mm with stay in hospital after op, followed by 3 weeks of daily Radiotherapy.   NO chemotherapy, thank God. And had to travel daily to the hospital 40 miles away for 3 mins of daily radiotherapy, yet was out all day in hospital car.  An utter nightmare.     But this time, no radiotherapy!  Let alone chemotherapy thank God.    So 2010 it  couldn’t be felt at 9mm - the size of a pea. This time at 6mm also couldn’t be felt, so it’s a petit pois pea this time!  Have to find some light relief!  Yet still yesterday couldn’t give me an op date. Definitely not May, possibly mid June.   The cut-off point by government, that useless lot, to becoming dangerous, is 4 months, so I told her “Getting very close as this has been from 7th March, over 3 months already”.   She was horrified at the hospital 40 miles away, and will hopefully pull me to top of my local hospital's operation list.

But I feel I’m being let off SO lightly, reading all your reports.  My deepest, deepest commiserations to everyone so much worse off than me, with my DCIS, 6mm petit pois, non-invasive, not broken out of duct cell, cancer.  And how fortunate this too was found so very early, as was the 2010 one, by the mammogram.  What would we do without that?  Think of the stone-age women living at Stonehenge when built.   Life span was to age 23!  And less if you got cancer!

A question please...as I will have it done in one day, but dreading the wire to be inserted to “the spot” which didn’t happen last time, anyone know how I’ll feel on returning home later that afternoon?   I’m normally ok with anaesthetics, but it’s 9 years later and 9 years older.   Living alone, no responsibilities whatsoever, I guess straight to bed.  But how about the next several days?   Will it be painful?  My pain-threshold tolerance is zero. I’ll only have to get food, nothing onerous.   How soon can I drive again?    Have to say, I have acute arthritis which is so bad I’m on morphine which doesn’t help at all.   I have had a replacement shoulder - twice.  Neither time has it worked nor helped.   Plus a replacement knee, which hasn’t helped.  All 3 operations between 2004, immediately after my husband died, and 2007.  My lovely GP says that my shoulders are both “shattered”. My right shoulder and right knee having in the last two years, both decided to join in the fun of tormenting me even more.   So cancer in 2010 was bad enough.    To have it twice is awful.

Any advice will be most welcome.    Love to all.