A – Z of Breast Cancer: QUEER SOUNDING WORDS AND REFLEX ACTIONS

The other day the ten year old smirked at me over his favourite science book, ‘Do you know what a contusion to the gluteus maximus is?’ he said.

Well, do you?

There is nothing wrong with stopping your doctor to say that you do not understand what he is talking about. Just be straight, say ‘What do you mean?’ plain and simple. Of course you could say ‘What exactly do you mean?’ if your vanity is such that you want to appear as though you only partially don’t understand. I don’t recommend this because it suggests a certain level of understanding on your part and you cannot blame the doctor if he doesn’t realise exactly which bit you don’t get. Keep it simple and ask when you don’t know, otherwise a bruise on the bum could get awfully complicated.

I can't believe it, we have reached the Rs:

R IS FOR REFLEX ACTION

I consider myself a reasonably reasonable sort of person. I admit to occasionally lashing out with some second rate sarcasms but I don’t swear at people, I rarely yell at anyone, and I certainly don’t hit people who are trying to help me. And yet the urge to slap the face of the young nurse who removed my final chest drain after the mastectomy was shocking. I am still shocked by the force of the feeling.

I was a bit nervous about getting the third and final drain out. Like a wimp, I’d asked for and had been refused pain killers. Still don’t see the sense in that. The first drain came out shortly after the operation while I was still receiving intravenous pain relief so I didn’t feel much. The second was uncomfortable but nothing to write home about. But the third! Maybe if she’d warned me, maybe if she’d given me the pain killers I’d asked for. Now, I know that the nurse (who was very nice incidentally) was only doing her job but the experience was such an affront that I just wanted to raise my hand and slap her face in retaliation. Honestly. I’m not proud of this but it really is the truth. I have worried at this response and have decided that it must be a basic human instinct, some primal self defence reflex from a time before humans evolved a sense of how to behave in polite society. I have seen that nurse a few times in the supermarket since then and I still feel a tiny frisson of aggression towards her. Perhaps I am not fully evolved.

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