By Rachel Efetha, financial adviser

Rachel Efetha – a financial adviser and single mother of two teenage daughters from Bedford – discovered she had breast cancer in the middle of the pandemic. Starved of the support she so badly needed, she battled with the news she might not see her children grow up.

In the summer of 2020, I started to feel tired, more tired than I had ever felt before in my life. I had read about ‘lockdown fatigue’ and decided that must be it.

A few weeks later I found a small lump in my breast about this size of a grape. I decided to wait a month, until I had been through a full cycle, to see if it was still there.

The next month it was still there, so I booked a phone appointment with my GP, who got me in the same day to examine me. She did an urgent referral to the breast clinic, but since this was my fourth breast lump I was not worried. The others had been a blocked milk duct and two cysts.

On the day of my appointment, I sat in the waiting room looking at other women with sympathy, thinking that they were going to be told they had breast cancer. I just had another cyst which would be drained there and then.

An examination, ultrasound, and mammogram later and I was worried - the cyst had not been drained and the radiographer had spent a lot of time digging around in my armpits where my lymph nodes are. That had never happened before. Then I was called back in to see the consultant who told me that he was 98% certain that I had breast cancer and that the biopsy they took would confirm this.