My Journey Through

Today, I'm exactly 12 weeks from surgery and six weeks from starting chemo. I've put my chemo schedule in my planner in brightly colored markers.  Aaaaaand, I have to cross it out. Everything is being pushed back a week. (Its nothing to be alarmed about - in fact, my oncologist giddily encouraged me to enjoy my week off.) One of the things I've experienced about going through treatment is that there is so much going on, so many moving parts, so many procedures and appointments and medications that its like a complicated marble track where you are chugging along in one direction but a little switch appears out of nowhere that sends you off in a different direction.  Overall, I've been fortunate to enter cancer treatment (relatively) young, strong and otherwise healthy. My providers are proactive and efficient in treating. I've recovered well from surgery and I am tolerating the side effects of chemotherapy well.  The biggest challenge I have been facing is my darn se...

The Day Before Last Thursday, I prepped for surgery the next day. I went to the gym and had a good workout, my last for a while. I wanted to feel as strong and positive as possible going into surgery, and I knew that working out would help me sleep well the night before.  That afternoon, I had an appointment at the hospital to have an injection of tracer dye that would help guide the the biopsy of my lymph nodes so that as few needed to be removed as possible. I thought fresh flowers in the hospital bathroom was a sweet thing.  We had a quiet evening with a surprise visit from a friend and some good food. I made a smoothie for myself at bedtime to get in the last little bit of nutrition before I had to stop eating.  The Morning Of As Dave said, the hardest part of the whole thing would be getting me to the hospital bright and early the morning of the surgery. My mastectomy would be done as a day surgery which necessitated an early start. I was due to get there at 6:15 and...

Thoughts about the diagnosis written last week before surgery... Many people I've told about having cancer have had a stronger emotional reaction to the news than I have myself. Honestly, I felt more shocked about having an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting and getting a flat tire the week of my mastectomy than I did when being diagnosed with breast cancer.  I've been preparing myself for this diagnosis since my mother died of metastatic breast cancer when I was 22. By the time I was 25, I had a mammogram, several ultrasounds, a biopsy, and visits with a breast specialist. This is not the beginning of my journey. I'm BRCA negative, so not the highest known risk, but my risk was still elevated to 20 or 30% chance in my lifetime, at least twice the average risk. So during this phase, one of my many feelings is a sense of relief. I'm dealing with it now, I don't have to keep watching and waiting. Because, it turns out that my risk was actually 100%.  For the last se...

Two and a half weeks ago, I had an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting. About a half hour after the sting, the palms of my hands and bottoms of my feet got itchy, hives appeared all over my body, and my lips and face started tingling and swelling. I took some expired Benadryl, which I'm thankful had survived my recent purge of expired medications, and we loaded the boys in the car so that Dave could drive me to the nearest emergency room.  Once there, I experienced what had become familiar uncertainty. Do I mention it? Is it weird to mention it? Or is it weirder NOT to mention it?  "So....I also have breast cancer. Just in case that matters?" (It didn't, as it turned out.) This story sums up my experience of this first phase of having cancer, between the diagnosis and becoming an actual Cancer Patient. If I hadn't had my routine scan last month, I'd still be walking around unaware, otherwise healthy, focused on the minutia of kids, work, laundry, life. And un...