As I write this, I am ten years post-diagnosis for breast cancer and I am going to do everything in my power to give other women with breast cancer the tools to make this, and more, a very real possibility for them. Eighty per cent of breast lumps and irregularities turn out not to be breast cancer, and there is much that can be done to prevent this disease. For the 20 per cent of women for whom the diagnosis does turn out to be cancer, there are many ways in which they can give themselves the best chance of recovery. Breast cancer is not a disease against which we are helpless. It is the result of a series of biological and environmental imbalances, and we are all able to take action to adjust these conditions.

My story-At the time I was diagnosed, I was thirty years old - a very young statistic - and found that the cancer had spread to half of my lymph glands. Whilst apportioning 'blame' for the development of cancer is probably ill-advised, I decided in later years, if there was a walking example of a woman most likely to get breast cancer I was probably her (genetics aside). I had not had any pregnancies; I had started my periods early in life; I had been put on the contraceptive pill as a young teenager to 'regulate' my periods and had stayed on it for many years; my diet was based on what was speedy and easy rather than nourishing and healthy; my food was certainly not organic; my stress levels were fantastically high; I had stopped doing any appreciable amounts of exercise, and so on.

After the initial shock of the discovery of the lump I set to work. The first item on my agenda was to find expert help. I asked around and found the most wonderful breast surgeon at a specialized National Health Service cancer centre. I had learnt that being operated on by a specialist, rather than a general surgeon, was likely to improve my chances of survival. He was sensitive to the fact that I was going through a divorce and felt extremely vulnerable, and was happy to do a lumpectomy and lymph gland clearance instead of a mastectomy. It was only as the 1980s were clicking over to the 1990s that this became an option, and I have since spoken to many women with much smaller cancers who endured far more radical surgery only a few years previously.

Then I learned an interesting thing. The incidence of breast cancer had been rising steadily, and significantly, since the Second World War. It was startlingly obvious to me that there must be something that we were doing, as a nation, for this to be so.

Providence then came into play. A friend, and nutritionist, Marjorie Green, started putting packets of vitamin Ñ through my letter-box, along with books to read. She was reduced to using my letter-box as I was feeling so low, emotionally and physically, that I would frequently avoid answering the door-bell. I was very depressed at this stage and it is hard to motivate yourself when you are feeling low and are on your own. I was having a bad reaction to my chemotherapy and feeling very unwell. Then I finally did as I was advised and started taking the vitamin Ñ (I had slowly started to address my diet earlier). The vitamin Ñ helped me turn the corner and the remaining three months of chemotherapy had nothing like the same negative impact.

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Cancer