Her moving words will make you see your life anew

Since I was diagnosed a year ago with terminal breast cancer, I’ve learned a great many things. How the mundane stuff — the ordinary chores of everyday life — become an intense and special pleasure when you know your life will be short.

The way your heart swells with pride and love as your toddler runs from nursery into your arms at hometime. The fantastic luck in having a husband who is solid, constant, dependable.

But the lesson I cherish most lies in the outpouring of love I’ve received from my friends. For the support they have given me has been selfless and unstinting.

They have weighed down the postman with cards, and the thoughts invested in them have buoyed me up. ‘We’re there for you if you need us,’ they write — and they mean it. Whenever I’ve picked up the phone and asked if they’d pop round for a coffee or to go to the park with my three-year-old Jessica and me, they have never failed me.

Yet as time trickles away, I’ve found myself more and more concerned that their sorrow will become a burden to them. Or perhaps it already is.

It’s one of the unspoken consequences of my illness that I feel a grave responsibility for causing sadness and anxiety in my friends. I’d rather they did not mourn for me but simply accepted my gratitude and love and hopes for their future.

It’s not myself that I feel sorry for, but them and their grief. I want them to share the wonderful knowledge that each of them has made my 38 years richer and sweeter than I could have imagined. That throughout my illness they have given me the most precious gift of all in allowing me simply to keep a grip on normality, to still be one of the girls.

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2012, I was convinced I would beat this disease, and I told my friends as much. I was going to get better.

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I’d just finished breastfeeding my daughter when I realised something was wrong. My right breast returned to its normal size but the left was twice as big.

My GP found a lump under my arm. Three weeks on, a mammogram revealed it was part of a malignant tumour that had taken over the whole of my left breast.

When my consultant told me I had cancer, I said, indignant and incredulous: ‘But I’ve got an 11-month-old daughter’ — as if it might make him say: ‘OK, you’ve got a reprieve. You haven’t got it after all.’

When the truth sank in, the shock was suffocating. I needed my friends then so very much. I remember emailing them with the news, and adding the cheerful rider: ‘On a positive note, I’m off to London to have some of my eggs frozen.’

I was due to have chemotherapy before a mastectomy on my left breast, followed by a course of radiotherapy. I knew the treatment might make me infertile, and my husband Barry and I wanted another child. ‘I might well need those eggs when I’m better,’ I thought.

But even as I sent that email, I felt for those friends who were receiving it. I knew how their hearts would sink, how my news would cast a dark shadow.

So at first I tried to make light of my illness. I met the eight friends I still cherish from my antenatal group and told them: ‘Don’t worry, girls. One in eight women gets breast cancer — and it’s me. You’re all safe.’ And we laughed through our tears.