Having been late-diagnosed at 53 with ADHD, at 55 I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
I took a deep breath, but strangely, my world didn’t collapse. I think I owe this to my ADHD brain, who I call Brian.
I took a deep breath, but strangely, my world didn’t collapse. I think I owe this to my ADHD brain, who I call Brian. Brian was born the day my mate Sutts (a fellow ADHD’er) sent me a WhatsApp which read, “my brian hurts.” After laughing at the autocorrect betrayal, we both decided to call our brains Brian. Ever since that day, Brian and I have been, you might say, inseparable. I love his odd logic and sideways way of thinking. When breast cancer knocked on the door, it was Brian who took the diagnosis and tumbled it around inside my head like a lone red sock in a washing machine full of white shirts.
When the machine finally stopped, Brian opened the door, looked at the mess, and said, “Well, that’s not going anywhere. Shall we just deal with it then?”
Ever since I was 5 years old, I’ve always loved “finding out stuff”. Whether the topic in hand was “Henry the Eighth’s wives” or “Who invented the Post-it note?”, I found myself looking for the minute details no one else would care about and presenting them creatively. (Imagine my joy when powerpoint became a thing!) I knew it was a slam dunk to deal with breast cancer in the same way – making it my latest “research project”. I was ready.
Almost immediately, I decided that my research would not be based around my diagnosis, but rather on the people I would meet during my “cancer journey”. So, dialling up my hyperfocus to the max, I came up with a challenge. Instead of viewing the pre-tests, scans, blood work and consultations as monotonous medical appointments, I reframed them as a simple mission:
“You have the time it takes for this appointment to make friends with the people in the room and leave here with as many random facts as possible”
And this is what I did, walking into each room with a smile on my face, and my random hidden agenda. It’s amazing what people will tell you when you get chatting! On my journey around the pre-clinics, I met Maurice, a sixty-year-old radiographer who’d been a DJ / dancer / lip-syncer in Italy in his twenties (and still had moves like Jagger); Clara, a healthcare assistant who auditioned to be a newsreader in her native Nigeria only to be told she spoke her local language with a comical British accent, and Paul, the surgeon who was a mega fan of The West Wing (excellent taste, I thought). Ultimately, those sorts of small connections gave structure to an otherwise disorienting process. They brought warmth to places that can feel cold and clinical.
For a brain like mine that thrives on connection and novelty, those moments mattered and Brian was happy. Breast cancer wasn’t something I ever wanted in my life, and frankly I still don’t really understand how I didn’t collapse in a heap. But by turning waiting rooms into places of small human stories, my hyperfocused mind, for all its sideways logic, became my greatest strength.
And in Brian’s words “We just got on with it”.
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