it Has been a while
"What'd you do this summer?" Was the topic of conversations at the bus stop, school pick-up and playdates. I fancy myself a chatty mama and admit that my responses have been mostly a shrug and "Nothin'." And quickly, "What'd you do?"
I can't possibly tell another person who's just an acquaintance that I had two health scares, one that was real, a major surgery, and I am currently going through radiation treatment. They’re reactions are predictable. 1. Be agast at the news. Nay, horrified. 2. Apologize. 3. Look for the nearest exit. 4. Avoid me as if bad news is catching.
At the beginning of the summer in May, I went to the optometrist to get a new set of glasses prescription (and get a new doctor, too, since I had Lasiks 15+ years ago), and he misdiagnosed me as having a brain tumor. Ever done that? Head in to get a new pair of glasses and get hustled into a tumor diagnosis? Yeah, me neither.
Luckily, he knew he didn't have the equipment to get a solid diagnosis (just zero common sense to not scare the bejeebers out of me) and referred me to the top neuro-ophthalmologist in the city. One MONTH later, I finally saw the neuro-ophthalmologist who asked a simple question before we took a battery of exams, "How bad was your eyesight before Lasik?" It was take-your-glasses-off-yer-blind bad. And it was revealed that my egg-shaped eye (this fact I knew from when I was a kid) - also called myopic - can't pass periphery exams that optometrists give in their offices. That lil' computer simulation doesn't work for me. I can see my periphery just fine, and my optic nerves are as healthy as they come.
Having kids and getting a health scare like this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime events that you hope to never repeat. You have long conversations with yourself, your spouse, and the Almighty in the days before you get a final diagnosis. And it was one I hoped to never repeat. But repeat, it did.
I have a dark sense of humor and grew up with darkness at my door, and, so I spend a shit ton of my time reading about staying healthy being healthy, and finally, after two kids and a pandemic, I'm finally doing the things I wanted to do but couldn't with two small kiddos. So when I scheduled my breast reduction surgery (the health insurance took one look at my 34J chest and said, QUALIFIED), I was excited. I knew it was going to be transformative, just not how much. I was required to get a mammogram as a pre-look into the tissue so they'd know if it was dense, fibrous, or fatty. And in my fibrous tissue, a 1.4 cm ball of double-positive, invasive breast cancer was found.
Fuck. Me.
In the next few weeks, I downloaded more information about breasts, breast tissue, cancer types, and treatment options into my brain than a supercomputer can with the human genome. Within this nightmare, blessings began to emerge. When the plastic surgeon’s office dropped me as a client after they heard "cancer," I was afraid that my reduction dreams were gone. But within my first meeting with the breast cancer surgeon (who, I found out later, just so happened to be the most requested breast cancer surgeon in our region - but miraculously took me in as a client when my papers were sent to her oncology center), said she was besties with my plastic surgeon and would request her to do my reconstruction after the lumpectomy, which would be the full reduction that we had planned. Then, on surgery day, the entire operating room staff, from anesthesiologists to the two surgeons to the nurses assisting, was an entirely female staff. Then, weeks later, we got the genomics back from the nasty little cells, and their reoccurrence score was low, as in, not coming back, low.
I'll always be vigilant from here to forever about getting mammos, taking my meds, etc., but knowing those nasty cell's likelihood of coming back is less than the statistic of me dying in a fiery car wreck, I feel blessed. Not just two months ago I thought I was kissing my family goodbye. Now, I've got a second chance.
And that, my friends, is what I did this summer.
What’d you do?
