Shock, Denial, Acceptance

February 2023

The whole month of February is a blur. You call the imaging place where the mammogram screening is scheduled and ask to come in sooner. Your husband agrees with you that something is definitely there. They are not in a rush to see you. They block out more time and shift your appointment from the preventative screening (free with insurance) to diagnostic with ultrasound ($). The tech says you’ll need a biopsy. You feel mildly apprehensive.

Biopsy day is ten days later. Three days after that, you have the results.

Malignant.

Invasive ductal carcinoma.

You feel fine. You’re healthy. Aren’t you?

You start Googling, and then you quickly realize you should stop Googling. Google is not your friend right now.

You think you should keep it to yourself, and quickly realize you are not that person. The need to tell others boils over. It isn’t real until you speak of it, and you need to take this seriously and be proactive. Speaking on it helps you accept the reality of it. You’re torn between your need to tell everyone–scream the unfairness of it from the rooftops–and the need to keep this close to your breast, locked up like a criminal. You decide to be transparent with your friends, with your coworkers, with your family. (You will not, however, tell your young son until you know the plan.)

You and your lunch bunch name it The Beezleboob–little devil that it is. The Beezleboob must be destroyed and then saved. And, lets’ face it, you love a good pun and you’re go-to defense is humor. You decide you’ll start blogging again. After all, you need the cathartic release of writing, and maybe someone else needs to read it. Maybe this could serve to remind them to check themselves, remind the women they love to be vigilant, or just need to know they are not struggling with their sense of mortality alone.

My instinct is to diminish my cancer diagnosis–to treat it like a cold I’m soldiering through. The knee-jerk reaction is to say “it’s nothing,” to not take up space with it, to not make a big deal of myself in the presence of others. But I am a big deal. My life is valuable, as is every other person’s.

It’s okay to not be okay.