40 year old Sarah Murphy from Carrigtohill, Co Cork, extends her right arm to properly display the ribbon synonymous with raising breast cancer awareness.
The tattoo is a beautiful coloured, bold and defiant one, a rebellious response to the cancer that stopped her in her tracks.
“My whole life I wanted a tattoo, I have always loved body art. Initially I was going for something discreet, pretty, behind the ear. A small pink ribbon. But then I thought ‘no, this is what I want’.”
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Her own discovery that she had a tumour has a familiar ring. She was
towelling off post-shower when she thought “hang on there, I’m actually
feeling a lump”.“From that moment I knew in my heart that it was cancer. Call it women’s intuition, but I just knew. It was a fairly large, hard and slightly painful lump on the top part of my left breast,”Sarah says. That was December 2011. After a Christmas night out, Sarah confided in her sister who had experience of benign cysts.
“The cysts had been moveable, but this was not. She advised me to go to my GP.”
Anxious not to spoil the family Christmas Sarah has two sisters and two brothers she did nothing about the lump until the New Year.
On January 4, she went to her GP who made an immediate appointment for her to attend David Gough, consultant surgical oncologist at the Bon Secours Hospital in Cork.
She went with her mum to the Bons on January 9 where she says the “running on the hampster wheel began”. She was sent for a mammogram, then an ultrasound, followed by a needle biopsy. Further biopsies were taken from under her arm. She had to wait a week for the results.
“That was one tough week to put down. I wanted to prepare mum and dad for the possibility that it was cancer, but I didn’t know how.
“So the week more or less went like this: They would say ‘It’ll be great to get the results and put it all behind us’ and I would say ‘Yeah, it will, but let’s not discount entirely the possibility of bad news’. We were all worried, but in true Irish fashion, none of us really had the words.”
It was business as usual for Sarah during that week. A music teacher with the Cork Educational and Training Board School of Music, she teaches violin to youngsters in Carrigaline and Glanmire.
On January 16, Sarah received the bad news. Her main concern was for her mum. “I could see that the actual words came as a huge shock. I was heartbroken for her. There I was, her 36-year-old daughter, just diagnosed with breast cancer.”
She was scheduled to have a lumpectomy (removal of the breast tumor and some of the tissue around it) and sentinel lymph node biopsy on January 19, a procedure in which the sentinel node is removed and examined to determine if further cancer cells are present.
Once the surgery results were back, a treatment plan would be formulated. “Mr Gough said I’d have one really horrible year of treatment but then I would return to my life. So the prognosis was really quite good to my ears,” she says.
Sarah and her mum went home to break the news to her dad. “That was the hardest. I, of course, had a completely inappropriate reaction. You know that nervous laughter you get sometimes when trying to impart difficult news?
So there he was sitting on the couch where he reads his newspaper every day with a bright, hopeful look on his face. And I had to crush him by telling him that yeah, I had cancer”.
The cancer diagnosis wrought some immediate changes. Sarah packed up and moved back home. She also told her friends. “Some handled it well and others didn’t,” she says. CONTINUE READING
IRISHEXAMINER
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