It took my hair but NOT MY LAUGHTER

Lisa Holman, 49, found strength in humour after her boob tried to kill her

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Driving home with my best friend Karin, then 56, in September 2022, we laughed nonstop, like we always did when we got together. Friends for more than a decade, we shared the same dark, quirky sense of humour, and our raucous conversations were punctuated with rude in-jokes and mock insults.

While I'd run my own soft furnishings business for 15 years, in my spare time I worked as a paranormal investigator alongside Karin, showing people around historic buildings.

If I wasn't with Karin, I was with my husband Simon, then 49, and son Harrison, 16, or visiting my daughter Rachael, 26, at her home an hour's drive away from where we lived in Bath. In my 40s, life was busy.

A few days after seeing Karin, I stepped into the shower at home. First I washed my long hair under the warm water, and then I picked up the shower gel and lathered it over my body. But as my fingertips traced over something, I stopped, turned off the water and got out.

Wrapped in a towel, I went to find Simon and told him I'd found a weird lump on the top of my right breast. Seeing the worried expression on his face, I tried to reassure him that it was probably just a harmless cyst, like I'd had a few years earlier. Right now, the thought of being ill wasn't on my radar, because Rachael had told us she was expecting her first baby with her partner Jamie, then 30, and my mind was filled with thoughts of the arrival of my first grandchild.

But I knew that I needed to get the lump checked out. I went to see my GP, who referred me to the Royal United Hospital in Bath. On 29 September 2022, I was called in for a mammogram. Refusing to panic, even when the nurse called me back in for a second examination, I told Simon to wait outside because I was so sure it wouldn't be bad news. Instead, the nurse explained that I needed an urgent biopsy. Simon took one look at my face when I went back outside, and wrapped his arms around me.