Well all through the time I just wanted to know about breast cancer. Anything about breast cancer. And I asked Google, which is one of the search engines, to send me a news alert on the breast cancer. So daily they would send me information from November, when I started doing it. And that was very interesting because there it tells me all the latest research on Arimidex and tamoxifen and all the latest ways of finding breast cancers without having to operate. This one thing was talking about electricity, some kind of electricity beams going through and they’re not having to operate with people because they’re able to find out. And another thing is kind of like a pap smear that they do for people with cervical cancer, something similar they’re doing in America and it seems brilliant what’s happening, it’s all so new.

 

So they don’t need to operate?

 

Oh they mightn’t have to operate, yeah, yeah. Or some other needle thing that goes in and takes these cells out and examines them and tells people that they’re abnormal or they could be cancer instead of having to operate, instead of having to do all that, you know, biopsies and all, which would be great.

 

Yes. So was there information you wanted that you felt just wasn’t there or you had questions which never were really answered?

 

I was amazed how much I could get on the internet I was getting far too much in fact, I was quite happy with it, I found out a lot about radiotherapy and would have liked to have had more talking from patients about radiotherapy. I didn’t find much on people who had been through it, so I was searching, searching and I was looking for the side effects of radiotherapy. I wasn’t finding an awful lot from ordinary people. I was finding it from, you know, hospital reports on the effects of radiotherapy. I would have loved to have somebody say “this is the way it affected me” you know, I’d like that.

 

Did you see any of the videos on the DIPEx website?

 

Yes, I did find some there, yes.

 

So did you ever feel there were questions that you had that weren’t answered or what were your, you know, what were your questions on your mind?

 

The main thing at the beginning was that I wanted to find as much as I can about DCIS and they gave me a leaflet, which was great. And then when I was put on the tamoxifen I wanted to find out as much as I could about tamoxifen and they did give me a leaflet. And my sister’s a pharmacist so she was able to give me some more, which was great. And every procedure I wanted to go through, I wanted to find out more about. I wanted to find out about anaesthetics, well I didn’t really find out an awful lot about that. I wanted to find out more about what food I should eat before or after operations you know, things like that.