One Breast Less
Posted on November 22, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Family, Food, Health.
Catherine discovered Haydn and Roos’ latest blog yesterday, it is called One Breast Less and I don’t think I need to tell you what it is about. This is a shockingly good blog with a raw honesty that caught me off-guard but is a mandatory read if you have any interest in health, illness and recovery.
My granny had a mastectomy due to breast cancer and my aunt has just finished a course of radium so I’ll be reading closely. It is blogs like One Breast Less that remind you what a powerful medium blogging really is, one which allows you to get to the heart of a subject without ever needing to think about a publisher or demographics.
Haydn’s recent writing has got me thinking (but not doing yet) a lot about diet. As soon as Catherine is getting a decent nights sleep we’ll switch back to the healthy us as we usually do after each baby. I’ll be using a lot of the information on The Diet Cast and My Diet Friends for that.
Technorati Tags: One+Breast+Less, OneBreastLess, Cancer, Haydn+Shaughnessy, The+Diet+Cast, My+Diet+Friends
6 Replies to "One Breast Less"
conor on November 22, 2006
It’s a difficult read but very worth it.
Cancer is still a word that can stop a conversation dead in its tracks and that needs to change. I’m pretty sure if one of my friends announced they had it, I would be struck dumb, followed quickly by a move to a comfort zone in talking about the technical aspects of the treatment.
Sinéad on November 22, 2006
As someone who has had cancer, I can tell you that people react very similarly to that. Some people just didn’t know what to say – one old friend avoided me, another got really angry about it.
conor on November 22, 2006
Have you written much about it? Or was it long ago?
As a part-time hypochondriac and ex-heavy-smoker, I “what if” it every time I get a cough or sore throat.
Sinéad on November 22, 2006
Without boring you senseless, this weekend four years ago I was told I had a leg clot. Six weeks later, it broke off and travelled to my lung nearly killing me, when a diagnosis of a rare form of leukemia (which makes your clotting system go haywire) was made. So there I was wondering around (and smoking my lungs out on New Year’s Eve) unaware of the disease.
I did pretty much five full months in hospital on a dedicated isolation ward for leukemia. Lots of chemo, other health problems, side effects, hair loss, etc followed. My biggest worry was infertility, and I blogged a rather large post about it last year that was nominated for best blog post at the Irish Blog Awards.
The post is here if you’d like to read it. It was based on an article I’d written for a magazine and I just added some general stuff in about infertility in Ireland and its causes.
Largely, I’m still here thanks to a wonder drug called ATRA. I’m told that if this had happened to me before 1998/9, I would have had a 20% chance of survival.
I’m back for my three month check up tomorrow and all (thankfully) is going very well.
conor on November 22, 2006
Jesus! I’ll have a good read of that post.
Infertility is another one of those slightly taboo topics in Ireland so it can’t be easy to write about your fears there. After our first child, we had terrible problems getting anywhere on a second. We even went the IIA Chinese adoption route for a while until we conceived Oisín and he hung on. Catherine spotted two good blogs related to that which you possibly know:
IIA Families Blog
and
The Waiting Game
I shouldn’t call him Oisín of course, since he announced in the car on the way to school today that he wanted to be called Tim from now on.
Sinéad on November 22, 2006
Thanks for this link, Conor. I’m going to visit a friend’s mam tomorrow who is post-mastectomy, mid-chemo and I’m forwarding the link to her.