During this, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, research and support charity Breast Cancer Now is turning the spotlight on secondary breast cancer. Here, 14 years after her diagnosis with the disease, a Lanarkshire mum explains how her remarkable positivity has helped her not only to survive – but also, to live.
When Lanarkshire mum Janette Campbell received a shock diagnosis of one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer, which went on to invade other parts of her body, she felt she’d been passed a death sentence.
And she’s convinced that her positive mindset and determination that cancer won’t kill her is the reason she’s still here, loving life, today. When the sisters returned to the room following the screening, two women were waiting for them – a surgeon and a breast cancer nurse. “It was four weeks before we were going to Mallorca on holiday,” remembers the mum-of-two. “My younger son was still in school. I thought: ‘I can’t go home and tell my sons.’
It was explained to Janette that her 24 lymph nodes were cancerous, and all – with the exception of one that sat dangerously close to an artery – were to be removed.Two of her sisters, Anne and Liz, later accompanied her to an appointment with an oncologist at The Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre.She said: “I just thought breast cancer was breast cancer.“Her words to me were: ‘It will come back within two years and there is nothing we can do about that.
“That was so very scary – and even more so when you know the cancer is going to come back. When it did come back, I was relieved. Sitting waiting for it was harder. Early in her cancer journey, she returned to her management job with British Gas, but soon felt the need to resign. She said:“Some of them didn’t get long. They were so young, with kids in nursery and primary school. It was horrible.
“I didn’t know that the cancer moving to another part of the body made it terminal, but after the cancer came back I was told it is – and that I would need to be on chemo for the rest of my life,” she explained. They put me on tablet-form chemo. It took the skin off the soles of my feet.During a stay at her caravan in Craig Tara on the West Coast in 2019, Janette attended Ayr Hospital for an antibiotic to treat a cut on her finger, and collapsed in reception.
Although she considers herself blessed to have such supportive friends and family – including six sisters and a brother – it was not to them but to charity Breast Cancer Now she turned during her lowest moments.
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