A friend who is a breast cancer survivor passed on advice she was given, which was to imagine I’m on a conveyor belt, and simply let it carry me through it all. I keep going back to this, as just today I’m feeling more like I’m in a free fall and I can’t remember what pushed me.
A month ago, no cancer. A week from now, no boobs. Just today, the “Wait, what now?” caught up with me and there seem to be big holes in the information explaining how I got here. Has Bob been paying attention? Can we review the tapes?
Oh yeah. Cancer. Right right right. Two spots of cancer in my breast. The cancer is different in each spot, which seems weird and ominous, but I am apparently the only one concerned about it. I feel a bit like our cat Balto, who doesn’t get to go outside at the cabin, but just made a break for it when I took the dog out. He walked purposefully away from me, but a couple steps off the deck he realized that he didn’t really know what comes next – he was surprised to find that “outside” is cold and dark, because all he knows is what he’s researched on the Internet and stuff friends have told him.
I talked to my surgeon on Friday, just to go over the plan. He said the surgery should take about four hours, vs. the standard two, as my cups over floweth. I will wake up without breasts, but with a drain tube sewn into each armpit, leading to a plastic bottle on each side that can be stored in the internal pockets of the special $79 zip-up tank tops that insurance covers.
Speaking of insurance, did I mention that a month ago, it looked like I wasn’t going to hit my out-of-pocket maximum for the year, for the first time in over a decade? Hahahaha.