healing through words

Time changed the day I was diagnosed. It didn’t just move forward, it lunged ahead, propelling me into a world I hadn’t wanted to enter, one I hadn’t prepared for. Days blurred into weeks, hours slipped away, and suddenly my life was broken down into tightly packed appointments, test results, and conversations spoken in medical jargon I barely understood.

It started with the PET scan. That enormous, humming machine confirmed what the ultrasound and biopsy had already hinted at: the tumour wasn’t just one singular enemy. It was multifocal—one main tumour had rooted itself in my breast, and beneath it, a smaller one was beginning to grow, as if quietly training to take the lead. They sat uncomfortably close to my lymph nodes, threatening to break through the barriers of my body’s defences, though the relief was that – for now – it hadn’t spread further. No liver, no lungs, no bones. Not yet. Still, the urgency was written across the faces of the doctors. This was a race against time.

Within days, my calendar transformed. Where once it had been filled with school drop-offs, project deadlines, and weekend plans, it was now saturated with medical appointments. Blood tests, imaging, oncology consultations, information sessions, consent forms. The rhythm of my life was dictated by hospital corridors and fluorescent lights. I had become part of a system, moving along its conveyor belt.

In the midst of it all, I tried to make sense of the name they had given my cancer: triple negative breast cancer. It sounded clinical and vague, as though stripped of something essential. In fact, it was. Most breast cancers are categorised by the presence of receptors – tiny proteins on the surface of cells that act like doors, allowing certain hormones or growth signals to fuel the tumour. Many cancers feed off oestrogen or progesterone, and these can often be slowed or stopped by drugs that block the hormones. Others overexpress a protein called HER2, and targeted therapies have been developed to shut down its aggressive signalling.

Triple negative, though, is a different beast. It lacks all three of these receptors: no oestrogen, no progesterone, no HER2. At first, the absence sounded like a blessing. No doors, no keys. But the reality was more brutal – without those targets, doctors had fewer weapons. Triple negative can’t be treated with hormone therapy or HER2 drugs. What remains is the blunt force of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. It’s a cancer known for being more aggressive, more likely to recur, and more common in younger women. It didn’t feel like a lottery win. It felt like drawing the short straw.

Two months after I had first felt the lump – on Christmas night, of all times – I was officially admitted into the hospital system. I was handed a plastic card and a URN, a Unique Record Number, that would track me from here on.

I wasn’t just Michelle anymore; I was a sequence of digits, tethered to scans and test results that would follow me for years.

The appointment itself felt anticlimactic. I had expected some gravity, some acknowledgment that I was standing on the edge of a life-altering journey. Instead, a doctor barely lifted his eyes from his computer screen. He rattled off details in a monotone voice, confirmed I was now a patient of the hospital, and told me my surgery would happen at the end of the year – after chemotherapy and radiation at another hospital. His detachment stung. For him, this was routine. For me, it was everything.

A nurse was summoned, her tone softer, her gaze gentler. She spoke to me about my hair. It would fall out, she said, almost certainly, and it might be easier if I shaved it beforehand. She tried to cushion the blow, but the words landed like a stone in my chest. My hair. I had always taken it for granted, the way it framed my face, the way I could twist it up on days I couldn’t be bothered. I hadn’t realised until then how much of myself I had tied up in it.

The entire appointment lasted no more than ten minutes. Ten minutes to tell me that my body would be cut open, irradiated, and poisoned. Ten minutes to announce that I was now a patient, not a person. Ten minutes, and then I was back outside in the car park, blinking into the sunlight, wondering how the world could still look so ordinary when mine had just been shattered.

Five days later, I was back in the same hospital, this time for a heart scan. It seemed strange to me then, almost cruelly ironic, that even my heart had to be tested before it could withstand what was coming. The chemotherapy drugs – particularly the red one, which nurses call the red devil – are so powerful that they can damage the heart muscle itself. Before pumping that poison into me, doctors had to know whether my heart was strong enough to take the hit.

I lay on a narrow table while electrodes were stuck to my chest, wires snaking across my skin. The machine beeped and pulsed, tracing the rhythm of my heart, capturing its hidden strength. I wondered if it would pass the test. I wondered if I would.

That was how quickly life changed. Two months from a lump on Christmas night to a URN in a hospital system. Two months from wondering whether I was imagining things to wondering whether I would live long enough to see my son turn eleven. Two months from being a woman with a career, a family, and a future, to being a patient with tumours, treatment plans, and timelines.

The speed was dizzying. Time had become elastic, stretching and snapping back, leaving me struggling to catch my breath. Every day seemed both endless and fleeting. Endless waiting rooms, endless forms, endless explanations from strangers. Fleeting moments of normal life – helping with homework, cooking dinner, laughing with my husband – slipping through my fingers faster than I could hold onto them.

I told myself I needed to be strong. That this was just the beginning. That chemotherapy would shrink the tumours, radiation would burn away the remnants, and surgery would clear the rest. But beneath the brave face I tried to show, I was bewildered. The map I’d been handed was written in a language I didn’t fully understand, the doctors were guides who didn’t always look at me, and the path ahead was lined with losses I hadn’t yet begun to grieve.

And still, time marched forward. Whether I was ready or not.