A nurse took me to a quiet room to calm down. Then she took me up to day surgery again to wait for my turn. There was another person sitting in the waiting room. I sat next to her and started a conversation. She told me her whole family was riddled with cancer. Her parents had cancer, and her sister was terminally ill. She herself had had an operation to remove some nasties from her tummy and now she had seven funny stuff on one breast and nine on the other. I started to cry again. This time because I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t tell her that. We chatted about the programs on the TV and I felt better after that. We even laughed very loudly at one point because she said something really funny but I can’t remember what she said.

Another lady came and told me she had had a tumor the size of a golf ball removed from her breast twenty years ago. Last year she had three tumors removed from her stomach. The biggest was ten cm in diameter, the smallest was five. I really began to feel like a big crybaby.