So I’m reading a book. It’s a book I could have written. I mean, obviously I couldn’t – not literally. I’m not a writer. To be clear, this is an actual proper book, written by someone with a huge number of writing credentials. An actual proper writer. So no, it isn’t a book I could have written. But if I had the talent, time, and inclination to write a book, it’s a book I might have written. Or at least something very similar. Except that someone’s already written it, so I guess I might have struggled to find a publisher. Anyway. 

This book is written by the sister of a friend of mine. I’ve had it for a good few years. I’ve read bits of it before, but not properly. It’s about her experience of breast cancer. I hadn’t paid enough attention when I first read it to realise the similarities between her experience and mine. Well, there weren’t any at that stage – I hadn’t had an ‘experience’ of breast cancer at all, yet. And then when I did, it wasn’t the sort of thing I immediately wanted to read – I guess I was concentrating more on seeking out pleasant literary distractions for a while. However, I picked it up last night and decided I fancied giving it another go. I’m really glad I did. Not only is it fantastically written, but it’s also a hilarious and moving account of something I’ve obviously been assuming is all a bit more ‘unique’ than is the case. 

When you get cancer, people spend a hell of a lot of time telling you how it’s your own ‘personal journey’. Usually there is a reassuring hand-on-arm, head-on-one-side, meaningful-gaze type interaction at this point. No one knows how this feels for you, they say. This is supposed to be encouraging, affirming, a Good Thing. In lots of ways it is – the intention is obviously to validate your own feelings, to stop you feeling that there’s a right way to do things, things you should or shouldn’t feel – we’re all different, blah blah blah.

Great. So no one knows how you feel, and you don’t feel the same as anyone else. Possibly liberating, more likely a bit isolating. Humans like having stuff in common. We seek it out. Pounce enthusiastically on it, and proceed to squeeze every last drop of conversation out of it. ‘Your cousin once met someone who swam with dolphins? Wow! That’s such a coincidence. I saw a killer whale at Whipsnade Zoo when I was six!’ 

So finding that you’re in the midst of an experience for which you are completely unprepared, with no rule book to follow, and then to be under the impression that even if somebody else has had the exact same experience on paper, their experience in practice will have been very different to yours, well, I can’t say that’s always helped me out. 

Reading this book has been a revelation. It turns out that someone else, at the same age as me, was diagnosed with a pretty similar condition. The medical bit isn’t exactly the same, but that’s irrelevant. What is pretty much identical, however, is the series of thoughts and reactions that followed. All the weird ‘am I going mad?’ thought processes and the completely unjustified random outbursts of inner bitch, yep, same here. The being bothered about little things at the same time as rationally knowing they didn’t matter in the grand scheme, yep, that too. In fact pretty much the whole sequence of thoughts, and over-analysis of thoughts, and subsequent analysis of the process of over-analysis described in the book is the sequence that’s played out in my head over the last year.

So, not so individual after all. Not quite a unique experience. As it turns out, I’m pretty bog standard. Also, not isolated, not in a situation no one else can ever understand, and not in bad company either. I’ll take bog standard, thanks very much.