‘From breast care nurse to breast cancer patient’

16 March, 2022 | By Ingrid Fuchs

I am a clinical nurse specialist in breast screening, supporting women aged 50 to 70 when they come in for investigations after an abnormality has been identified on their mammogram. In October 2021, I was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer. As a health professional I felt it would be a good idea to share my story with you, reflecting on my journey from breast cancer nurse to breast cancer patient. Hopefully it will give an insight into my cancer journey, treatment process, feelings and thoughts – and how I coped with it all. By talking about my own experience, I’m hoping I will be able to understand and guide patients better in the future. Perhaps other clinical nurse specialists can also learn from my experiences as a patient.

In mid-September last year, after a holiday in France, just before returning to work I felt a little lump in my left breast. I’ve had benign lesions before and it felt no different, so I decided to wait for a week to see if it would disappear. When it didn’t, I asked a friend and colleague at work to have a look. She could feel the lump too, and agreed it definitely needed further investigations.

I saw the surgeon a few days later and she arranged mammograms, 3D images and an ultrasound. She didn’t know what it was, but it felt like a mobile lump, which could be good news. Two of my colleague radiologists reviewed the mammograms and said it looked indeterminate. A subsequent ultrasound revealed that the lesion looked very vascular but not like a typical breast cancer. A biopsy followed as this was the only way to determine what exactly it was. The fact that the tumour wasn’t present on a previous mammogram made it more suspicious.

That evening I started to read up on vascular lesions in the breast and found that in general two out of three of those lesions are malignant. Several sleepless nights followed. It felt like I had a stone in my stomach. I looked forward to the mornings so I could get up and distract myself. Going for a run made me feel much better – just focusing on where I was going and stopping the ruminating in my head.

One of my colleagues had asked the pathologist to speed up the sample, with the intention that my case would be discussed at the multidisciplinary team a week later. At the end of that Friday afternoon, I decided to check whether the histology results were ready, not expecting to get them before the weekend. But there they were. It took me a little while to register what we were seeing on the screen, but my colleague cursed and then I saw the outcome clearly –a grade 3 invasive ductal carcinoma. Cancers are graded from 1 to 3 and grade 3 means the cancer cells are growing more quickly, so it is seen as more aggressive.

I remember, after closing the office door, asking my colleague if it was really true what we had seen on the pathology report. I couldn’t quite believe it. My colleague invited me to stay at her house that evening as my husband was away on a walking weekend in Scotland. But I decided to go home, and I recall cycling down the hill, thinking “I have got breast cancer, fast-growing”. I kept repeating it in my head over and over again. I felt a bit dazed.

In my next blog, I will discuss my full diagnosis, which turned out to be far worse than I had expected.

This blog was originally published in the Nursing Times. Many thanks to them for sharing Ingrid's story.