AS her daughter Hannah snuggled up to her on the sofa one summer evening in 2011, Debbie Cambrey felt a pain in her right breast.

She had a fleeting thought something wasn’t quite right, but put it out of her head.

“I had a feeling something was there, although I couldn’t find an actual lump,” she says. “I was never any good about examining my breasts. I knew two of my dad’s sisters had had breast cancer, but I thought it would never happen to me. I was only 43.”

Three months later she noticed that the nipple had inverted. Alarmed, she rang her GP.

Just before the appointment, the nipple went back to normal and, frightened of mentioning it, Debbie found herself consulting the family doctor about an unrelated, trivial matter.

“I met some friends afterwards for coffee and they asked if I mentioned the breast,” the bubbly mum-of-two recalls.

“When I said no, they said ‘oh Debbie for God’s sake’ and told me to go back, which I did a week later.

The GP said it was probably just a cyst, but I was more worried he was taking me seriously.”

Within two weeks, last December, Debbie, from Eastwood, was at Southend University Hospital’s breast unit to be checked out. As the morning wore on, she sensed a change in the atmosphere among staff.

She says: “They said they wanted to do a core biopsy and I started crying, even though I was saying, ‘I don’t know why I’m crying; you haven’t told me it’s cancer yet’,” she recalls.

“Then they took me into a room, and told me they thought it was. Thank God my husband Alan was there.”

Surgeon Casper Tsokodayi told the stunned couple he thought she had ductal cancer – a form of cancer in which rogue cells line the inside of the milk ducts, making it difficult to detect.

Debbie and Alan, 44, a consultant engineer, then faced an agonising week’s wait before further tests revealed the cancer had not spread to her bones or major organs.

It was during that time that the couple told Hannah, then 10, and their son Alec, now 18. Doctors had determined her particular form of cancer was HER2 positive, which normally occurs in younger women.

She was started immediately on the gold-standard drug for this strain of cancer, a £20,000 course of Herceptin, which she will take until February next year. Herceptin latches on to the cancer cells and prevents them from regenerating.

It also helps prevent new cancers forming. Because there was a trace of cancer in the smallest of the lymph nodes, Debbie underwent a gruelling nine weeks of chemotherapy – adjusted in the first week after she suffered a severe allergic reaction to the drugs.

The good news was that after nine weeks, the mass had shrunk.

“I remember consultant Dr Anne Robinson almost dancing a jig – they were delighted and said they would get all the cancer out, not just put me in remission,” Debbie says.

“A further nine weeks of chemo followed, then a mastectomy which revealed, as promised, not a trace of cancer remaining in the breast.”

Debbie then underwent 15 sessions of radiotherapy as a precaution, and will now undergo reconstructive surgery.

She is almost back to normal, helping out at the family firm, Crest Coaches, in Rochford, and hopes to go back to working as a volunteer driver for the WRVS, delivering meals on wheels to older folk.

Debbie says. “I would say to other women, get checked out – don’t take a chance.”

THE Echo is teaming up with Bosom Pals to promote their On the Road Appeal at Southend University Hospital.
The campaign has nearly reached the £500,000 target to buy digital mammography equipment. But they need help to raise the final £125,000 before October 2013.
The £500,000 will be spent on replacing analogue machines with the latest digital equipment on the three mobile units which move around south Essex.
All women aged 50-70 are invited for routine mammograms at these trailers every three years. From next year the age women can be screened will widen from 47 to 73. 
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