Here we go again…
Around this time of the year, I get uneasy. It’s February, which means it’s time for my mammogram and the determination of whether I’m still in remission from breast cancer. It’s also the month when, in 2017, my life was slammed in a different direction and the best I could do was try to hang on.
February 8, 2017: Doctor’s appointment. After feeling a lump in my breast for six months (SIX MONTHS!!!), I finally met with my general practitioner to have her tell me it was nothing. Except that’s not what she said. Instead, she gave me a referral for a diagnostic mammogram and warned me not to put it off.
February 23, 2017: My mammogram and diagnostic ultrasound. I had not expected that waiting two weeks for a screening would be so horrible, but my anxiety worsened with every day. I also had not expected the radiologist to come in and tell me that I had cancer. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to do that without biopsy results, but he knew what he was looking at. One in eight women is diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in her life, so he’d seen his share. Things spiraled downhill after that.
February 28, 2017: Biopsy. This procedure was anticlimactic in the sense that I knew I had cancer (see above). What I didn’t yet know was how aggressive it was. The procedure itself wasn’t bad but the mammography technicians were unable to get a clear picture of the titanium markers that the radiologist who biopsied me had inserted as surgical guides, so they took over eleven mammogram images on that left breast. The physical squeezing was miserable, but I was being squeezed mentally too. I think they eventually got the image they wanted…or maybe they didn’t. It was all a blur. I didn’t want to remember.
But now it’s three years later and I remember everything too clearly. Every February, I lose my footing on the Earth and hover for a few weeks in limbo, starting from when I make my mammogram appointment.
I’ll have an uneasy feeling until I get the “all clear” from the radiologist, or “I’m so sorry, but…”. On one end of the continuum, there’s glorious relief, on the other, mind-numbing anxiety, and I’m standing here in the middle. Most of my life now is lived in this middle ground and it’s a struggle to release expectations and attachments to how I want things to be. I’m not great at it, but I have the rest of my life to learn to deal. I hope that’s enough time.
Frantic Shanti 