Month: March 2019

Daring to say no

Calamitousmummy

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Like many trying-to-be active and ambitious working mums, I often struggle to achieve everything I want to achieve. I want to be a stay at home mum who’s there for her girls (who are part-time in nursery), I want to run my own investor marketing business from home,  I want a house that’s clean and tidy with food in the fridge, with freshly laundered clothes, I want to keep running and cycling regularly (because it keeps me from going loopy)… but sometimes I have to admit defeat. And that’s easier said than done, but when it’s ‘done’, boy does it feel good.

I’ve spent the past two weeks ill with yet another winter bug. I’ve experienced a cocktail of symptoms from feeling like I’ve been run over by a bus, nauseous, sore throat, chesty cough, headache, fever, glands in my neck the size of golf balls, feeling totally wiped out, oh and an eye infection to boot.

Somehow I’ve ploughed on still thinking, until Sunday night, I would get better in time to go on 95km rides in the Kentish hills with cycling club training camp this week and, until yesterday, that I would be better in time to participate in a live video interview with a friend and ex journalist colleague tonight, where I would have been later immortalised on YouTube with my red gunky eyes and hacking cough.

Eventually, of course, when you stop and listen to your body, and decide ‘no, I’m not going to do that’ you feel a flood of relief. Even if it’s something you had really been looking forward to and wanted to do, and involves losing a bit of money (in the case of the training camp) or letting down a friend (in the case of the journalist).

The same applies to mental as well as physical pressures. But I’m on a roll now. At the end of last week, a good friend who works for me (not always wise to mix friends and business…) messed up on a technical issue in a client project. He’s fabulous at the work he normally does, but has an unfortunate habit of saying ‘yes’ to other things because he wants to help out; even if he’s not always very experienced in said area. I should have stood firm and said ‘no’.

I ended up having to simultaneously employ someone else (the person I’d initially had in mind for this part of the project) to step in and help out. This was on Friday, a day I shouldn’t normally be working because I’m meant to be with my girls. My aim had been to solve the issue, and hopefully spare my friend any negative feedback (even if it meant I was slightly out of pocket).

The upshot was an irate call from him on Monday, accusing me of poor project management (because he hadn’t been around on Friday and he’d done unnecessary work because he’d not seen all the emails sent to him, which I apparently should have ‘collated’ for him). He then quit, leaving me reeling, minutes before I was due to leave for nursery pick-up.

4-year-old MiniM#1 perceptively asked me why I looked sad and I gave a dumbed-down summary. “Oh dear that’s not very nice, you should have told him you’re not feeling well and you have a sore throat,” she suggested helpfully. “Maybe you can ask your friend Laura to help out instead?” I didn’t even know who she meant by Laura, but I did know I would be giving my little girl a big hug when I got out the car.

Thankfully, he appears to be ‘un-quitting’ now. Or at least honouring existing projects with legally-binding contracts. And possibly more. And back to his lovely self, even offering to contribute towards the pay of the person I’d brought on board to help out. In the height of the quitting saga I began to question if all the hassle was worth it. Should I maybe strip out his area of activity from the company rather than find a replacement?

Tough times help you to readdress the balance. To dare to say ‘no’ to what doesn’t work. And to either sort it out, or change path. This can only be a good thing, even if at the time it seems horrible.

Still in this frame of mind – ‘enough is enough’ – I threw caution to the wind and wrote an email to my biggest client last night. I spend most of my company time working for them, so I lack the time to look for new business elsewhere, plus they don’t pay me enough for what I do. I politely told them to either pay me more or to reduce my workload because I sadly could not continue the way things were.  It was a big risk. But sometimes you have to bite the bullet or you never get anywhere in life.

To my delight the client agreed to reduce my workload and still pay me the same. I think this is probably the better outcome too, because it gives me the time to look elsewhere for other, hopefully more remunerative clients. Or go for a sneaky bike ride to feel the wind on my face and escape toddler tantrums and tricky clients.

For now though, I just need to concentrate on getting well again. I think I’ll be saying no to the People’s Vote March in London on Saturday too, that I’d been planning to take the girls to. They’ll be learning about it in their history books in school, so it’s a shame for them not to partake, but I’m not well enough and a part of me had been a bit scared of taking them on a march with several million people just in case anything untoward happened.

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Keeping abreast of motherhood

Calamitousmummy

How many of you have heard, I wonder, that after being pregnant and breastfeeding it’s advisable to go for a mammogram to check all is in order?  I’ve been told that three times now, at two separate NHS hospital breast clinics, yet my local GP seems surprised by this…

I would have been none the wiser too, if it weren’t for the fact I developed mastitis and milk cysts in January 2015 in the early stages of breastfeeding MiniM#1. Luckily a trip to Pembury hospital and young doctor brandishing a giant needle put pay to my pain. I even got to watch the ultrasound replay of the milk being siphoned off, which was perversely fascinating. It was then I was told to come back for a mammogram when I’d finished breastfeeding.

Except I was pregnant again with MiniM#2 before I’d stopped breastfeeding MiniM#1. And the mastitis returned after giving birth again. I returned to Pembury but no milk cysts this time. Just a reminder to get a mammogram when I’d finished breastfeeding.

When MiniM#2 was 6 months old I received a letter from Pembury hospital inviting me back for a mammogram but I was still breastfeeding so couldn’t attend. I remember being put on hold for ages when trying to cancel my appointment. I was busy, still trying to run my own business while simultaneously look after a 6-month-old and a barely 2-year-old. I was passed to several different members of hospital staff, but never connected with the right department. In the end I left a message with someone to cancel it for me, never certain that they actually had.

If it proved that tricky to cancel an appointment, I imagined it would be even trickier to reschedule an appointment when I didn’t even have the correct number to call and the referral had come direct from the hospital and not my GP.

Yet, my ‘missed mammogram’ nagged away at the back of my mind. Then in January this year, I heard reported on BBC 4’s Today Programme (also on BBC News online) that mammograms were recommended for detecting cancers in 35 to 39-year-olds ‘at risk’ and that NHS screening often starts at the age of 40 for women with a family history. 

I was 40 and had a family history – my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer and my aunt with ovarian cancer. And I’d just finished watching Series 8 of Cold Feet, blubbing away at Jenny’s diagnosis…

So I called my local GP. The receptionist said I only had to be 25 for a mammogram, before twigging that was smear tests and I actually had to be 50 (!) I insisted and finally spoke to a doctor, who eventually agreed to see me (purely based on the fact I had erroneously told her my grandmother was in her 50s when she was diagnosed with breast cancer – my mother later told me she had been 62!)

Exactly two weeks ago, the doctor examined me and found a ‘sizeable lump’ near my right underarm and said I would need to be fast-tracked for a mammogram.

I tried not to, but inwardly I panicked.  Of course I did. Compounding matters, that very day I was asked to work on a PR project for one of my French clients who had invested in a company specialising in artificial intelligence for breast screening to better detect breast cancer. I had to market the story and secure an exclusive with the French national media.

My appointment was today at Maidstone hospital. A registrar quickly examined me – telling me, again, I should have had a mammogram after pregnancy and breastfeeding – and then I was bundled off for a mammogram. The wonderful news I was in the clear was slightly dulled by DH rushing off in the wrong direction to the car park in his haste to return to work, without so much as a celebratory hug, or listening to me saying we were going the wrong way…

And then I began to worry the registrar had examined me too quickly. What was the lump? And the mammogram didn’t even target the area the original doctor had found the supposed lump so what if the registrar missed it?

So I called my local GP back. “You should have told this to the registrar at the time,” I’m told flatly by the receptionist, after explaining my need for another appointment. “You should have told him to check the correct place.” I’m almost speechless at the receptionist casting judgement!

“Yes I should have done,” I managed to muster. “But it wasn’t the most relaxing environment: having a male registrar feel my breasts while a nurse looked on, with my husband sitting on the other side of the screen.”  I wasn’t exactly going to say ‘oh feel them a bit more please…’.

“And I believe it’s common in worrying situations not to say things you later wish you’d said,” I continued diplomatically (knowing that when I’d hung up there’d be things I wished I’d said to her….). There was a pause. “The doctor can see you in an hour,” she said. “And she’s very nice…”

She was very nice. And I definitely don’t have any lumps; it was probably just glands or hormones that the previous doctor had felt. But she appeared surprised I had been advised to have a mammogram simply because I’d been pregnant and breastfeeding.

In my mind I’m relieved to have insisted on having that mammogram and the extra checks. It’s certainly put my mind at rest after four years of niggling worrying about missing that mammogram. And I’m glad to have this worry out the way for tomorrow’s call I’m hosting between French national daily Les Echos and the pioneering breast screening company.

But if it’s such a struggle for women under 50 to have a mammogram, isn’t it time to get some clarity on the risks given there’s such conflicting information out there? I worry about all those women whose lumps go undetected until it’s too late.

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