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Showing posts from May, 2015

I accept my blessings

My husband laid 4 quarters on the table yesterday, lined up in a straight line, and proposed a toast. The quarters measured almost 12cm across, the size of the cancer removed from my body. He toasted the blessing of clear margins and lymph nodes, and i almost cried.  I was almost brought to tears because he gets it.  I've had two weeks of people talking in hushed tones around me, alternated with me showing my new chest to anyone who asked. People who don't know me and my family well seem Perplexed about my joy.  I met with my doctor to review my pathology report and listened intently when she told me that they couldn't see anything like this on imaging. There was no way they could see this much disease. They also couldn't see the rare melanoma that was Inside one of my breasts. They couldn't see that one of the suckers was trying to kill me and the other had been laying in wait, slowly formulating a backup plan should it's partner fail.  I am a rational woman, s

Part 3 Cherry Blossom Eyelashes

Funny things happen when you tell people you have cancer, especially breast cancer. They give you "the face". The face is interesting, because it's not like a pity face or even a sorry face, it's a face that says "I'm scared shitless. What happened? If this happened to you, it can happen to me." And it can, for no reason whatsoever. That's where the scared shitless part comes in. Then they want to know details, not because they really want to know, but because they need to do their own mental checklist and measure it against yours, to see if we've done the same things. Then you tell people what you've decided to do, and it really doesn't matter if you have no logical other choice (like me), or you have options, a look of disbelief will come over their faces and you get either "girl, I don't know if I could make that choice" which is of course, ridiculous, because, of course they could. If someone says "you do this thing

If thy boobies offend thee

There was no lump. No bump. No discharge. No itch. No shadow. No image. There was only a hunch.  The doctor thought that what she saw was atypical hyperplasia, but she wasn't  sure. That's not cancer, she said, but precancerous and it would have to come out. I was good with whatever wasn't supposed to be there being in a test tube . I was not good with being asleep to have things happen. For my first and second biopsy, I was awake and talking. The second one was actually classified as a partial mastectomy, but I was allowed to talk to the surgeon throughout the entire procedure. My biggest question? If they can take fat  from your butt and put it in your face, why couldn't they do that for your breasts? The answer: Because. Just. Because.  I was going to have a hole.  Good thing my breasts don't define who I  am. Good thing my man isn't a boob man.  The margins were not clear after that procedure. That meant that when my Mimime asked me, I had to tell her that n

An Overachieving Between

I am an overachiever. The doctor told me that after he told me that I had breast cancer. He said if I had to have it (as if), I'd picked the best one possible. That doctor's statement is how I started my 2015. That was not what I'd planned. I'd planned a year of writing  two books, a patent at work and training to compete as a figure athlete in the summer, followed by a bang-up bash to celebrate my milestone birthday in a pretty place in October. I'd planned college trips and dance recitals with my children, and a beach holiday with tons of friends. Here I was, in the best shape of my life, yet I was diagnosed with the disease whose mention made every woman and quite a few men take a serious deep breath and the blood to drain from many a face. I've always known that breast cancer was coming for me. I have lived like one of TheBetween as described in Tannanarive Due's novel, someone who cheats death and because death can never be cheated, it is always lurking