Twenty Minutes of Shaking on the Bathroom Floor Post-Dx

The shower had just turned off. I was standing in our en-suite in Brisbane, dripping onto the bath mat, when my chest did that weird flutter it sometimes does after too much coffee. I leaned on the vanity. Then my vision tunneled. Then my knees buckled and I was down on the tiles, back pressed against the bathtub, fully convinced I was dying. Again.

This was three weeks after I had finished active treatment for breast cancer. Three weeks after my last herceptin. Three weeks of telling everyone I was doing really well, thanks. The panic attack lasted about twenty. I timed it, sort of, by the little red numbers on my phone balanced on the edge of the sink.

I did not expect this. The lump had been found months earlier on an ordinary Sunday, while I was rushing through a shower before school pickup, and I had written about that earlier post on my blog. But nobody had warned me about the bit that comes after the bit everyone prepares you for. The bit where your nervous system catches up with what your body has already been through.

So this is a story about a bathroom floor, a folded towel, and what I now know about panic attacks after a cancer diagnosis. If you have ever felt your ribs tighten in the cereal aisle at Woolworths, this is for you. If you have ever had to pull over on the M1 because your hands went numb, this is also for you.

The night the floor became my therapist

I want to describe it properly, because for months afterwards I thought I had made it up. The en-suite light is one of those awful cool-white LEDs. The tiles were cold under my bare feet. I remember thinking, with absurd clarity, that I should get up. I remember not getting up. My hands had gone into that rigid splay you see on medical dramas, fingers spread and trembling, like my nerves were trying to broadcast a signal nobody could hear.

Breathing was impossible. Not hard, impossible. I was doing that thing where the top of your chest heaves but no air actually moves. I remember thinking, very calmly underneath the panic, this is what the women in the chemo chair were trying to describe when they said they could not catch their breath between scans. My brain was offering helpful commentary while my body was busy short-circuiting.

Somewhere around minute twelve, I started reciting the postal codes of Brisbane suburbs in my head. 4000 for the CBD, 4064 for Paddington, 4151 for Coorparoo. My mother had taught me that trick years ago for bad dreams, and I had not used it since I was about nine. It worked, sort of. It gave the panic something to bump up against. By minute twenty, the shaking had eased enough that I could crawl to the bed, where my partner found me at 2:14 a.m. asking, very politely, if he thought I should call an ambulance or just have a glass of water.

When the body remembers what the mind forgot

Here is the thing about a panic attack after cancer. It does not feel like a regular panic attack. A regular panic attack, in my previous life, was about work emails or a flight I did not want to take. I could usually name the trigger, breathe into a paper bag like a 1950s housewife, and recover before the kettle boiled.

This one had no script. There was nothing to point at. The lump was gone. The chemo was over. The hair was growing back in that irritatingly soft fluff that catches the light at the Chemist Warehouse checkout. By every metric my oncologist in Brisbane used at my last review, I was NED, no evidence of disease. So why was I on the floor?

The answer, I have since learned from a wonderful clinical psychologist in Sydney who specialises in cancer survivorship, is that the body does not know the tumour is gone. Your nervous system has spent months bracing for the next scan, the next blood test, the next unfortunately. When the crisis ends, the alarm keeps ringing. Your adrenal glands do not get the memo. They keep pouring cortisol into your bloodstream while you are trying to choose between sourdough and wholemeal at the bakery.

That is the bit nobody tells you. Survivorship is not a single switch flipping from patient back to person. It is your nervous system slowly, reluctantly, learning that the bear is no longer at the door.

What my GP in Brisbane actually told me about post-cancer anxiety

I told my GP about the bathroom floor episode at my next appointment. She did not look surprised, which in itself was a comfort. She told me that something like one in three women who finish active treatment for breast cancer in Australia experience clinically significant anxiety or panic in the first year afterwards. The number felt huge. It also felt like permission.

She walked me through what Medicare actually covers for mental health support post-cancer, because the alphabet soup of Australian healthcare is enough to send anyone into a spin. You can get a Mental Health Treatment Plan from your GP, which gives you up to twenty rebated sessions with a psychologist per year. Cancer survivors can also access the Better Access initiative, and if your anxiety is treatment-related, your oncologist can sometimes add extra sessions through a psychiatrist referral.

She also reminded me about superannuation early release on compassionate grounds if treatment has affected your ability to work, and gently suggested I look into the Breast Cancer Network Australia online review and survey group, which I now recommend to every single person I meet in a waiting room. Practical information did not fix my panic, but it put a railing on the staircase.

I also want to flag something that surprised me. Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme listings for certain anxiety medications changed in 2024, which means some scripts that used to cost a small fortune are now noticeably cheaper. Ask your pharmacist. Ask twice. The savings are real.

Tiny rituals that brought me back to my body

I am not a meditation app person. They make me more anxious. What worked was a collection of small, deeply unsexy rituals that I now perform almost daily, whether I need them or not. The first is the breath-counting thing my mother taught me. I have upgraded it from Brisbane postcodes to the names of every coffee order I have ever ordered in Melbourne laneways. Flat white, long black, piccolo. It is a pointless inventory. It works because it gives my brain a list. Lists are the enemy of panic.

The second is a hot shower at the exact temperature that makes the bathroom fog up. I stand in it until my shoulders drop. Sometimes that is four minutes. Sometimes it is twenty. My partner has learned that the hot water bill is now a wellness expense and has, bless him, stopped complaining.

The third is the five-minute scan-letter rule. When my brain starts composing the worst possible email from my oncologist, I say out loud, that email does not exist yet. If the dread is genuinely because I am waiting for results, I schedule a five-minute window to worry, set a timer, and then move my body. Walk the dog. Hang the washing on the Hills hoist. Something with my hands.

The fourth is texting one specific friend from chemo who lives in Adelaide. We do not even talk about cancer most of the time. We just send each other photos of our dogs and complain about the weather. Connection is a panic attack's worst enemy.

Telling the medical people without losing your dignity

Here is the awkward bit. Telling your oncology team that you are having panic attacks feels like confessing to a crime you did not commit. There is a strange guilt that comes with saying I am not coping to the people who spent a year keeping you alive. They fought for you. Now you are telling them you are falling apart in the biscuit aisle of Coles.

But here is what I have learned after three bathroom-floor incidents, two conversations with my GP, one very patient psychologist, and a handful of slightly weepy phone calls to the McGrath Foundation nurse who was assigned to me during chemo. The team wants to know. They cannot help with what they cannot see.

I now keep a tiny list in my phone called Things I Have Told No One. Every time I add to it, I bring the most recent item to my next oncology review. Sometimes the item is huge, like I am afraid of every follow-up mammogram. Sometimes it is small, like I cried in the car at Bunnings because I saw a woman in a headscarf and could not breathe. Both are valid. Both get written down.

My oncologist in Brisbane has never once rushed past the list. They pause, they ask a follow-up, and usually add something practical. Once, they referred me to a specialist menopause clinic because the hormonal meds were making the anxiety worse. Nobody had thought to mention that hot flushes and panic attacks are basically the same chemical event. Knowing that changed everything.

The community that held me when I could not hold myself

There is a version of breast cancer survivorship that looks like sunrise yoga, a clean fridge, and a freezer full of meal-prepped grain bowls. That is somebody's story. It was not mine. My version looked like PJs at 2 p.m., toast with Vegemite eaten over the sink, and a group chat called Bosom Buddies Brisbane that pings at unhelpful hours with messages about digestive side effects and sad cat memes.

Both stories are real. Both are survivorship.

I found my people through Breast Cancer Network Australia's online forums, a local Bosom Buddies meet-up near the Brisbane River, and the kind of women who respond when you post in a Facebook group at 3 a.m. asking if anyone else's armpit still hurts two years after surgery. Yes. Yes it does. We are all with you.

If a piece of merch that makes you snort-laugh in the chemo chair sounds like medicine, the shop page has a small range of tees that help fund this work. Wear the rude one. It does wonders for morale in radiology waiting rooms.

If you are reading this from a bathroom floor right now, or from a parked car, or from the change room at Kmart, here is what I want you to know. The twenty minutes will end. Your nervous system will, eventually, get the memo. Until then, you can borrow mine. I have left it on the floor, neatly folded, with a clean towel beside it.

I am going to put the kettle on, text the friend in Adelaide, and add one small thing to my Things I Have Told No One list before I go to bed. If you have a story you have not told anyone yet, write it down somewhere quiet tonight, even if it is just a voice note to yourself. That is the next step.