My Cancer Trial, Mean Girls: From Snide Comments About Drinking to One-Upmanship About Vanity and Hair Loss, and Bickering About Doctors

When I was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer, the first thing I did was ask my friend and fellow sufferer Caroline for advice.

Two years after her diagnosis, she was on the other side, healed, positive and thriving. I wanted what she had.

Not only was she brutally honest about the toll the treatment would take on my body, but she also told me that I would be moved to tears by the kindness and generosity of some of my friends. She was right.

She also said that I would be shocked and upset by those who disappeared into a black hole. That also left her with the money. A friend who I had only recently supported through an employment tribunal wrote me a long email, complete with bullet points, detailing all the reasons why she would be ‘stepping back from our friendship’.

The only thing Caroline said that I was skeptical about was when she warned me to ‘beware of competing cancer fates’. According to her, there was a small group of women who formed cliques, which turned their illness into a competition and made you feel like you were being judged by the choices you made during treatment.

It sounded so unlikely to me; Surely we would be a group of sisters united in our support of each other in the fight against this terrible disease? But she turned out to be right about that too.

My cancer was the type called ‘triple negative’. A less common and particularly aggressive type, triple negative means that, unlike most breast cancers, it has no receptors for estrogen, progesterone or the HER2 protein, making it particularly difficult to treat.

Little did I know that my pesky cancer would earn me extra cool points among some of the competitive cancer cliques.

Shortly after my diagnosis, I joined a local breast cancer support group near my home in West London, where I met some amazingly inspiring women, three in particular becoming absolute outcomes in my darkest moments. I am still good friends with two of them. Unfortunately one is no longer with us.

One of my cancer club friends was Adele. Her cancer was not aggressive, had not spread to her lymph nodes, and her oncologist was confident they could treat the cancer with a small lumpectomy and without chemotherapy.

When Adele stopped attending our weekly meetings, I called to see if everything was okay. She said she decided to quit because a handful of other women had made her feel unwelcome. It turned out that they were not happy that her cancer was not as serious as ours, but had been outraged and suggested that she should not be part of the group.

When I brought this up at our next meeting, one of Adele’s opponents doubled down and said, “It’s like going to a brain tumor support group with a headache.”

I must emphasize that the vast majority of women I met were fantastic. But a small, hard core of ‘mean girls’ with cancer often disrupts the balance.

Most of us were treated in the same hospital in West London, which also had a private wing attached to it. The conversation about which oncologist we were under was a big topic. A particularly handsome advisor who we call Dr. Adonis was the oncologist everyone wanted – and not just because he was easy on the eyes.

He was helpful, supportive and answered emails and took phone calls outside of appointment times. When I was treated on the NHS I was lucky enough to be one of his patients – much to the anger of a group member who had been unable to obtain his services privately.

“How did you get it for free?” she asked.

When she later discovered that I work in TV production, she insisted that I had promised him TV work.

Having one of the deadlier forms of cancer meant that in their eyes I had earned my place at the meetings, but it didn’t stop them from exploring other issues.

I am divorced with no children and was told by two different women that cancer was much ‘easier’ for me because I didn’t have to break my bad news to the kids or try to keep the family going during my treatment.

No; it just meant that I had to work while feeling like a living dead because I had no one else to support me. It often left me suffering alone because I found it too annoying to ask friends to help me with everyday things like shopping, cleaning or gardening.

After attending some group meetings it became clear that we were splitting into two very different groups. There were the purists – those who saw their cancer as a wake-up call to reshape their lives. They ate organic, were obsessed with juicing, shunned all chemicals in their beauty products and practiced yoga and meditation.

Then there was the rest of us. They were hardly hellraisers at first, we just thought it was bad luck that we had cancer – and we were damned if we were going to make ourselves even more miserable by giving up wine and pizza.

Things came to a head during a group meal. We drinkers could feel the purists’ eyes boring into us every time we ordered another bottle of Plonk. Finally, one of them spoke up and said she thought we were being “disrespectful” to our doctors by drinking alcohol when it was known to contribute to breast cancer. If we had been drinking as teenagers during Freshers’ Week she might have had a point, but we’re talking a few glasses of chilled prosecco.

It wasn’t just the local group where I encountered judgment.

My doctors decided they wanted to shrink my tumor with chemotherapy before surgery, and in hopes of keeping my hair as long as possible, I opted to wear a cold cap to prevent loss.

During my second chemo session, I sat next to a patient who was bald. We exchanged polite small talk before she asked me why I was wearing the cap. I told her that my hair was my best feature and that I wanted to try to keep it.

“Wow, that never occurred to me, I just want to live,” she replied.

I wasn’t oversensitive; she clearly thought I was vain for worrying about my appearance while being ravaged by a terminal illness.

I told her I wanted to live too (if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be sitting in that damn chair with chemo coursing through my veins!) But if I could survive with a full head of hair, that would be a bonus. Then I put my earphones in and ignored her.

Over the course of my treatment, I noticed that some women wore the side effects of cancer with pride, almost like a badge of honor. No wigs, no microbladed eyebrows. Absolutely their choice of course. Yet a handful seemed to look down on those of us who didn’t act in the same way, those who raided the wig department at Selfridges and paid fortunes to have our eyebrows tattooed.

Tests showed that I did not carry the genes for breast cancer 1 or 2, meaning I did not need to undergo a preventive double mastectomy. Dr. In fact, Adonis was so happy with the way the nuclear chemo had shrunk the tumor that he said I didn’t have to go through with the originally proposed unilateral mastectomy unless I wanted to.

Instead, he was able to save my cancer-stricken breast by removing my shrunken tumor and filling the remaining space with fat from my abdomen.

Want to keep my breasts and lose some belly fat? Brilliant! Or so I thought.

‘Why do you do that?’ asked a shocked chemo patient who had the same type of cancer as me.

“You know our cancer is the one that comes back, right? Take them both out and you’ll never have to worry again.’

Explaining that I didn’t want to surgically remove healthy body parts seemed like a no-brainer to me. Then again, another woman judged me for making a decision she wouldn’t have made.

I encountered a similar attitude among two of the ‘purists’. They had undergone a mastectomy and turned down reconstruction, and were stony-faced as others joked that they were going to ask their surgeon to give them Dolly Parton-esque proportions.

Four years later, I am cancer-free, happy and healthy, and my anger at competing cancer fates has faded into a source of amusement.

I’ve encountered competitive and cliquey women at school, college, work, and even the gym… but I never thought I’d encounter them in a cancer support group!

Names have been changed