I joined one of the most exclusive clubs in my city – but the entry qualifications are brutal
By Lucy Ormonde
“The women I’m sitting with at this table are not trapped in sadness or anger, like a TV show,” says Lucy Ormonde (pictured). “They’re interesting and vibrant and, despite their diagnoses, absolutely full of life.”Credit: Peter Tarasiuk
It’s a Wednesday night in early November last year when I arrive for my first meeting, and I’m immediately confused. I’m looking for a table of women I haven’t met before, but as I walk through the chaos that comes with $22 lasagne-and-wine night at an inner-city Melbourne pub, I see three, maybe four, groups of women that could be mine.
The table of 20-somethings is immediately eliminated (mine are young, but not that young), closely followed by the table of women whose chemistry is giving lifelong-friend vibes. They can’t be it.
I’m eyeing off one of the remaining tables of possibility when I see two things that give me the confidence to know which one to approach – a floral headscarf on one woman and a box of name tags in the hands of another.
Anyone else passing would be hard-pressed to guess what brings these women together or that they are part of one of the more exclusive clubs in Melbourne, for which the qualifiers to entry are best described
as brutal.
Because this is Boob Club. Every woman at this table has, or has had, breast cancer. Including me.
“There are usually more baldies,” a woman named Kelly tells me as I take a seat and politely try and explain my confusion. Her humour is startling but comforting. I’m not used to talking about cancer this way. She’s right though; I was looking for a table of GI Janes.
I soon learn that most of the women at tonight’s dinner are, as I expected, aged in their 20s, 30s and 40s (deemed “breast-cancer young”). But, unexpectedly, I learn that the women here tonight have mostly completed their treatment or are well and truly into it.
Who turns up to the monthly gatherings is something of a pot luck, they tell me. Some nights are filled with women wide-eyed and fresh from diagnosis, other nights – like this one – are infused with wise “cancer aunt” energy. The best nights, I’ll come to learn, are a beautiful mix of both.
Someone asks my age, diagnosis and stage of treatment. I feel like I could cry at this question, probably in the same way a new mum at a mothers’ group feels when someone asks for her birth story. There’s a comfort in being welcomed to talk about The Big Thing you simply can’t stop thinking about.
On that night, at my first meeting, I’m 37 years old and six months into a gruelling treatment regimen of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and hormone therapy. Cancer has become all-consuming – my days occupied by doctors’ appointments, drugs and the kind of trashy TV shows I can nap through – and I’m struggling to remember a life outside the system I was cast into only half a year ago. I’ve spent so much time at the hospital lately that when I get into my car, Google Maps now identifies it as Work.
I could talk about cancer forever. It is my whole world. And it’s clear from the way these women lean into the details of my story, that they could talk about it forever, too. The conversations go deep quickly.
Where I would usually censor or simplify the details for close friends and family, with this crew I’m all in. By the time we order meals, we’ve already talked about the first places your hair falls out during chemo (hint: not the head), how we each found our cancers and where to buy the best post-surgery bras. I’ve felt one woman’s implant, shared details of bodily functions I would never burden my non-cancer friends with, and discovered I’m not the only one who was initially told she was “too young” for breast cancer.
If I ever had an image in my mind of what a support group is, this wasn’t it. But if there was going to be a group that defied the cliché, it was the one that calls itself Boob Club. The women I’m sitting with at this table are not trapped in sadness or anger, like a TV show with a cancer storyline would have you believe. They’re interesting and vibrant and, despite their diagnoses, absolutely full of life.
I never thought I would have anything in common with Catherine, Princess of Wales, but every time I hear her talk about cancer and its treatment, the more I realise that no one (not even a princess) is immune from the emotional turmoil that comes with a diagnosis.
“You put on sort of a brave face [with] stoicism through treatment,” she said in July, while visiting cancer survivors at an Essex hospital in the UK. “Treatment’s done and it’s like, ‘I can crack on and get back to normal again’,” she said, “but actually, the phase afterwards is really … difficult.”
When video of that encounter was released, I remember sighing a quiet breath of relief and immediately sharing it across my own small network. It was a couple of months after my own active treatment had ended, and finally someone had put words to what I was feeling but couldn’t articulate: namely, that the idea of being “better” scared me more than my diagnosis did one year earlier.
“You’re not necessarily under the clinical team any longer, but you’re not able to function normally at home as you perhaps once used to,” Princess Catherine said to the patients, adding, “You have to find your new normal and that takes time … and it’s a roller coaster, it’s not one smooth plane, which you expect it to be. But the reality is it’s not. You go through hard times.”
Catherine perfectly described what I was experiencing – the feeling of the old life mixing with the new and of nothing feeling “right” anymore; of being cancer-free on paper and in people’s minds but navigating a life that was still completely consumed by what had just happened. I felt like a baby learning to walk, stumbling often and crying more.
It was a feeling my girls at Boob Club confirmed to be normal. But it was also something I had never heard anyone else talk about.
I can’t speak to other cancers, but for a society that is constantly “pink washed” and raising awareness for breast cancer, I’ve been surprised at how unaware we actually are.
There’s a misconception, for instance, that breast cancer is one of the “easy” cancers to get. We believe breast cancer is only a concern for women with a family history. We think it’s quickly treated and that normal life resumes almost as soon as it’s over. We think this because we’ve all heard of that woman – she’s someone’s sister or cousin or neighbour – and she had breast cancer and she’s fine now.
But there’s so much we don’t know, and so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that breast cancer is typically more aggressive in young people and is the leading cause of cancer death in women aged from 20 to 39. I wasn’t aware that breast cancer treatment is one of the longest and most demanding of all cancer treatments. I didn’t know that more than 90 per cent of breast cancer patients don’t have a family history.
I didn’t know that many young women with breast cancer are thrust into medical menopause and a life of hot flushes, infertility, insomnia, joint pain and anxiety, years before their bodies would have naturally taken them there. I didn’t know that so many women who have had breast cancer stay on preventative treatment for years, sometimes decades, even after they have been declared clear.
I could go on.
I also didn’t know – when I was sitting at my first Boob Club at the pub in November – that the year to follow would turn out to be my hardest to date. Or that these women – these funny, warm women – would ultimately bring me back to life.
A Boob Club dinner happened to fall on the same day I found out I needed a third surgery. It fell again on the day I found out I was in remission.
During the year, I sat in the waiting room for my new friends’ scary scans and wore party hats as we celebrated final infusions together. Just yesterday, one of my Boob Club buddies danced the macarena in the corner of a pathology room, distracting me while a nurse poked at my veins for another test.
At our most recent Boob Club dinner in October, this time a $28 steak night at a different pub, the table is that beautiful mix of newly diagnosed (like I was) and the wise cancer aunts (like I am now). This time, there are enough baldies that the new girls know exactly which table is theirs.
During Breast Cancer Awareness Month, most of us have spent the last few days spreading the message we want people to actually be aware of – that is, that early detection saves lives, so please – check your breasts and know your breasts, so you’re aware if something changes. Stay vigilant. Get your mammograms. Keep supporting breast cancer charities so they can work towards a cure.
Why? Because we don’t want you to go through what we have. And because as much as we love this little club and the connection and joy it’s brought us, it’s definitely one we didn’t want to join.
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