Here’s how I found out I had secondary breast cancer.
I developed backache and a sore right hip in mid-March while I was on my first ever overseas cycling trip, in Mallorca. The week-long trip was the first proper phase of the huge amount of training I was planning to do over the following few months that was to have culminated in a long-distance, three-day charity bike ride in France in July.
Initially I put the pain down to a mix of factors. For starters, while I’d done plenty of indoor training, I hadn’t ridden much at all outside or for any distance over the winter, and here I was doing back-to-back 50-75 mile rides involving quite a few hills. Also, I wasn’t using my own bike. While the rental bike was far better than mine and I loved it, I figured I was probably riding in a different position and that that was part of the problem. I hoped I’d just strained my back and hip and that it would soon get better. Interestingly – and fortunately – while the pain was at times quite bad, there was no pain at all when I was on the bike and cycling.
The pain persisted when I got back to London, although it would come and go. The most common place to which breast cancer metastasises or spreads is the bones and I knew backache was a potential symptom of it having spread to the spine. The pain was worse at night and when I was lying down. I did some reading and discovered that these too were signs of “bone mets” in the spine.
I very rarely get backache of any kind. Pretty quickly therefore, I decided to contact the consultant oncologist who treated me for primary breast cancer in the summer of 2015 and ask her advice, hoping all the while that it was just a sprain and that it would go away soon.
That was in late March. The consultant said it made sense to investigate further, so I had some blood tests done the following week.
The following weekend, I held a games afternoon at home to raise funds for the charity I was going to be doing for the bike ride in France in July. Other than the intermittent back ache and the periodic hip pain (the latter had in fact almost gone by then), I felt as fit as a fiddle. This fundraiser had been planned for ages and, at that point, while I was worried, I was still hoping the remaining pain would disappear with time.
That hope all but disappeared when the consultant subsequently called to say some of the blood results “weren’t entirely normal”. It made sense to follow up, she said, and a PET CT scan was being arranged for the following week. The writing was on the wall.
Despite this big shadow hanging over us, my husband and I managed to have a lovely Easter. The pain in my right hip had gone away completely at this point. As for the pain in my back, it sometimes disappeared for days at at a time, it always came back.
In the now forlorn hope that I would still be doing the various cycling events I had planned for the summer – or perhaps it was just to make myself feel better – I went out training on three of the four days of the Easter weekend. 
I even set myself a new speed record, reaching just over 40mph on a descent in Surrey.
My husband came with me on two of the rides. We don’t usually ride together but I think we were both aware that our lives were about to undergo a massive change and wanted to enjoy each other’s company while things were still relatively normal.
I had an appointment with the consultant the day after the Easter weekend, on 23 April. This was a couple of days before I had the PET CT scan and it was to have been my regular annual review with her. The consultant knows from having treated me before that I like facts and straight talking. So when I asked what she thought the problem was, she told me that, going by the blood test results, she strongly suspected that the breast cancer I’d been treated for more than three years earlier had spread to my bones and infiltrated my bone marrow. We even talked through potential treatment plans.
Among other things, the level of a specific breast cancer marker (CA 15-3) in my blood was very high. While this was “meaningless in itself”, I also had anaemia. The two things together clearly spelt trouble.
A week later, and the results of the PET CT scan confirmed what the consultant had predicted – “bone metastases and bone marrow relapse”. As well as there being cancer in my bone marrow and in three vertebrae, there is a lesion in my left-side rib area and there are “areas of less significant scattered bone disease”. As for my right hip, while there are no obvious signs of cancer in the hip itself, the pain may well be related in some way to the diagnosis. Then again, it may not be.
Thankfully our two young-adult sons were away at the time. We had time to digest the news ourselves and to plan a strategy for breaking it to them.
Since the PET CT scan, I’ve had numerous additional blood tests, a bone marrow biopsy, an MRI scan of my spine, and I’ve started treatment.
I have, of course, had to withdraw from the charity bike ride in France in July. More on that later.
iamtheoneineight 