I know a lot of what I am about to say is probably long overdue. I have covered a lot of journey in my life and I haven’t always been able to take the time or energy to get it out of my head and down on paper. I’ve been wanting to share for awhile, but it’s just felt weird. Like, how do I go back and cover all of this stuff and the timing has just felt off. But recently, it has felt like this is the right time. I have an important milestone rapidly approaching that I would like to tell you about. But before you can appreciate what it is, I feel I first have to tell you how it came to be….
The year was 2013. It was the month of March. I was 28 years old. Married with five bonus kids and three biological little people. At the time the oldest was 23 years old and the youngest was just three years old. Of the eight children, we had at that point, four of them living full time in our house with us. This particular morning, two of them were in school. (This was before we started homeschooling.) It was in the shower that day that I found the lump on my left breast. A lump that didn’t hurt. In that moment, my life changed forever, even though I didn’t completely know it yet. I made a doctors appointment that day. Went in the day of the appointment, told the doctor about what I held felt. She examined me and told me it was probably nothing but just to be on the safe side we should do an ultrasound. While I was there that she had me set up a follow up appointment to come back for a physical and to discuss the results. When I came back in I was told that the ultrasound didn’t show any abnormalities. For a moment there, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, ‘Ok, maybe it really is nothing.’
During our follow up conversation the doctor started talking about my family history. She knew that both of my grandmothers, paternal and maternal, had had breast cancer. She also knew that the breast cancer killed my maternal grandmother at only 40 years old. Knowing all of that, she felt it would be wise to get a second opinion. She had me go see a breast specialist that was about a two hour drive each way.
The breast specialist wanted to error on the side of caution, so she set me up for my very first mammogram. Now, let me just pause here for a second to point out that I was just offended by this. Up to this point in my life I had been saying that I was never going to need a torture session (also known as a mammogram), because I wasn’t going to need one until I was 40 and by then someone was going to have come up with a better alternative to the mammogram. (Obviously, this still hasn’t happened. Unfortunately.) So, to find out that not only was I going to have to have a mammogram at all, but that I was going to have to have my very first one at only 28 years old, was just an outrage. (It was slightly funny at the time, it’s gotten way more funny over the years. Anyway…)
By the time I went through all of this process and the day of the mammogram arrived, it was now the 8th of May 2013. I made my two hour drive down for the ‘quick’ mammogram. For the first and probably only, time of my life, I took very little with me to keep me busy. I didn’t expect to be there very long. I had a book that I was half or better way through and that was about it. (I didn’t get a smart phone until 2016 so, yeah, no help there.) I had figured that that would be more than enough to keep me busy. Which it would have if I had gotten in for a quick mammogram and been done. But sometimes, life doesn’t turn out the way we expect it to.
My mammogram was scheduled for 9AM that day. I left there around 4PM. By that time, I had been mammogramed, had a new ultrasound done, mammogramed again, had biopsies done on both the left breast and nearby lymph nodes, and then mammogramed again. (The ultrasound person came out himself to tell me that the ultrasound disk I had brought with me, he had looked at it, and that the ultrasound I had just had done a few weeks prior, was, in his words, ‘garbage’.)
So, it was after a mere SEVEN hours later, that I got to climb more sore aching body back into my stick shift car and drive myself the two hours back home. Let me just say, if I had had any idea that my day was going to turn out like that, boy, would I have done some things differently.
Two days later, I got a phone call from a nurse at the doctors office. Let me just say one thing I learned from that call. When a doctors office calls you and the first thing they ask after confirming who you are is, ‘Are you somewhere you can talk?’, it’s not good news. I remember that moment clearly. My first thought was, ‘I should just hang up. Then I don’t have to hear what they have to tell me.’ That was then followed up by the more rational thought of, ‘Yeah, but today’s Friday and then you would have to spend the whole weekend wondering what’s wrong.’ It’s amazing how quickly a train of thoughts can roll through a persons mind.
‘Are you somewhere you can talk?’ She asked me. In that moment, I knew I didn’t want my kids to be a party to this conversation. I sat down on our stairs, as far from them as I could get without leaving the house, and said, ‘Yes.’ That is where the clarity ends. Once she said the word, ‘cancer’, everything else became background noise, with the word repeating itself over and over inside of my mind. I just remember sitting there and asking her, ‘Are you sure?’ (Meanwhile my tiny rational brain was sitting back there saying, ‘Of course they are sure! Do you think that they would have called you and told you that if they weren’t absolutely sure?!’)
Turns out, it wasn’t ‘nothing’. It was a whole lot of something. At that time, I had stage 2 invasive ductal carcinoma in my left breast and lymph nodes.
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