Dear Cancer,

Dear Cancer,

I’m feeling a little bizarre that you started growing in my body and feeling betrayed that you chose my breast. My breasts being the sacred place that only very recently helped me feed my beautiful children. So as I wait to hear your story next Friday and try to live my life in the meantime, I just wanted to say a few things to you.

I am sorry to have left you in the big smoke last Tuesday and driven 200kms away from you. I hope you are doing what you are supposed to inside the laboratory.  I hope you are multiplying inside the petri dish. I hope you are reacting to all of the chemical work that is being done.  I wonder if the scientist ever thinks about who these cells belong to or where they previously lived.  If ever I had respect for science it is now. This moment.

I hope you can be eradicated from my body. But I won’t ever know. I won’t ever know why you started growing. I can surmise hundreds of possibilities without any scientific base; the emotional footprint I was born with, my inability to handle stress, my love of cheese, chocolate and wine, consuming artificial sweeteners as an adult, too many tinned tomatoes, endocrine disruptors such as electromagnetic fields, power-lines, pesticides, shampoos, cleaning chemicals, contaminated water, plastic bottles and containers leaching BPA into my food and water, microwave use, bore water, some mutant gene or some inherited gene from war time England, not breathing deeply enough, not having an alkaline diet, not consuming enough antioxidants, breathing in chemicals inside hot cars, eating too much glucose in my life, if my weight fluctuated too much, and so on, and so on. But I will never find a reason and searching for causes is pointless.

I hope you tell the pathologists and the oncologists and the surgeon your story with the details written clearly and truthfully in every chapter.  I want to know how fast you changed, how different you are from the rest of me, how large you are, how clean are your edges, how responsive you are to my hormones, the extent of your involvement in my lymph nodes, if you are great at seeding elsewhere or not. We are all ready to listen and understand.

The only certainty at the moment is that I was ready to find you after almost a year of healthy eating, exercise and weight loss. I don’t know why I chose my 37th birthday to make such a change.  But you have made me even more determined to continue on this health and personal respect quest. I might not have found you had I not laid quietly and heard you whispering.  It was almost like I knew something was around the corner that I needed to prepare for.

A beautiful friend called Catherine, who I only met last year in what appears to be the year of my awakening, shared with me her readings on Buddhist monks, acorns, trees, potential and future actualisation… and she really does believe that my ‘future self’ has given me the heads up and already knows that I have the strength to get through this. So I am ready and waiting to hear your story.

Yours sincerely,
Lisey