Don Donovan's wife Pat was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009. Don has written this story especially for our website, offering an invaluable perspective of his own journey as he supported Pat through her experience with breast cancer. Pat has published an inspirational book of poems, The Dreaded Diagnosis - The Positive Approach, and is donating all proceeds from sales to Breast Cancer Support. To order your copy of this limited edition collection, please visit the information page on our site.

View From The Other Side
by Don Donovan

Pat and I married in 1955 having known each other since our mid-teens. That's a long time and one which sees a couple pass from young love and idealism to old friendship and deep dependency. Reason tells us that death will us part, but a kindly ignorance lulls us into the expectation that each day's end will be followed by a new day's beginning.

Until... until something happens that only happens to other people.

Like a ship appearing over an otherwise uninterrupted horizon an unexpected event brings us face to face with mortality.

Pat had had mammograms yearly for many years and, apart from the long ago excision of a minor benign intruder, had been repaid with good news. But then, having insisted upon the annual check against the suggestion that it might no longer be necessary at such close intervals, she was recalled.

'It'll be nothing', she proposed. But it was something. And I felt a clawing fear, a chilling apprehension which turned to a disbelieving helplessness when her surgeon eventually told us that there were incipient cancers in one breast; it would have to be removed.

I remember that day vividly, the blood draining from my cheeks, my outraged comment; 'It will be such an insult!'

I meant, of course, an insult to the perfection of her body. The cancer was the insult, the necessity of the removal of a breast was ipso facto also an insult. I think that at the moment of his pronouncement I suffered more than she did!

But out of the depths of the old Pat arose a new one: tough, practical, determined and instinctively courageous. A side of her personality that I'd not seen before emerged, one that not only made it possible for me to survive the 'insult' but which allowed her to ride over all of the fear, pain, uncertainty and downright damned inconvenience to come out the other side immensely enhanced in mind and spirit.

I suppose the net effect of all of this upon me was one of astonishment. I was, and still am, astonished at how she managed the affair from day one. With no prompting from anyone it was Pat who decided to have both breasts removed; she didn't even canvass opinion; there was never any doubt that they (a fine pair of breasts by any man's standards) were no longer necessary. She would not allow the 'healthy' one to become unhealthy, it wouldn't get the chance. She could not abide the idea of a singleton sagging and ageing alongside either a reconstruction or a scar. She disliked the idea of being 'off balance'.

Her stay in hospital was as short as it could be. Her convalescence lasted only as long as it needed to. She was impatient, ready always to take the next step; positively, cheerfully. Where most people would be disconcerted by anaesthetic-induced hallucinations, she laid back and enjoyed them, welcoming any new experience. She offset any negatives by writing a series of verses that she titled 'The Dreaded Diagnosis' in which she explored the whole spectrum of events from the first diagnosis to the final outcome. In doing so she encapsulated her breast cancer history both for her benefit and to reassure any fellow sufferer that old life doesn't end with cancer, it presents a new beginning.

I continue to be astonished by Pat, by her energy and by her determination to help others – especially me! And, as always, we go on, love unaltered, in the expectation that each day's end will be followed by a new day's beginning.

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