Pathological Response

If you're a mom, the first major hurdle you face after a breast cancer diagnosis is figuring out how to share that information with your kids.  There's a big catch.  Namely, you're not allowed to freak them out even though you yourself are VERY freaked out.  Whether or not to tell the kids, when to tell them, and how much to tell them, depends upon many factors, but for me it was clear that I would have to be up front with them.  I am simply terrible at keeping secrets.  In the week after diagnosis, my older son had already caught me crying a few times and he didn't believe me for one little second when I told him it was nothing.  "You're lying," he pronounced knowingly. One beautiful fall day last October, while my youngest played Biddy Basketball and his older brother looked on, I found myself taking refuge in a family dressing room at our local Boys' and Girls' Club.  I simply couldn't find anyplace else where I could phone my sister out o...

                                                This July my husband took our eleven-year-old son to set up and break down tents.  Pink tents, to be specific.  Hundreds upon hundreds of pink tents. Our local Boy Scout troop had asked scouts and parents to volunteer as a way of supporting the people walking in the Avon 39 Walk to End Breast Cancer.  So I signed them up.  Yep, without even asking.  Would I have preferred if my son had asked (no, begged) to take part?  Sure, that might have been nice, but that wasn't gonna happen.  Now that I have hair again, my kids have practically forgotten that I ever had cancer. To be honest, I was simply following established protocol in our house when I signed my son up for this. You see, he never asks to join in on any organized activities of any kind. Instead, he drops hints as to what he...

No, I did NOT skip a mammogram.   Phew!  It feels good to get that out there.  For some reason I feel the need to protect my reputation as the responsible, rule-abiding, appointment-keeping person that I am.  I also feel the need to let other rule-abiding people know that you can find yourself up sh**'s creek even if you keep all of your appointments and ask all of the right questions (or at least what you think are the right questions!).  The human body is complex and our ability to see what's going on inside at any given moment limited. Neither people nor technology are infallible.  That said, intuition is a powerful thing and I wish that I had trusted mine a wee bit more.   The thing is that I kinda felt something was amiss and I kinda asked my doctors to take a closer look at a potential "problem area" in my right breast months before a biopsy would show that I had ductal carcinoma. By then the cancer had already bust out of the duct...

I was diagnosed with breast cancer just over five months ago.   I know that lots of people start blogging right after diagnosis, but I just couldn’t bring myself to write about it until now.   Couldn’t allow myself to write about it until now. Much of my treatment is behind me.  I’ve already jumped through a hell of a lot of hoops and cleared a hell of a lot of hurdles: umpteen biopsies, two MRIs, a full-body CAT scan, a repeat scan of the lungs, a bone scan, chemotherapy, a PET scan, and a mastectomy, in that order.  It’s not that I didn’t want to write about any of this stuff at the time.  It might have made for better reading if I had (it would have been more suspenseful , at any rate).  It’s just that being a cancer patient sometimes felt like a full-time job.  A really, really hard job that doesn't pay.  I'm good at finding jobs like that. There were scary tests and marathon chemo sessions (each infusion took six to seven hours) to ...