I don’t think I have ever received so many letters in one week.
I think our postie must have thought it was my birthday because the amount of post I received after my diagnosis was ridiculous. Every day seemed to bring another letter from the hospital with either information about what had been discussed and my diagnosis, or invitations for various tests that needed to happen before my scheduled surgery in May. Add to that, amazing family and friends sending cards wishing me love and to get well soon, and most importantly chocolate, there really were so many letters!
I was pretty floored in the days after receiving my diagnosis. I spent the day at home the day after and spent a lot of my time on my own in my office oscillating between reading everything I could get my eyes on on the Breast Cancer Now and Macmillan websites and having a little cry. My husband got home at the end of the day and found me sulking in the bath. He too had had a similar day of reading everything he could. The two of us are from an academic background and so our natural defence to anything is to research and educate ourselves. I decided very quickly that being at home on my own was not good for my mental health.
Thankfully, we had a long weekend booked at the end of the week in Wales. We had booked a cabin on a hill, surrounded by sheep and views, with a log burner and had planned to spend the weekend hiking and generally enjoying southern Snowdonia. This was exactly what I needed. So despite feeling really blue we headed off for a good distracting weekend that Friday.
The weekend was lovely and we had a lovely time, but cancer sat like a cloud over my head the entire weekend. Sleep evaded me and I just lacked my usual joyful self. Even so, I felt like getting away from it all was a fabulous distraction, but when we got home I sank back into the blues.
It was at that point that I realised, at the current time my mental health is definitely worse than my physical health, or at least it seemed that way to me, and I realised that I needed to make use of the various support networks that had been shared with me by my breast cancer nurse.
The forums on the Macmillan website are definitely amazing. Being able to talk frankly with other people that are going through exactly the same thing is massively reassuring, and I definitely found huge comfort in that.
I also called my GP to talk to them about medication. I’m an anxious person and so already have a prescription for Citalopram, but the GP increased that for me as well as prescribing a sedative to help me with my sleep. I also referred myself for talking therapy. It is so good to know that there is so much support out there and that I am definitely not the first person to be struggling emotionally with going through this.
Shrapnel 