‘I’m scared ... I have a sense of grief for my right breast’

It does mean that recovery from the nine-hour operation will be gruelling. Having had two C-sections I was pretty cocky about my ability to recover, until the surgeon drew me a picture of the hip-to-hip incision they will make across my tummy, and added to his drawing the comparatively tiny caesarean scar. I’ll be in hospital for a week — rather than being turfed out after two nights like with my C-sections — so I’m hoping the morphine will be flowing freely.

The actual logistics of the operation are too much for my head to compute. I felt strangely disassociated as the surgeon described the mastectomy using phrases like “shell out the breast like an empty balloon”. Although the bit that truly scrambled my brain was when he explained how my missing nipple will be recreated by folding up the skin “like origami” and then tattooing on the areola.

I feel immensely grateful to the NHS for saving my life and rebuilding my body, but that doesn’t make me feel any happier about going into surgery. Emotionally I’m veering between feeling lucky to receive such incredible treatment and disconsolately wailing on Jonathan’s shoulder that I don’t want to be sliced up like a slab of meat and put back together like Frankenstein’s monster. I guess it’s possible to feel wretched and fortunate at the same time. But ask me again in a few months, and hopefully I will be feeling only lucky.
@RosamundDean

Jonathan says ...

Rosamund spent five days in hospital having and recovering from her mastectomy, during which I didn’t really do anything to help. I worked and I watched the Euros — I was as useless as Icarus’s wings. But not because I don’t think this is serious, rather we were deep in Covid restrictions and nobody could visit. She hated it in there — lonely and in pain. I just needed distractions while being available for FaceTime and a daily drop-off of some overpriced salads. There was a service to deliver stuff to patients and I doubt the nurses had ever seen so much quinoa.

Every morning the kids would realise she had gone and I would make them draw her a picture. Eden’s art is rather abstract, but on the day before Rosamund left the ward Ezra wrote, “Mum is coming home. Like the football.” It was during that wild week of winning and the first thing he asked her when she got back was if she had seen England v Ukraine. She hadn’t. He didn’t understand. The football proved to be a marvellous diversion for a six-year-old boy with an ill mum who won’t be able to hug anyone properly for a month. It made us all forget bad stuff.

Then she was back — we thought it would be a week, but it was two days fewer, and she just seemed so remarkably calm. I moaned more after my first AZ jab than she did after a mastectomy, and she talks about herself being Frankenstein’s monster but really she is more the bionic woman. She is not meant to sit much in case bits seize up, but most people, I imagine, lie down more than she did. Sure, she watched a few episodes of Love Island, but who hasn’t?

One thing she is not meant to do is laugh, but the problem is that while she was in hospital I took the kids on the Horrible Histories boat tour up the Thames — Terrible Thames. Again, a great distraction. But Ezra learnt that pirates used to call bad fish “hairy willies”. On FaceTime he said to Rosamund, “Your cancer is a bit of a hairy willy” — which is accurate but also caused Rosamund pain as she giggled in her hospital gown.

Still, at least that bit is over. Now? We wait for the results that will tell us how all this has gone.
@JonathanDean_

Rosamund and Jonathan’s story will continue in Style over the coming weeks