A – Z of Breast Cancer: PERSPIRATION, PRIVACY

PERSPIRATION

You’ve heard of eating for two, well my ‘good’ armpit is sweating for two. The armpit that was operated on barely sweats at all now but the other one more than makes up for it. I am not used to this. I was never a Sweaty Betty but now I have expansive unilateral sweat stains. Honestly, if you were a symmetry freak you just couldn’t cope. I am blaming the Tamoxifen for my increased sweating as I stubbornly refuse to believe it is just me. Meanwhile the radiation seems to have had a permanent depilatory effect on the ‘bad’ armpit. Imagine, hair removal as a cosmetic spin off from radiotherapy. Sound scary? The ten year old tells me that when radium was discovered it was used to brighten complexions and make teeth glow, but only until they realised it could kill you!

P is also for PRIVACY but forget it, you won’t get any in an NHS hospital. I was admitted to a mixed ward the night before my operation and then transferred to the correct ward the following morning. This presumably had to do with the pressure for beds. I didn’t mind this, I was just grateful they were seeing me so promptly. My blind panic had been replaced by a calmness that was far more irrational than any other emotion I’d experienced so far. I was in hospital and they were going to fix me. I lay there with the bed curtains drawn round me listening to snippets of the details of the people around. It was better than an episode of Holby. Mrs X’s medication needed changed. Mr Y was back, his ninety seventh overdose that year. Ninety seven! Sick jokes about practice making perfect came to mind. I wondered if anyone had made some bad taste joke about me. I heard that one person was ready for discharge, another for transfer, that the Breast Lady needed her bloods done. Wait a minute. The Breast Lady, that was me.

Try really hard to steel yourself against the loss of privacy that being in an NHS hospital entails. You can draw the curtains around you but you cannot keep the news within.
Newsflash: Sound travels through fabric.

Read more at http://breastcancercares.blogspot.com/