cancer – day 9
One of my friends suggested I keep a journal of this experience because some day it could be helpful to other young women who get breast cancer. I had to decide what date to start counting from . . . the day my doctor found the lump, the day the mammogram showed the tumor, or maybe the day I got the biopsy report that said it was cancer. I decided to go with April 25th as cancer day 0, it was the day my doctor told me on the phone that it’s definitely cancer. Invasive, malignant, breast cancer.
There have been lots of little stories to tell along the way already . . . how I freaked out on my dance partner because he was the first person I talked to after finding out about the lump (and the colonoscopy I was going to have to have), how messed up my first biopsy was, how I had to chase down the biopsy results because my surgeon prefers to discuss things “in person” and I was not about to wait until freaking Monday to find out, having the MRI show two more cancerous areas, and of course all the conversations with family and friends along the way. But since this is the first blog about it, I’ll just get you caught up on the facts as we currently know them.
I have an infiltrating ductal carcinoma, which is an invasive malignant cancer, as well as an area of what they hope right now is ductal carcinoma in situ, and another area they hope isn’t even malignant yet. The two additional biopsies I’m having next Tuesday will tell us about the latter issues.
And to top it off, breast cancer is both rare and more aggressive in young women (classified as younger than 40), and they are definitely going to put me through aggressive treatment with chemotherapy. Apparently the cancer is a much greater threat than the possibility that my heart condition will suffer/flare from the chemo treatments.
I’ve mostly been ok emotionally, or at least I think I have. I had one good breakdown this morning because it’s just getting harder every day to pretend life is normal. My life of course is not normal, but I act that way to make it easier for the people around me. And it helps me too, in a way. It’s not like I don’t admit to or avoid thinking about having cancer, but at the same time, the medical process is thorough and therefore requires some time. Not a lot, we’re still talking about a matter of only a few weeks from the lump being found to getting me in surgery, but still. While I have a doctor’s appointment or test or procedure of some kind pretty much every day of the week, I still have lots of time every day that I could wallow in self pity, or instead, try to do my job, try to dance, and keep living.
The breakdown this morning was overdue, because I’ve been pulling off the “life is normal” thing pretty well apparently, and it finally burned me out a little too much. The other thing that came to a boiling point in me emotionally and kept me up all night last night was that I’ve been trying to call Artie’s mom to tell her what’s going on but I haven’t been able to reach her (and when I couldn’t get Paul or Philip on the phone either, I started getting nervous that there’s something else going on with their family, which is worrisome). Then all that got me thinking about how awful the past five and a half years have been for Artie’s family and all of us who suffered for losing him, and how I just can’t stand the thought of putting my family through that. [Mark had a great comment at this point in the conversation this morning, he said “that’s why you’re going to survive.” Shocking, to have someone just matter-of-factly say the exact truth of the whole matter like that.] There was a time when I promised myself I would never let someone suffer over me the way I have over Artie, and it kept me out of a lot of relationships. Well, that and plenty of other issues. Isn’t it ridiculous how hard we make it for ourselves to have a good lasting relationship? Or maybe that’s just me, I don’t really know. It’s been well over 18 months since there was a guy in my life I really called a boyfriend, I’m usually pretty good at avoiding those kind of relationships altogether. Life’s so much simpler that way. Ah, but I digress from the primary subject, which is to let people know where we’re at with the cancer.
There are so many more people I should call and tell about the cancer in person, but I finally gave in to my natural tendency to write instead of call because the phone calls have been so hard, so, here we all are. I’ll blog more when we have the results of the other two biopsies this week, and when the surgery is scheduled.