Diagnosis

To write about my diagnosis is to start a story that I am not sure will ever be complete.  But I will try.  I found my lump on April 11, 2011.  It was an evening and I was telling Sean that for the last few days my left breast had just been aching.  We had been trying to get pregnant, so truth be told I was hoping that we had succeeded and that was the beginning of a wonderful experience.  I started rubbing the side of my breast and found the lump.  I called Sean over and had him feel it to see what he thought.  He looked at me and said, 'You need to get that checked.'  Now...lets back up here a bit.  I work at a cancer center.  I knew what this was.  I can't tell you how, but at that moment I knew that my life would never be the same.  There was a thought that if I didn't get it looked at that it would just go away.  But I knew that was not an option.  I had seen WAY TOO many women who had tried that and learned the hard way it would not work.  So the next day I called the doctor.  I was not ready to face it so I told them that I just needed a physical...it had been a while.  They set an appointment for Friday and I was FINE with that...I did what I had to.  So Friday came and I went in and told them about the lump.  The nurse practitioner looked at me and said.....I can't rule out glandular tissue, but we need to look into this.  The next Tuesday was the mammogram and ultra sound.  We had been down this road before.  We did this a few years before and everything turned out ok...or did it?  When the doctor came in after the ultra sound I was hoping for the 'let's check this in 6 months' talk...or even better...'it's nothing to worry about'.  Instead I got the 'we need to do a biopsy' talk.  We were able to set that up for Thursday, April 21.  It was then that I decided that I needed to let a couple of people know what was going on.  So I went up to work and had my doctor pull up the films and look at them with me.  He looked at them and tried to reassure me, but I could tell that he was not convinced himself.  So Thursday came and we did the biopsy.  They took a piece of the tumor and could see a lymph node so they took a piece of that too.  The waiting game began.  I tried to keep myself busy and not think about it.  That night I had a talk with my doctor.  We talked about the possibility of positive and negative results.  I told him that I knew it was positive.  He tried to reassure me that it could be this and could be that.  I told him that I was not spinning, and that is what I usually did...I knew it was going to be okay, but it was cancer.  He told me to wait until tomorrow and we would deal with it then.  Friday came and so came the phone call.  Cancer.  and it had spread to the lymph node.  We still are shooting for a cure.  One that I feel in my heart will come.  Just a long journey to get there. 

Beginning

They say that writing helps the mind figure things out...or at least that is what I have heard many times along this journey.  I have thought about how I want to preserve the memories of what I am going through and how I can share them with others without censoring my feelings.  I am going to try this blog and see how raw I can allow myself to be. 

Sharing these deep feelings can be dangerous...to me and to those that will read this blog.  Once I put these things out there, they can never be taken back.  I can never un-say how I feel and I am not sure about how to proceed...I guess we will see how it goes and take it from there. 

Thank you for taking this journey with me and I ask for your patience as I figure myself out along the way.