To Breast or Not To Breast?

October is breast cancer awareness month.  It is pink and boobies all over.  I think that is great.  We all need to be reminded of the presence of our breasts.

Personally, I tend to notice mine a lot.  Really; they are lumpy and they scare me.  My mom died of not one, but two kinds of breast cancer.  Her mom, my grandma, also had breast cancer, before she had a few other cancers.  Both of them lived until their late 70’s.

So, I am a good girl and I put the twins in the booby smasher every year and get them checked.  I have been doing this since my twenties.  I have had biopsies done before; one in my late twenties and one in my mid thirties.

I think I am about to get another.  My mammogram came back ‘inconclusive’ and the doctor wants me to go in for an ultrasound and a diagnostic mammogram.  When she did my exam the other day, she kept saying, “hmmmmmm, ohhh, and hmmmm.”

This has me feeling kind of reflective and weird.  I have known I had a new lump but I did not really want to report it for a few months.  Why did I do that?

I have felt overwhelmed.  I have been thinking, illogically, that I cannot have something else.

That is of course, stupid. A. I probably don’t. B. If I do, it is likely curable; just nasty.

So, here I am in no girl’s land: waiting for the next step.  I have to make my mind go blank.  I cannot go around thinking about my boob.  I cannot contemplate the fact that people with my host of immune and autoimmune disease are much more likely to have cancer…

I want to run to the radiology place and say, “Here I am.  Look at my boob right now and tell me what the deal is!  I will not wait!”

But they don’t actually have an appointment for a couple of weeks.  I will try tomorrow to move things up.

The deal is I should know this game by heart now: NO CONTROL.

Life just veers around and takes you along for the ride.  Maybe life takes your boob because your cells do something weird in your body and it is called cancer and that sucks.  I don’t know.

Maybe you miss that bullet and you wait until the booby smasher comes around again next year.

I dunno.

To Breast or not to Breast?  That is a silly question.

Think of all the weight I could lose if I got rid of ’em?

Ha! Take that you stupid, lumpy boobies!