-
cancer on our calendar
This relatively normal Christmas could have used the enviable scheduling skills of the Breast Patient Navigator. The hustle and bustle of my favorite season has been overshadowed by interminable waiting for results of tests on tumors and saliva. By some miracle, the Christmas tree is up and twinkling in our front window. I even resurrected my camera and, on a 70 degree day, forced our daughter to don a cheery winter coat and pose under a tree in the backyard. The effort and the eye-rolling was worth it, producing a festive image that was duly uploaded to Shutterfly where the nice people there transformed it into a Happy New Year…
-
positively negative
During a webinar with colleagues this afternoon, my cell phone rang. No caller ID. “Unknown.” Presumably, like all recent “unknown” callers, this would be one of my ever-expanding new network of medical professionals. Initially, I thought it was the cheery Maria from my dentist’s office, confirming a routine cleaning, but it was the other Maria, The Breast Surgery Coordinator, whose phone calls have become as vital to me as dispatches from the front. Two weeks had passed since last we spoke, so I knew this was about the BRCA gene testing. With a quick readjustment, I braced myself for Maria’s news and at the same time resigned myself to the likelihood…
-
Uncategorized
47 days
I read something the other day about a woman who felt she had two distinct lives – the one before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis. In thinking about my own journey through cancer country, I am stuck on determining the actual departure date from the life I’d had without cancer. I may have had it for as long as seven years, I’m told. Still, I feel different. Something has shifted around and within me. Ostensibly, my life is technically the same. I wake up, take a shower, ‘prepare a face to meet the faces I will meet.’ I go to the same job every day with…
-
discovery day
I should have written about it at the time, right after I heard “tumors” in the context of my right breast but it took 17 calendar days before I could actually put pen to paper. Sort of. It’s all too common, apparently – all too acceptable. Somewhere between taking a shower and putting on deodorant, on a Saturday like any other, I discovered a thickening, a lumpish thing above the nipple of my right breast. Inexplicably, within a split second of feeling it, I began sobbing, as if my body already knew. I called my husband into the bathroom. He usually doesn’t respond so quickly, especially when he’s reading the newspaper,…
