Save Me a Seat, Please -

Hi there -

Sneaking through the door to introduce myself. My name is Nina. Biopsy confirmed IDC left breast 1/24/14, and I underwent lumpectomy w SNB on 2/10/14. Now it's that awful matter of waiting for the path report so I can sit down with a few med oncs to plan a strategy. I'm HER2+, ER/PR-, and since all pre-op imaging put my tumor at just under 2cm, I'm reasonably sure I'll be in for chemo no matter where the final path size nets out. The single node my surgeon removed looked good upon initial inspection, but I'm not letting my head get too excited about that because I know there's a chance that closer inspection will uncover some involvement.

Today is my 50th birthday; it also marks the first anniversary of my mom's funeral (she passed away last February following a series of increasingly debilitating strokes). And while the news of my own cancer was hardly the birthday present I was hoping for, I feel so lucky that my annual mammo caught it, and that I have a fantastic team of aggressive doctors who rushed me through every procedure with lightning speed. I had an MRI following the u/s biopsy which revealed additional spots including a highly enhanced area on my sternum, so I had a PET/CT, a bone scan, and a second MRI in rapid succession to rule out any mets. The moral of the story is that sometimes it's genuinely better NOT to know what's going on under your skin, especially when it's a stupid, harmless bone island.

I know a diagnosis of breast cancer is terrifying. Everything's so confusing and scary in the beginning, and you're unceremoniously dumped into this horrible world with a foreign language where nobody seems to give you the precise, definitive answers you so desperately want. You go blind staring at a bunch of statistics and try to match up what's happening inside you with what's happening inside someone else. You also probably kill a whole bunch of valuable brain cells wondering how long it's been inside of you, why you didn't find it sooner, and what you did that might have caused it. We women are terrific at blaming ourselves for everything, but incredibly, there actually ARE a handful of things that are beyond our sphere of influence, and breast cancer is usually one of those.

I'm calm not because I enjoy having breast cancer, but because in January 2011, my younger sister was diagnosed with Stage IV (we both are BRCA negative, so it's just the luck of the draw). I did my panicking for her and with her, and I'm all panicked out. I'm also far more educated about the thing than I was when we got her news. We made a commitment to focus only on what we could influence, and to leave the rest up to the universe. We've also learned that grabbing joy with both hands whenever you find some is infinitely better for you than constantly bracing for the next bit of bad news. We talk more about how much we love each other. Cancer has an upside, if you can let yourself see it: it forces you to acknowledge that none of us will be here forever, so we all need to be less willing to waste our time wrestling with petty dramas.

What I'm saying is that I get the fear and the anger and the sadness. I feel all of those things, too. But I'm going to do my best not to get lost in them, and I'm probably going to ask you ladies for help with that every now and then. I hope to give you the same encouragement and comfort in return. And I'm looking forward to getting to know you all - even the super freaky ones. Super freaky people are my favorites, lol.

Now I'm going to finish baking my birthday cake. If my husband and son are very, very nice to me, I might give each of them a (tiny) slice!