The scan was on the fourth of February and the appointment was on the eleventh.
Amira Qureshi went to it, because she is a surgeon and because there was no version of the world in which she did not, and because she had already read the report.
That is the part nobody outside medicine understands. She had read it on the Friday, on the system, at eleven o'clock at night, at her own desk, having gone looking for it, which is a disciplinary matter and which she has never once regretted.
So she sat in a chair in an oncology clinic in Birmingham next to her mother on the eleventh of February and understood the letter on the desk about four seconds before the consultant started talking.
Stage three. Node-positive. Operable.
"What's the number?" said Nusrat Qureshi.
"Ammi — "
"I am asking the doctor, not you."
"Around sixty per cent at five years," said the consultant, "and I want to be clear that sixty is a good number, and that it is a number about a thousand women and not about you."
She was extraordinary about it, which was the worst part.
Nusrat Qureshi is fifty-nine. She came to England at nineteen, she has worked in a school kitchen for thirty-one years, and she took a stage three diagnosis exactly the way she has taken everything since 1989, which is to nod once and then ask a practical question.
"How long is the chemotherapy?"
"Four cycles before surgery, then surgery, then radiotherapy."
"And can I work?"
She did not cry in that room.
She did not cry in the car. She said one thing on the way home, at about the fourth roundabout, and it was:
"Don't tell your brother tonight. Let him have Friday."
She had four cycles before surgery and she did not complain once.
Amira Qureshi has told about four hundred families about four hundred numbers, and she found out in eleven weeks that none of it — not one hour of six years of training, not one thing she has ever said to anybody in a side room — is the smallest use whatsoever when it is your mother in the chair.
She was very good at the practical parts.
She was the one who knew what the bloods meant. She was the one who rang the unit. She got her mother's anti-emetics changed on the third cycle by ringing a registrar she had trained with, which took four minutes and which Nusrat has never known about.
And she sat in a chair in a side room at two o'clock in the morning on the second night after the mastectomy, in her coat, with her eyes shut, pretending to be asleep, because her mother had told her four times to go home.