In fact, slightly less than 4 days….my appointment on Tuesday was at 3pm and its 9.15am on Saturday now. Really. What is it with time warps in highly emotional situations? When you get really bad news, time stands still for those seconds: when you are doing something you love, it speeds past: when you are in love, you enter a different world and time spectrum when with your lover. And when you are waiting for results to find out if you have breast cancer it takes on this elastic quality – it feels like a lifetime ago I was lying on the bed with the radiologist saying they had to take a biopsy and when my heart sank. When I asked could it be cancer, I wobbled around asking that, so she repeated it back to me, ‘are you asking could this be cancer? Yes, it could’. I wanted that part of time to disappear. When she told me that the suspicious lump (yes, despite everything, I still get a picture of that lump looking like a B movie PI, slouching around corners with dark glasses and a beige rain mac) was not related to the potential implant rupture, I wanted to cry.

And time stood still when I was in that room – slow motion, things happening around at different speeds, wanting to laugh when she was explaining the noise of the biopsy extractor (don’t have that lingo yet,….no idea what its actually called), what it did, the noise it made, not to jump. I remembered the ‘good old Hep C days’ – and how liver biopsies hurt like fuck – how you would get that referred pain in your shoulder. And how we used to joke that the docs would never believe us – they whack that horrible needle that punches into your liver, us ex addicts yelp in pain, grabbing our shoulders. I used to be so upset after the biopsies – lying on my side for hours, gutted that I was going through this, confused and scared. And now, back to biopsies nearly 20 years later. So I wanted to say to the radiologist that I wouldn’t jump so long as my shoulder didn’t hurt….but figured that would have gone over her head. And all of that happening in a matter of seconds, yet the liver biopsy memories and thoughts were long ones in my head, but in real time were seconds.

The days are stretching out – I feel a little like I am going through them in a spacesuit – those old pictures you see of men on the moon moving in their massive moonsuits in slow motion. That’s how I feel I am going through the days right now – disconnected, behind a moonsuit, taking incredibly slow steps. Looking around me in wonder, more often than not wanting to cry, feeling slightly bewildered, that sort of batty, distracted mad old auntie type look. It may sound really stupid, but I am not sure why I want to cry so much, why I have cried so much, why I think I will continue to cry so much. Tear by tear landing the fact I have cancer perhaps. I feel slightly sick as I write that.