never going to be the same again.
I’ve got a confession to make. I’m scared of having an operation.
Quite a lot of people are. But it’s a hard thing to say admit when you’re a breast surgeon like me – operating is my life.
Well, it used to be, until the tables were turned and I found myself under the knife. In 2015, aged just forty, I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer and suddenly it was my turn to have a mastectomy and implant reconstruction.
My surgeon, let’s call her Amanda, was the woman who’d trained me to do this operation.
It was the strangest thing to be sat on the couch where I used to examine women myself as she sized me up, moving my breast up and down, right and left to work out what size of implant to use.
As she talked me through the consent form and listing all the things that might happen, from post-op pain to the risk of death, I started to panic.
Even though I’d said this to my own patients hundreds if not thousands of times, it was like I was hearing the words for the first time.
What if any of them happened to me? This was serious.
On the morning of my mastectomy, I woke up before dawn on a frosty December morning. I was only allowed to drink clear fluids until six and I joked with my husband Dermot that I’d love a gin and tonic. It was clear, wasn’t it?
As the birds started singing, we walked into the hospital and onto the ward where we first met – he’s a surgeon too. He used to be my boss, although now we say that I am.
Instead of the usual banter from the people we passed, I was met with eyes filled with sadness. I’d worked with these nurses for several years, but now it was their turn to look after me.
I caught a glance of myself in the mirror and paused for breath. I still don’t recognise myself when I see my bald head even now, but there was no time to feel sorry for myself.
I was measured up for compression stockings, filled in forms and the anaesthetist came to see me.
As she talked through what would happen during my procedure, I started to relax a bit – maybe it wouldn’t be as scary as I thought.
My final question before she left was to ask her to save my one remaining eyelash. It was the only thing that stopped me feeling like a complete alien, and I wanted her to be careful when she took the tape off my eyes at the end of the surgery.
She promised that no eye-lashes would die on her watch.
And then my surgeon, Amanda came to see me. Dermot waited outside to give us both some privacy.
I undid my gown and sat on the edge of the bed whilst she got out her Sharpie.
I always used to joke with my patients that I had twenty years’ of training just so that I could draw on their breasts with a permanent marker. With a tape measure draped around my neck, she marked out the operation, ending with an arrow pointing to my nipple, a big letter ‘L’ and the words ‘Mx and recon’.
Inside my head I was having a mental battle. I was desperate to tell her what stitches I wanted her to use and where to put the drain – my own personal adjustments to the operation she had taught me.
But it was my job to be the patient. I was no longer in control. I had to let her do her job.
As Amanda left, the porter came to take me to theatre. But it wasn’t a porter – it was my favourite theatre nurse who wanted to come and get me herself. Silent tears started to fall as I gave Dermot one final hug, and then we were off.
I felt so vulnerable being wheeled along the corridor in my hospital gown, without my hair or clothes for protection. I felt lost without my engagement ring and hoped Dermot wouldn’t lose it. Amanda was waiting for me in the anaesthetic room and I started to cry again.
She held my hand as the anaesthetist injected the final drug, and the last thing I remember is calling out in pain as the milky white propofol crept it’s way up my arm, burning as it went.
Later that afternoon I woke up on the ward, groggy and thirsty and confused. It took a few seconds to remember where I was and why I was there. I looked down at my chest underneath the gown and saw the shape of my new breast.
Not bad, I thought. There were two plastic drains on top of the sheets that would prevent fluid building up around the implant to help things heal, and I wasn’t in any pain.
And then Dermot arrived. This time we both burst into tears.
I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for him whilst I was on the table, forcing himself to stay away until a nurse in recovery rang him to say I was OK. He leaned over to give me a gentle hug, and that’s when it hit me.
I’d been in denial from the day of my diagnosis. I knew too much, but now it was real. I had breast cancer.
And life was never going to be the same again.
Dr Liz O’Riordan is a consultant oncoplastic surgeon who blogs about her experiences as a doctor and patient here, her new memoir Under The Knife, is out now, published by Unbound.