I am not okay

 (Title post and song credit: Jelly Roll)

Who even blogs anymore? Why am I blogging? What is this all about?

While I don't know the answer to the first question, I can easily answer the next two: I'm blogging for me, about my experience with navigating breast cancer at the same time as I support my daughter navigating thyroid cancer (yep, both diagnosed within months of each other).

I'm blogging because I'm a much better writer than speaker, when I can write, edit, re-write and over -think things behind the scenes. Which I will do, for sure.

I'm blogging partly for therapy and partly to share information - more on both of those to come.  I'm also wrapping up work this week, for the next few months, and it feels like I'll need something to do (besides heal). 

So, that's the answer to the first 2 questions and now a bit about my cancer (I don't think I need to introduce myself, since I'm not planning to share this broadly) but I was diagnosed in August 2024 with Invasive Ductal Carcinoma.  It's the most common type of breast cancer, which doesn't really give me the warm fuzzies but as someone more comfortable in a crowd, than at the front of the stage, it's always good to know that I'm in good company.  I also have no family history of breast cancer, which, for years somehow made me feel safe against breast cancer.  High blood pressure and heart disease are in my gene pool, but not breast cancer, until now.  So, how did I find out?  Probably the same way as a lot of women.  Not with a breast self exam, but with a mammogram.  I was lucky to have been enrolled in a study and was getting yearly mammograms between the ages of 48 and 53, and after year 4 of the mammograms, I received the dreaded call to come back.  I think I knew instantly that it wasn't a "bad read" on the mammogram, since they also booked a breast ultrasound at the same time as the repeat mammogram.  I kept this all to myself and went alone to this appointment but the dam broke when the radiologist came in to tell me I needed a biopsy.  Fast forward another 4 weeks for the biopsy and 2 weeks for results (hurry up and wait is likely going to be a theme here)  and I received my diagnosis. 

All the while this was happening, my daughter, Faith, was waiting for her thyroid cancer surgery to be scheduled (more on her diagnosis and process in another post - #checkyourneck).  One diagnosis is a lot to take in, two, in a family, within weeks of each other, feels like a tsunami.  Decisions that should be easy can feel insurmountable. Emotions of all kinds come out of nowhere. Every aspect of my health has been challenged in the past few months and probably will for the foreseeable future.  I avoid situations where there's a risk of PDE (public display of emotion) because there are times when I can't turn off the tears (I should mention that I've also had to go off hormone replacement therapy which was a bit of a god-send for the past year or so).  I want people to know what I'm feeling but I don't want to have to explain it 18 times, and certainly not in a group setting.  So, here we are...

This has been a tough weekend as Faith got her biopsy results through MyChart, 10 hours after her post-op appointment and when she was already back in Sudbury, so without anyone to explain what they all meant.  These results confirm that her cancer has spread to her lymph nodes.  Beyond that, we don't know what the next step is or when or how long the wait is, and so we wait for the surgeon to call her back.  It's also been a tough weekend for me, probably the toughest so far, as I'm looking at my appointments next week, both on Tuesday - to get a magnetic seed injected into my tumour to be able to easily detect it during the surgery the following week, as well as for an xray on my ribs/back/chest to see if there's any reason why I'm having pain (same side as the tumour).  For someone who over-thinks things, this has been a ROUGH weekend...on top of having had both flu and COVID shots late last week and dealing with the range of symptoms that came from those shots.  Oh, and did I mention that Monty ate an order of onion bhaji before we left for curling on Saturday night?  Yep, tough weekend, mentally and carpet-fabricky.  But it's over and I'm ready to move on and face the week ahead.  

I'll try to make the next blog post more positive and shorter.