Apart from being angry, I think I was quite angry, I wasn’t angry at anybody in particular, apart from myself, but I was angry at the lack of information of the symptoms of ovarian cancer, the lack of knowledge that I had, as a female, I thought I should have known about these things. I knew that if you had a lump in your breast you went to your doctor’s , but I didn’t know if you had these symptoms, you know, that you should perhaps persevere, and if I’d had a scan earlier maybe things could have been caught earlier. However, I think you know, the anger, since has inspired me to do many things.

And here I am, nearly two years later, praise God I’m still well and I’m, you know, trying to make an effort to raise awareness of ovarian cancer to deal with this anger that I still have to a certain extent and I, you know, tell, I’m probably quite boring actually, I talk to a lot of, you know, women obviously, and men to a certain extent, but of my age and younger, and try and educate people. Because I think I did, well I do believe I’m quite a well informed person, and I, you know, I’m not surprised when I talk to people that they’re quite as ignorant, and I think that helps me overcome my anger with myself, but it still doesn’t stop me being angry at the lack of information available, you know, generally about ovarian cancer.

You seem to have been relatively well provided with information.

Yes.

Do you feel you had enough information?

I think I did. What I would say is, I had the information, quite a lot of information, more so than my mum did, I feel, and as I say, she was diagnosed in [town], but in my particular part of the world, I feel I was catered for. All I would say is that it didn’t automatically mean a lot, because I would read it and not take it in, because of the state of mind at the time, you know, so it was good when I was calmer, you know, when someone else I got my husband to read everything, so that he could point out things to me that, perhaps, had gone completely over my head, or, you know, I wasn’t taking in for whatever reason, because I was so’ well’ I don’t know quite what the word is, but’ not coping that day, sort of thing. So, yes, the information was there, but it seems, as well, like you can never have too much.

So did you seek out lots of information after your diagnosis, did you seek out lots of information for yourself?

Did I seek it out? Yes I did, in fact we hadn’t got a computer, my husband went and bought a computer so that I could find out as much as possible. And in the middle of the night when you haven’t had cancer for a long time, night time can be very dark, and it was a time when I also went in the chat rooms, I looked up information and I also went in the cancer chat rooms and talked to other people and found only one or two people with ovarian cancer but we did build up relationships and I was going to see one of them in New York and she died the month before I went, unfortunately, but, you know, we had a lot of quality time even in the chat room together.

Going through the kind of cancer journey early on and things, I spoke about the cancer nurses being very very supportive, but I was a fiend for information. I needed to know everything. I was on the Internet, borrowing, buying, whatever, books, reading things that people passed on to me, and I was introduced to a cancer support group in my local town which I started going to, and I still go to.

But what I also started doing was going to this place called CLAN which is Cancer Link Aberdeen North, and basically CLAN had a fantastic library, it had a librarian that would help you with internet sites. It had every kind of bit of information, booklet on cancer of any description. All books about different kinds of complementary therapies, it had all the information about, you know, foods to eat etc.,

You mentioned to me earlier that you had the Ovacome newsletter. How did you find out about them?

That was in the hospital, the cancer section, theres a little section in there for people to wander in and you ask, you know, you say what your problem is and they point you into well perhaps you’d like to read this. And I didn’t subscribe to it I didn’t, I don’t have it every month or anything, I just collected it at the hospital and they would say well if you bring it back next time you come. So I just read about various, peoples various way they’d been diagnosed, how they’d been treated, but I didn’t feel I needed to have it every week. Every month rather. So I just read it when I was at the hospital.

Did you find that helpful?

Bit frightening really because I was reading of people, that was talking of people that had died and, you know, had had it two or three years, and so I found it, you know, I didn’t really want to go down that road, I wanted the positive things, which I found that I could do that myself. I didn’t really want to know about people that hadn’t survived, so yeah I was a bit cowardly that way.

When I first had, you know, the ten years previously, you didn’t ask questions because it wasn’t the thing to do, you know, and you were told. My oncologist was a charming man, a lovely lovely man but he explained it all to me but I really wasn’t, I didn’t know enough about it and you didn’t really ask about it, you know, you asked one or two questions but you really didn’t go any further, so I didn’t learn enough about it I must admit.

Now I must say now, they sent me to see the oncology nurses and there is a whole, it was like a whole new life opening up because there I’ve got these wonderful nurses who knew so much about it, which I had nothing like this ten years ago, I was so in the dark I really didn’t know what it was all about, I didn’t know what oncology was, I didn’t know what the drugs were, there was no internet, nothing to look up, you couldn’t find out very little and you were in awe of the oncol, you know, these doctors, you just didn’t ask them, you asked the nurses and it was, they really didn’t know enough to tell you, you just had to know how your reaction was, you may get this, you may get that.

Here suddenly there was leaflets galore, booklets galore with Cancerbackup, you’ve got a phone call you can phone anytime you’re not sure, they were superb.