Awareness is crucial. Have you noticed how every month now has some relevance to certain diseases, fund raising efforts etc? February is Heart & Stroke month, and a lot of hard work is done to raise awareness about how to live a healthy lifestyle and try to prevent health challenges pertaining to your heart.

Simply put, every day, every week, every month, every year, we should be aware 100% of the time, aware of anything that can help us live a healthy lifestyle. Awareness means that we can do our best to live a full and happy life. Prevention is also very important. If we can prevent health challenges by living a healthy lifestyle and being aware of how we can help ourselves we are moving in the right direction. Last but not least comes Early Detection. If you practised awareness but failed to recognize you had a health challenge, if you did your best to prevent a health challenge but detected you did notice something not quite right, it means the challenge can be dealt with early enough to stop it getting worse.

I have lived by my simple philosophy all my life, the APE Philosophy for Everything Money Can’t Buy, try it, you won’t be sorry!

I found a lump on my left breast in 1994 and my lovely family doctor send me for a mammogram which showed nothing out of the ordinary. To be on the safe side he also sent me along to an equally lovely surgeon who assured me the lump was a non malignant  cyst. At that point I do believe that is what it was.

After moving to Canada from the UK in 1993 I was suffering from severe stress, but had not acknowledged that fact. Early in 1994 my Father who still lived in England was rushed to hospital and I flew back to the UK in order to be by his side. It appeared he was making a good recovery from a chest infection with complications but, he died. I returned to Canada and did my best to deal with all the challenges in my life and the lump was forgotten for a couple of years.

In 1997 I recognized that the lump had grown slightly, was tender to touch and my instincts kicked in, I just knew I had to return to my family doctor and ask for more tests. He sent me back to the same surgeon who had assured me it was a non malignant cyst and once again he said I had nothing to worry about. I asked, nicely, if I could have a biopsy and he asssured me, once again he was 99% sure I did not have breast cancer.

The one thing that I remember vividly at that time was that everyone I met told me stories of women, and a few men, who had died from breast cancer. It appeared to me that no one survived and my future was bleak.

I was wrong, my future was wonderful, I just did not have a crystal ball and could see into the future. It was at that time I realised I had to get the message out there to everyone who would listen, a diagnosis of breast cancer did not mean a death sentence. Yes women and a few men do die from breast cancer, but more and more people are surviving and that is what I wanted to focus on, survival, not death!

The tests that follow a diagnosis of breast cancer are all necessary but very scary. Bone scan, live scan, blood tests, biopsies, ultrasounds, Lymph Node removal, whilst doctors try to discover if the cancer has spread. In 1997 things were quite different to now, 2009, in my case we did not have a Regional Cancer Centre, we do now. I also had to wait a couple of weeks for results, some results can be known the same day now. This definitely takes away some of the stress and fear of the unknown.

Once my doctors had determined I definitely had breast cancer I was admitted to hospital, had to sign a form to say depending on what they discovered once they opened me up that it was at their discretion if they removed my breast or not. I woke up to find I had no tubes attached to my chest area, and I had been told by someone that would be a good sign. Evidently the doctors performed a small lumpectomy to remove the cancer tissue, about 9 lymp nodes to determine if the cancer had spread, but they had managed to save my breast.

Once the good news came that my breat cancer had been microscopic, hard to find, so early detected and that it had not spread, it was decided 5 weeks of radiation once a day was the way to go.