My turn

Everyone takes a turn with cancer. We all fight the battle: for ourselves, for our families, for our friends. Researchers battle in the labs; runners battle on the course. Here in Columbus, bar crawlers battle in the bar (and sometimes with each other, but let’s set that aside). We all take at least one turn.

I found the lump in November. Truth be told, breasts are kinda lumpy. You might not know that if you don’t have them, but it’s true. Tissue changes. Family history and a general anxious nature ensure that I check the girls regularly, but I’d found things before that just went away. So, I felt pretty comfortable waiting to see the doctor. We were getting ready to leave for Europe. I’m not sure, I might have let it go completely, but I got hit on the head with a truck.

One of the remaining bastions of my lapsed Catholicism is the belief that those who pass on before us still play a role in our lives. Both of my grandmothers had breast cancer, and have since passed on to the next place. As I walked to my car the morning before Thanksgiving, I turned a corner and almost walked into an enormous mammogram truck, parked in what is usually an incredibly crowded parking lot downtown. I’d never seen one there before, and I thought, “Ok, Grandmas. I’ll get on it.” Coincidence? Universe? Who knows? I choose to thank Peggy and Helen.

When we returned from our trip, the lump was still there and so my doc referred me for a mammogram and an ultrasound. The best way to explain a mammogram to a man, I think, is to imagine your favorite (ahem) cylindrical body part. Now, imagine sticking it in a cold panini press, which a very nice person in kicky scrubs then uses to try and flatten your naturally non-flat favorite body part. Medical technology has advanced so that its a lucite panini press. But, still. “Press” is the operative word.

The lump feels like a very small grape. And, while I intellectually understand that a breast is comprised of tissue, what I picture is actually closer to a thin-skinned water balloon. I have no idea why. I think its possible that its related to my watching movies from the nineties featuring plastic surgery and Bridget Fonda (Doc Hollywood, Singles), but that’s really another blog post.

At any rate, for most of the first week of my turn, all I could think of was a grape taped to a water balloon being smushed into a panini press.

The experience was, of course, nothing like that. But the docs saw the ultrasound and decided to biopsy the spot that looked like the eye of a hurricane on the ultrasound screen. I’m assuming all of the years in medical school help you discern the breast tissue from a tropical storm.

I had the biopsy on Christmas Eve Eve and December 30, I got the phone call. Breast cancer.

There’s a lot more to find out. There’s a lot more to decide. We don’t yet have our plan of attack. If you imagine this happening, you imagine urgency and things happening very quickly, but it will be 8 days between hearing the diagnosis and meeting with the doctors. We caught this early and the lump is small. No one seems panicked.

So for 8 days, I break the news to family and friends with bad jokes (it’s a premier breast facility, but not a strip club) and try to gear up. I go to work. I watch the Buckeyes. I am scared…though fortunately, as an anxious person, I’m pretty used to that. I run, because that was my plan before all this happened and because even at 13 minute miles it makes me feel stronger. I think about how my life is about to change.

But, also, about how its not going to change. I am a partner and a sister and a librarian who makes bad jokes, likes to take pictures, is bad at soccer and just happens to have cancer. It’s my turn. #tovictory