Stella Duffy: 'Having cancer has changed me, from my core out'

Last year, Stella Duffy was diagnosed with breast cancer. Medical intervention saved her life. But there was a price to pay: infertility and a loss of innocence

A year before I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I started a novel about a woman who gives birth to the next Messiah. She is an unwilling Madonna, growing in her body something she wishes was not there, something that will change her life for ever. I finished the third draft – and then found I'd been growing something that would change my life too.

On 14 January 2000 I got up early, rushing off to do a radio piece for Woman's Hour about Charlie's Angels. Light and fluffy. I turned on to my side and felt a lump. I looked down and saw a large, hot, red lump sticking out of the underside of my right breast. If not for my girlfriend screaming down the phone until she managed to get me someone else's cancelled mammogram appointment, I would have had my initial mammogram on the day I eventually had surgery.

As it was, the operation took place six weeks after first discovering the lump. I was in my mid-thirties, had no breast cancer in the family: the doctors were sure the lump was a cyst. They were wrong, my gut fear was right. The slow healing from my scars was followed by six months of chemotherapy, then a month of daily radiotherapy.

That year I also finished a novel and toured a show to the States. There was bad (cancer), fantastic (performing off-Broadway) and very fantastic (getting married to my girlfriend). And I tried to do it right – saw a therapist, went to acupuncture, homeopathy, massage. I was very good at having cancer.

Then came 2001. Which was supposed to be wonderful, no more illness and starting to feel better. My hair grew back. I began work on a new book. Despite the awfulness of 2000, I was still hopeful. What I didn't realise, was that I had a roller-coaster waiting, often more painful than anything I had experienced the year before.

I went through the whole of 2000 in a state of shock – the adrenaline rush you get when your life is threatened in any way continued through treatment. Though they were life-saving measures, surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy are also life-threatening measures. To cope, I kept going. But this year I had time to realise what had happened. To acknowledge my ongoing fear – I'd had a Grade 3 cancer, there is a not insignificant possibility it will return. I have been left with the fear of illness, pain, death.

Despite having wonderful support from my wife, family and friends, being ill was also very lonely. You really do have to go through it alone. The unfairness – I have always known I wanted to have children, but all the indications from my latest blood tests are that chemotherapy has made that impossible. (I do have frozen embryos, but despite the media hype suggesting test-tube babies round every corner, making children in this way is still exceedingly difficult, the chance of me getting pregnant using those embryos is minimal at best.)

These days hardly anyone says "How are you?" but instead: "You look so well!" And I don't know how to reply. Maybe I do look well. But I often don't feel it. Most mornings I wake up scared in case a 2.5cm tumour has sprung up overnight again. I suspect people would like to hear I've been given an all clear, but breast cancer doesn't work like that. You go for checkups for five years and only after those five years, with no recurrence, are you better.

I still have pain from the combination of surgery and radiotherapy. And, barring miracles or my ovaries spontaneously rejuvenating (I try very hard to believe in miracles!) I am infertile from chemotherapy. Because breast cancer most often affects post-menopausal women, infertility is rarely mentioned (it wasn't even listed as a chemo side effect at my hospital) but for me, cancer was a doddle compared to the ongoing loss of my fertility. Even without wanting children, I suspect any woman would find early infertility difficult to come to deal with.

Part of the pain is that I keep meeting the attitude that I'm not supposed to find it painful. Given I'm alive, I ought to be thankful for small mercies. Maybe I'm an ungrateful cow, but the starving children of Biafra didn't make me want my peas at seven, and being advised to count my blessings (usually by people with a few kids of their own tucked up safely in bed) doesn't help now either.

Life-threatening disease of any sort brings with it loss. Loss of old self, loss of planned future, and loss of "immortality innocence". We all know we're going to die. Having had more than my fair share of immediate family deaths, I thought I understood something about it. I didn't – I knew about grief and losing those close to me, but I only knew about their deaths. Now I know that it happened to the people who died and I was affected by it, which is not the same thing – I didn't know about losing myself. My own death has become tangible for me.

Having cancer has changed me, from my core out. Some days that change is fantastically liberating. I am way less interested in making people like me. I'm much more flexible with deadlines – my gain, my editors' loss. I'm really very good at ignoring requests for cups of tea from people I don't want to see – especially those who weren't there for us when I was ill. I book holidays! I've spent 18 months writing a novel slowly and carefully, not knowing if anyone wants to buy it – because I wanted to write for my own pleasure. Now, I am much more careful of my own pleasure.

Then, on other days, I'm tired and hurt that people don't understand how hard it is. I've learnt that spending a day in which I am happy and sad and scared and brave – almost simultaneously – is not mad, but honest. I'm much less predictable, but I'm also far more me. And I'm also more angry. Or maybe I always was angry, and now I'm letting it out. I have no time for petty complaints – unless they're mine!

I have less time for major ones too – after 11 September, when people who weren't directly affected by the incident, didn't know anyone who died or was injured, started saying their lives were changed irrevocably, they didn't know what tomorrow held and they were scared for their children's future, I was delighted that someone finally understood what I feel constantly. (And I notice they've stopped mentioning those fears now. I haven't.)

I am both more serious and much more frivolous. I've (almost) stopped working weekends. I want to shoot Ruth Archer – the character moaned and whined her entire way through cancer last year and now she almost never mentions it – and she's pregnant! I don't mind fiction not being entirely factual, but when a respected series like The Archers uses an issue as important as this, to follow it up with an attitude of "cancer, what cancer?" smacks of cheap sensationalism.

It's marginally more annoying than catwalk models promoting cancer charities. Yes, the charities need money, disease research is appallingly underfunded, and we all know famous people get more attention than the rest of us. But I don't care what Geri Halliwell thinks about breast cancer. She had a scare. It is NOT the same thing. I care what women (and men) who've lived through cancer think about it. Empathy is fine, but where experience is available, experience should do the talking.

Twelve months on, it seems that my year of actually being ill was just the beginning. Like everything else in life, getting over cancer is an ongoing process. I can't say I've "beaten" the disease, because I don't yet know if I have. And even if I did, I wouldn't use those words – the image of my body as a battleground and me as a victim, fighter, or survivor, is one I loathe. We are too stuffed with violence as it is, I've no intention of speaking about my own flesh as a war zone.

I'm slowly coming to terms with my lack of fertility. I don't look well, not really. I look more tired and more lined than I would have done without cancer. I have shorter hair. And yes, I'm here. Which is incredibly fortunate. But if I had died, my loved ones would be suffering – not me, so I cannot live my life comparing it to a nothingness that might have been, no more than any of us can.

What I have is loss, sadness and anger. And a clarity I never had before, an awareness I could never have gained without illness, and a fearlessness that excites me. And today (being a brave day, not a depressed day) I am more me, post-cancer, than I ever was before. More Stella. Stella enough. It's not a trade-off for the losses, but nor is it a bad replacement. It's just different. It's a new life.

Stella Duffy's new novel, 'Immaculate Conceit', is published by Sceptre, £6.99