A straight line can be drawn between the early detection of my triple negative breast cancer diagnosis and Gareth Southgate.
It's 16th June 2024, and the first England game of the Euros. I’m Irish but there hasn’t been a chance to support them past a group stage since Italia '90. During what the tabloids would go on to call ‘an uninspiring performance’ from England, I subconsciously gave myself an impromptu breast exam. Fiddling about with my tits I happened upon a lump.
I was 40 at the time, so immediately I thought - hormones, perimenopause. Peri is having a moment right now. Every time I can't think of a word, peri gets the blame. But also Miranda Hobbs popped into my head immediately, "I've been trying to diagnose myself on the internet. Just type in the symptoms, hit enter, and wait for the word cancer to appear on the screen."
So instead of trusting the internet to tell me what was going on, I hotfooted it to a clinic. There, the lovely people squished my tits between two slabs and stabbed them a few times to select some materials for the boffins to have a snoop at. Looking back, I was so hilariously shy about getting my tits out. What feels like half of London has seen them now.
In what comes as a surprise to nobody who is now reading this page, it was only bloody cancer. Triple-negative, high growth, high grade, ductal, aggressive breast cancer.
So that was that. I found out, as I was going about my life, drinking my £4 take away coffees, forgetting to water my plants and worrying about climate change, my tits* were indeed trying to kill me.
*Ok, only the right one, but come on, like they weren't in it together.
Breast cancer much more frequently affects post-menopausal queens, with only 10% of new breast cancer diagnoses being in us legends under 45 years old. Whilst the support I've received through treatment has been INCREDIBLE, I couldn't easily find much support and community for younger women, that's a bit spicy and silly. So here we are!
Claire xx
I'm Claire Poole and I got diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer 3 days after my 41st birthday. What a lovely layer of existentialism it added to my celebrations with friends. I live in south London with my husband Colin and our doggo Monty. I run my own company, Sport Positive. I've been in treatment for nearly 12 months.
Nobody who I'm really close to, has had to deal with a diagnosis like this at a younger age. There are so many incredible resources out there, and forums and charities, but everything feels quite serious and clinical. I know breast cancer is serious and clinical, but I think you can be yourself while dealing with this shitty disease. Only 10% of new breast cancer diagnoses are in women under 45 years old, and I think when your younger it hits differently, so I wanted to set up a place to connect and build community. I also wanted to collate what I've learned along the way, for others. Maybe it'll help one person, a little bit, and that will be boss.
I'm still in immunotherapy and on chemo tablets. Triple negative breast cancer has a higher chance of recurrence, so although the chemo and immunotherapy I had for 6 months shrank my tumour a lot, there was still some residual cancer there. So there night be horrible little cells still floating about my body. I'm on this stuff now to try and smash them up, and hope they don't take hold anywhere else and metastasize. HERE'S HOPING, QUEENS.
Only when you get hit with the shitty titty stick, and start chatting to other people with it, you realise what a veritable banquet of breast cancer flavours there are. I'm triple negative, but there are people with hormonally driven breast cancers, or HER2+, people with genetic dispositions like BRCA2. Then you've got your grades of tumours, growth rates, how early it's been detected, where it has spread, how old you are, if you have other health conditions. Every different iteration has it's own treatment pathway and plan. The only people who you should be listening to about that stuff is your team of consultants, oncologists, cancer nurse specialists, nurses and medical professionals. This site is for ancillary ways to cope, ideas that might help and to know you're not alone, with a bit of silliness along the way.