Issue link: http://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/85232
082: health&wellbeing ABOUT SEX LET'S TALK BABY WORDS BY: JANE MORGAN My experience with breast cancer was of entering a deep and scary world, unfamiliar and foreboding. It's not just about having the offending body part lopped off and coping with that. It often involves long, arduous and distressing chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and ongoing drugs (in my case Tamoxifen) for a further five years. Five more years of being reminded that you are not 'whole' anymore and have had a close encounter with an early demise (not to mention the 'C' word – a word I always utter in a whisper in case it hears me, knows I escaped its clutches and comes back to get me). At a time when your head is spinning with thoughts of "will I see my kids grow up?" "will I go to heaven?" "will I look weird with no hair?", to mention just a few, you are bombarded with helpful advice around the type of surgery required, whether to have a reconstruction or not, whether or not to have an implant, back-flap operation or belly-flattening one and whether you should have the other one taken off at the same time. Luckily, if you have a great surgeon as I did, you can find a reasonable path through this mega-maze of information and decisions. I can't praise my breast surgeon highly enough; she is, I have no doubt, an angel sent from another world and made my breast surgery and reconstructions more bearable than I had ever hoped. After surgery, I entered yet another new