Moving On

This time last year I was recovering from my mastectomy and reconstruction, and I still can't believe how much my life has changed in the year that followed.

I'm still off work at the moment - waiting for things to fall in to place so I can be re-skilled before being let loose on live patients again, and that means a lot of time at home during the day, and I might watch the odd Friends repeat every now and again just to pass the time.

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a tweetchat for Macmillan to help people with cancer learn about their rights when they go back to work.

I'm about to start returning to work, and I have to say I'm a little nervous. It's going to be incredibly tough to go back into the breast cancer environment having had breast cancer myself.

Ever since I was a teenager, I've had an aversion to the colour pink. Now before you panic, I wasn't traumatised as a child, I just didn't think it suited me.

It's been a while since I last blogged. I guess I just needed a couple of months to mentally recover after all my treatment had finished. But now I'm back, and there's a lot to catch up on.

I can't believe that it's almost a year since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. A lot has happened in that time.

I bet that title caught your eye, didn't it? Friends and family alert - I'm going to blog about the thing that no-one ever mentions after you've been diagnosed with breast cancer.

It was time to start the maintenance treatment - tablets and injections that will hopefully keep any lingering cancer cells fast asleep, and keep me around for as long as possible.

So I've completed my breast cancer triathlon, but it's not the end of the journey. My breast cancer is sensitive to oestrogen. This means that the oestrogen I produce could stimulate any remaining cancer cells to grow and spread.