Hi, my name is Sarah Crimmins. At age 28, when my daughter was only 11 months old (in December 2008), I was diagnosed with Grade 3 Invasive Breast Cancer.

Since then I have had a mastectomy of my left breast, gone through IVF, 4 months of Chemotherapy, 5 weeks of radiotherapy, hospitalised with meningitis and just recently in December 2009, I underwent a prophylactic mastectomy of my right breast with immediate reconstruction and a reconstruction of my left breast using the latissimus dorsi.

At the start of my cancer journey I spent hours on the internet searching for similar stories to my own and in particular, photographs of those women so I could gain an understanding of what I was about to go through and although I found some, I didn't find many.

This is the main reason for my blog. I wanted to be able to share my experience and photographs of my journey in the hope that it will help someone else with the decisions that they are about to face.

This is the story of the worst year of my life, from finding the lump all the way to my reconstruction surgery and beyond.........

Please feel free to post some comments, actually i would absolutely love it if you would xo

August - September 09, So very tired!

I can't believe how tired i was during this time! Although I was in a good routine when i was going through radiotherapy of going to the gym and sleeping when Macy did, this stopped around mid August because i just couldn't motivate myself to go anymore.

I was utterly lost.

I have never felt anything like it before in my life. For the past 9 months my life had been about appointments, being sick and sleeping basically and now that the formal treatment plan was over I didn't know what to do with myself. I read this from others on the internet, that they felt the same way around this time as well. I've never been depressed and never thought that i had the type of personality to get depressed but I would say that at this time of my life I was.

I was taking tamoxifen and had started taking Efexor for the hot flushes which is also a very mild anti-depressant so you'd think that this would have helped with my mood around this time but it didn't. I remember going out for dinner with Mat and after a few beers I really opened up about how i was feeling at the time and he was really shocked. He said to me 'how can you possibly feel worse now than you did back in december when you were diagnosed?' and all i could tell him was that I was, and much worse.

When you're first diagnosed its all so surreal and you're so busy with appointments and making decisions and just getting through each day that for me I found that i didn't have time to be depressed. I had too many other things to think about.....who was going to help me with Macy when Mat was at work, when's my next appointment with my oncologist etc etc etc.

But after all of the treatment finished I didn't have to worry about that anymore but yet I still felt quite sick and was just constantly tired. I was so angry at my body around then because all i wanted to do was sleep and i kept thinking, come on already i'm over this feeling, give me something new!

The other thing that's hard to deal with as well is that everyone around you automatically thinks that now that your treatment has finished, you must be all better now and life will get back to normal. But it doesn't happen that way.

We've just been through the biggest thing in our lives and just because we're no longer getting poisined (can't spell sorry!) by chemo and radio it doesn't mean that we're all better now. During chemo i kept saying to myself that i would go back to work a week or two after radiotherapy finished because 'i'd be ok by then!' Yeah right! I'm so glad that i allowed myself this time between the radiotherapy and my planned reconstruction to just let my mind catch up with what i'd just been through.

After I spoke to Mat that night and let him know how I was really feeling I arranged to go and see a psychologist to get it all off my chest. I couldn't get in until the following week and by then I was feeling a bit better but it still helped to go and have a chat to someone who doesn't know you, but deals with this sort of thing everyday and it was good to have a cry to her about how crappy i was feeling. She let me know that it's totally natural what i was feeling and that others often feel the same way. Like she said 'sympathy doesn't last very long' so we need to understand that it's easier for others to move on quickly but not so easy for us. We need to just let our minds catch up with what we've been through, and vent/cry when we need to about it.
Posted by Sarah Crimmins

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