Big up the sisterhood

As promised, here is yet another amazing survivor story from another amazing woman. Today we hear about Leesha Duce's battle with breast cancer......

 Leesha Duce –My Breast Cancer Story

 

In February 2008, when I was forty,  I discovered a lump the size of a hard boiled egg in my left breast as I got out of the shower. I contacted my GP immediately and was sent for tests straight away. The Breast Cancer Care Unit at Gloucester Hospital were brilliant and within ten days I’d had a mammogram and a core biopsy, a further ten days later I had my results. At the end of March 2008, I was told that I had a grade 3 tumour DCIS and was sent into hospital for the doctors to do a wide local excision and for them to take lymph nodes to test. That first time around they told me that they couldn’t get a wide enough margin in the tissue and so I went into hospital again so that they could repeat the surgery. Again the doctors couldn’t get a clear reading, but by this time I’d decided a mastectomy was the way forward and so in May I went in to have the necessary surgery. Chemo then followed at the end of June and later Radiotherapy in September. In December I started on a years course of Herceptin. During the second stage of treatment I started to lose my beautiful thick hair – I used to sit in front of the telly playing with it to see how much would fall out! In the end I decided to shave it off. I think my girls were more upset than I was to be honest. I was just glad that I had a nice shaped head!

I’m a pretty stoic person, what will be will be and as long as I could talk about things to my family I was okay emotionally. I think my family found it harder than me because it was their job not to let on how worried they were. My husband might even say that I froze him out and forgot to talk to him about how he felt. I remember him getting drunk one night and telling me that he was afraid I might die, to which I got mad and shouted back at him – didn’t he think that I was worried about that too?

 

I focused very much on my two teenagers and my horses throughout – obviously I couldn’t ride much, but grooming the animals was so therapeutic. We also brought a puppy, which kept me entertained and was an absolute godsend to my daughters.

 

From very early on in my illness, I decided that if I was going to have cancer it was going to be with a small c and not a big one! It wasn’t going to take all of my life and energy. My friends say that I’m strong, but I know the real reason I fought the way I did – I’m just bloody stubborn!

 I will now be on Tamoxifen for the next five years. I don’t look back though, as far as I’m concerned I’m cancer free. Of course there are times when I’m reminded how I’ve been affected by it all, but that’s only natural. The first time was in 2010 when I took my daughters to visit my sister in Canada and had to declare it all on my travel insurance, to which I was quoted nearly £800! The second time was when I went into my local M and S only to be told that they no longer did mastectomy bras. I lost it with the sales assistant and burst into tears. I picked myself up though and found an amazing on line retailer.

I’ve promised myself faithfully that I will live my life to the full. I took on a Women V Cancer Cycle challenge and I’ve decided that I won’t put up with any crap in any relationship – I think that’s frightened my husband! My family keep asking if I’m okay and when I say ‘yes’ I genuinely mean it. Life’s too short to worry. I keep an eye on things and go to my check ups every year and in the meantime I live.

 

Useful links

 

http://www.actionforcharity.co.uk (Women V Cancer Challenges)

www.breastcancercare.org.uk