The Thing About Breast Cancer

This week has been busy getting ready for surgery (heck… I can’t eat after midnight tonight so I had to double up on my M&M consumption yesterday and today!!). 

Everyone tells me that I need to get used to people helping me out, so I’m planning on having meals delivered until 2012 and having everyone do the carpools until my daughter goes off to college!  As part of my new found love of delegating, I’m letting my friends say the funny things for my blog, so I’m welcoming everyone to email me funny thoughts and you can be my guest bloggers!  Today I received the following in different emails from my friends:

1.  good riddance to no longer reliable breasts and hello to fabulous new knockers and even more fabulous peace of mind 

2.  You are going to kick some serious boob butt tomorrow

3.  Trust me; you’ll laugh for the rest of your life every time someone says “titillating”, and you won’t believe how many times each day you’ll hear the word “chicken-breast”.  

I hope you all noticed that, in the spirit of continuous improvement, I upgraded by blog to a new lovely design with a more beautiful lime and more functionality. 

Anyway…. my daughter over heard my husband and me talking about the new web site design and she said, “that’s appropriate:  new boobs; new website”.  I laughed it off until I realized there was a pattern emerging.  Was everything REALLY tied to my new look???? 

new job at work?  new office at work?  new home office?  newly decorated family room?  newly elected US president? 

Were my new breasts really the catalyst for all this change????????????????????????????

shortly after my diagnosis, someone asked me to serve on a committee at our temple.  It was something I was interested in, and I thought I could add value to the process.  Unfortunately with the prospect of surgery and chemo ahead, I had to respond “no”.  I was bummed that my cancer had gotten in the way of me doing something I wanted to do. 

My husband later got a call for something silly …. you know the “committee to choose a new color for the town street signs” or something equally ridiculous.  Without blinking, he said, “I won’t be able to help; my wife is battling breast cancer”. It rolled off the tongue so easily.  I wondered how else I could hide behind my cancer………

·         committee to chose a new leaf collector at the temple?  sorry; busy with breast cancer this winter

·         carpool to Maryland for camp reunion?  sorry; busy with breast cancer this winter

·         Drive crazy Aunt Esther to JFK the day before Thanksgiving?  sorry; busy with breast cancer this winter

·         Pick up 20 2 liter bottles of soda for the cast party for the play?  sorry; busy with breast cancer this winter

·         Volunteer for crash and burn project at work that requires 3 all nighters in a row?  sorry; busy with breast cancer this winter

I think I’m on to something here………….  I wonder how long I can get away with this??????????????????????????????????????

While discussing my upcoming surgery with the receptionist at the Plastic Surgeon’s office, I made what I thought was a funny throw away comment.  Pinching the fatty part of my upper thigh, I said, “any chance Dr. P can take away some of my lovely cellulite while he’s operating on me next week?”  (ha. ha. ha.  I’m thinking… such an original joke!).  With a total straight face, she said, “we prefer to do all of that during the second surgery when he’s doing the permanent implants.  You should also know that part of the reconstruction requires him to remove some tissue from your lower belly, so you’ll be getting a virtual tummy tuck at that time, too”. 

She was totally serious.  I was floored…. Overnight, I went from being the “thin woman with big breasts” (see previous blog entry) to the “overweight, out of shape slug who needed to sneak some cosmetic surgery into her mastectomy”.  What a difference a week makes!!!!

statistic:  1 in 8 women will get breast cancer in her lifetime.  There are a group of 8-ish girls who are my dear friends from high school.  This week, I informed them that I had “checked the breast cancer box” for our group. 

I’m still waiting for my “thank you for getting breast cancer so we don’t have to” card!!!

so……. right in the middle of all the breast cancer madness, my older daughter got an infected cyst in her breast (NO relation to breast cancer, but a lovely opportunity to spend more time with radiologists, surgeons and other people who are all too anxious to stick needles in your breast!!). 

In between all the tears, she looked up at me and said, “mom… I’m so sorry; I didn’t mean to steal your breast cancer thunder”. 

True story.  really!  

background fact:  in preparation for a rigorous course of chemo, doctors send you to cardiologist for an echo cardiogram. 

so, here’s a recap of a conversation in our house this AM:

me (to my older daughter):  I’ll see you this afternoon.  I have to leave work early to go get an echo cardiogram.

the daughter:  What is an echo cardiogram?

me:  it’s an ultra sound of the heart

the daughter:  your heart?  I thought it was your boob??????

you can’t make this stuff up! 

had I known that I was going to “retire” these breasts early, I would have given them more exposure early on.  I didn’t date very much growing up and I got married relatively early.  So…. while my friend Micky keeps saying (after reading my blog) that he thinks he’s the only one in Connecticut who hasn’t seem my breasts, the reality is they have gotten very little exposure.  To use a work analogy, I thought they were going to be a permanent menu item (like a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s or a Mountain Dew 2-Litre at Stop n Shop).  Instead, they’ve become a limited time offer (LTO), like the Pumpkin Latte at Dunkin Donuts.  when you have an LTO product, you work hard to get lots of trial, knowing that the product will soon be out of circulation.  Oh well… it looks like I missed my window for high trial of these breasts.  Sorry to all of you who missed out! 

as my daughter Olive noted today, my zodiac sign is Cancer