It’s a bright hot spring day and an hour since I left the calm and serenity of the breast screening centre in Glasgow. I am sitting on the steps of a statue in George Square and staring at my phone – I have managed to avoid the man waving his can of Tennent’s and shouting at the moon, and ducked the pigeons that are flying around my head. I’m hanging together by the threads of my Presbyterian temperament that insists that sobbing in public is a bad thing. I don’t think I can speak as I’m about to make one of the hardest calls of my life. But I want to, I have to talk to my husband before I board the train at Queen Steet.
Breast screening
They have found a lump and are “very, very suspicious” about it. I ask the consultant during the biopsy, “Should I go home and get help?”. “That would be very sensible”, I am told. No mention of the ‘c’ word yet, but I am clearly being prepared. I am stunned and disorientated; I have sailed through life untouched by illness or disaster and my first emotion is fury that my body has let me down and that the state has just blown up our lives.
The results will take a week to process and then I will be called by the consultant to tell me what will happen next. Normally these are given face-to-face at a clinic, but my circumstances are a little more challenging for the NHS pathway. I live on a Hebridean island where my husband and I own and run a busy bed and breakfast. For the rest of this year, my treatments are all going to be in Paisley where my breast care consultant will be looking after me. That’s going to involve a lot of travelling and logistics before I can even begin to care for myself.
This won’t be a normal diary about cancer and a middle-aged woman, although that is what is happening. The story I will tell you is of how one Islander copes with the ferries, trains, buses and automobiles that influence the lives and decisions of Islanders. How bringing a truck to mammogram all the women over 50 on an island in April impacts the business community and disrupts local resilience at a time when ferry tickets and hospitality workers are scarce. And how the lack of understanding by policymakers of rural and island life in Scotland tells a story of urban and rural divide.
Let’s rewind a bit: the mammogram
In early April, the letter inviting me for my mammogram arrives along with the big NHS truck. This is my second one and as a highly educated middle-class person, I duly drive along on the 22 April and get my boobs squashed and think no more about it. It’s a nice day out and I take a friend with me and we have a picnic lunch on the west coast – a rare trip out from the house in the summer season.
Three days later the letter arrives – I don’t open it for a couple of hours as we’re busy, so it’s chucked in a corner as I’m fully expecting it to say, “nothing to see here”. When I do, it’s an appointment letter for the National Breast Screening clinic in Glasgow. The date given is three days away – 2 May.
Travel and logistics for an Islander
I laugh. There’s no way that I can do that – the ferries are all mucked up again, I probably can’t get a ticket for love nor money and we have guests. That’s aside from all the business stuff – I can’t leave my husband on his own for 24 hours at such short notice. We don’t have staff – we run our four-bedroom guesthouse on our own and for both of us, it’s our only income. We work hard every season, opening slowly and gently in March to get back into things and closing abruptly in mid-October when the fatigue that hits in August, gets too much.
Not working means not earning and that has an impact. We have a mortgage and a 10-year business plan before final and full retirement. Since we bought the business in 2017, we have renovated the house, then endured the closures that Covid brought, seen our mortgage costs increase by a third due to Liz Truss and her mini-budget, sucked up the rampant inflation of the cost-of-living crisis, coped with the chaos of no ferries at Oban or at Corran and the increased regulation of short-term let licensing and the upcoming visitor levy both imposed by Holyrood.
Now when we had a great season lined up, the Gods of Hospitality have decided to throw a further grenade into our plans. It’s all the ‘C’s’ for us – Covid, cost of living, chaos and now cancer.
This is the first part of the author’s diary series. More to follow.
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