Cancer is a journey you don’t choose to go on

Oct 2 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Joan Elmer Project Director at the Sunflowers Centre in Aigburth _220

THE lump was the size of a pea and hard as marble. Joan Elmer, a busy social worker and mother-of-three, was in the shower enjoying the luxury of a day off work.

Just days off 50, she had taken to checking herself regularly for unexplained lumps and bumps.

"It was in my left breast just next to the nipple," she remembers. "As I pushed my fingers into the tissue, I could feel it. I just knew it was cancer. I couldn’t tell you why."

Her GP sent her to Warrington Hospital, where the next day a consultant did a needle biopsy, then performed a cone biopsy for further tests.

On Friday, the day of her 50th birthday, she and her husband were summoned back to the hospital. A cancer nurse and a prosthetics specialist crowded into the office with Jean’s consultant.

"He said it was a malignant tumour and I needed a radical mastectomy and lymph gland removal."

The breast care nurses gave them tea and a box of tissues, left them alone and promised to visit when they’d had time to re- group.

"We went home and told the boys, and had a group cry," says Joan, now 57, from Hale Village.

"But I didn’t panic. I didn’t allow myself to think it was something I was going to have to deal with. In 1989, my mother-in- law had a terminal diagnosis and I gave up my job to look after her. After she died, my mother discovered a tumour in her abdomen, and she died. I think it made me a bit stronger and more pragmatic. After that I thought, I’m not going to cry any more. I’m going to get on with my birthday."

She succeeded in pushing it to the back of her mind on a birthday holiday in Africa. But when she got back she says she "couldn’t wait" for her breast to be removed.

"I thought if it was in a rubbish can somewhere, instead of attached to me, I wasn’t going to get sick," she reasons.

After the op, her fighting spirit returned.

"I thought, that bit’s over and the next bit is total recovery," she says. "I truthfully didn’t feel any pain.

"What I kept thinking to myself was, the b----rd is not going to get me. I was going to fight for everything with all the strength I had. You discover things about yourself you didn’t know before."

No cancer cells were detected in her lymph nodes, so she was spared the rigours of chemo and radiotherapy. A long angry scar reminded her daily of how precious life was.