Today is World Cancer Day and I am sharing my diagnosis of lobular breast cancer.
From mid Feb I will share a week-by-week summary of my experience of chemo, surgery, radiotherapy, and hormone inhibitors over the 12 months of 2025.
I will share this experience through my “One Line a Day” journal, which I completed each day throughout 2025. The information will be distributed through the #lobularalineaday hashtag.
In meantime here is summary of December 2025 events
December 2025
I was recalled seeing the breast surgeon in early December and she explained there was a tumour in the right breast and that it was lobular breast cancer.
I had never heard of lobular breast cancer, I didn’t realise there were two types of breast cancer with lobular being slightly rarer with 15% of the total breast cancer diagnoses, the most being ductal at 85%.
The surgeon explained that lobular breast cancer doesn’t always form a lump, it can’t always be felt as a lump and isn’t always distinguished on mammograms as a lump the reason for this is that the cancer cells are missing a protein called E cadherin which means that the cancer cells aren’t sticky and rather than form a lump they grow in lines, ridges or like a spiders web.
She was clear with me that the breast cancer was hormone positive and HER 2 negative and told me that that was reasonably good news.
She told me in such a kind and compassionate way that she thought a right-side mastectomy was required and that would be followed by radiation. However, in the meantime she wanted me to go for a full body scan to check but the cancer hadn’t spread to other organs.
She also wanted me to have a breast MRI scan to check the other breast and the chest wall.
I explained that was due to go to Somerset on my annual “escape” Christmas trip and she expedited the tests so they could be completed before my departure in mid-December.
She was planning surgery in January and booked me in for a surgical pre assessment on 31st December.
December became a dark month with the diagnosis I didn’t really want to tell anyone because I didn’t know what I was telling them. I was waiting for results, and I didn’t want to tell people that I was going for surgery and then discover that actually surgery wasn’t a possibility because the cancer had spread.
So, I put a smile on my face carried on, I worked my way through December with the shadow of metastasis and went away to Somerset.
Although I was very worried, I tried to stay philosophical. Seth had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 10 years earlier, it was late stage there was no active treatment just palliative care. He died 33 short and heartbreaking days after diagnosis.
It took 34 days for the diagnosis of my lobular breast cancer 1 day longer than Seth had survived after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
Maybe just maybe breast cancer might just be a gift with a survival rate of 83% over five years….
Yes, there was a chance of living beyond, of surviving this horror.
Hope – a person or thing that may help or save someone, surgery and radiotherapy were my hope.
