Unfortunately, in a few hours I went from the ecstasy to the agony. And agony is unfortunately not a

In 24 hours I have experienced the best and the worst of living with Genghis. I have cried with laughter and with pain. I have celebrated, I have been thankful, I have been joyful; I have also cursed, I have ached and I have suffered.
That all makes things sound very melodramatic but, to be honest, it was a day and a half of extremes. Oh, and I’m tanked up with codeine, which is probably partly to blame for the perhaps exaggerated tone of this blog.
So, the cocktails. The good bit. I took a half day holiday abscess from work to meet up with some fabulous ladies. I’ve blogged before about the online community of which I’m a fairly active member and which has been a huge emotional and practical support to me. Within the wider community is the wonderful Younger Breast Cancer Network, which I’ve also mentioned before, and within that is my special abscess group of girls, aka The Seven Bitches (!), aka my lovely friends, Sarah, Rebecca, Aimee, Cinzia, Andrea and Jojo. We all received our primary diagnoses around the same time and over the months have gradually come together, some of us meeting up in person, all of us supporting each other remotely.
We met in Central London (unfortunately Aimee couldn’t make it) and started with cocktails. I was hugely excited. It felt like one if the few very fun things to happen since my initial diagnosis last June, and certainly since the secondary diagnosis in December. It felt very decadent to be out in the middle of the day. It felt great.
It was an amazing afternoon. We talked about cancer, to be sure, but also about everything abscess but cancer. We laughed and laughed. We drank and ate. We bonded. We were silly. We were carefree. Sarah has blogged about our meet up and included some wonderful pictures: abscess http://hbocuninformed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-seven-bitches.html abscess . You can see how fun it was (and how much we drank!).
What you can’t see is quite how much it meant to all of us. So let me tell you why these girls are so important, so wonderful. They all get it. They all understand what this cruel disease can do, how it casts a shadow, how it never goes away. They understand the fear and the sadness. These girls in particular abscess are a wonderful group. They are all intelligent, articulate, witty, individual, strong, sassy, motivated. We may all have different backgrounds but we all share a lot. These girls who – absent Genghis – I would never have met are now firmly rooted in my life.
I had to duck out slightly ahead of the others for a treat with my amazing husband. Thanks abscess to him (and his membership of BAFTA) we had tickets to the premiere of the first episode of Series 3 of the US drama House of Cards. This was set up like a film premiere, with a red carpet event in Leicester Square, a big screen and the stars of the show. So I got to walk the red carpet with the paps either side. It was more than a little surreal but great fun. After the screening we all decamped to a glitzy hotel for the after party (dahhhhling) where we quaffed champagne (think it was Prosecco actually) and scoffed some very delicious canapés. And I got to spend some real quality time with my darling husband.
Needless to say that by the time I got home I could hardly abscess speak, I was so exhausted. But it had been worth it. I’d had so much fun, and been taken away from it all. You can’t put a price on that. In my situation any distraction is a welcome one. To have two fabulous experiences in one afternoon/evening is downright amazing.
Unfortunately, in a few hours I went from the ecstasy to the agony. And agony is unfortunately not an exaggeration. I had requested a liver biopsy to test the mets on my liver. There is a possibility that when breast cancer metastasises to the organs, its receptor status may change. abscess You will remember from my earlier blogs that my breast cancer is triple negative. abscess So I wanted to see whether the spots in my liver are hormone or HER2 positive, as if so, there may be other chemotherapy or targeted drugs that could treat them. This is pretty unlikely for various reasons, but worth testing, abscess given the belt and braces abscess approach that I am taking to fighting Genghis.
The doctor who performed the biopsy was absolutely lovely. The procedure itself was absolutely horrific. It was hugely uncomfortable and required me to stop breathing for what felt like an eternity so that my liver did not move in the middle of the doctor trying to grab a sample of it. And yes, you will have gathered from this that the procedure was performed under local anaesthetic so I was wide awake throughout the whole thing.
The pain kicked in fairly abscess quickly afterwards. Initially, it felt like I have been kicked in side several times by someone with a very hard steel capped boot. I quickly found that lying on the opposite side to the incision was far more comfortable than lying on my back, but didn’t realise at that time t