If you have boobs, listen to them.
I’m not great about listening to my body - chronic pain and working manual labor jobs for thirty years mostly make me want it to shut up, because pain is very loud sometimes.
But last June when I was at the doctor for something else (which we still haven’t figured out) that hurt a lot more, he asked if I was having other problems, because he doesn’t often see me.
‘Eh, my left breast has been kind of uncomfortable for a little while?’
Fortunately, he not only listens, but takes things seriously. Diagnostic mammogram, several years before I should have needed them for routine testing.
‘Hmm,’ said the mammogram techs. ‘Let’s biopsy that.’ (‘That’ was an abnormality in my left breast that appeared to be shaped like a piece of macaroni. Amused concern about boob noodles abounded.)
As much as I try to ignore my body is roughly how successful my body actually is at ignoring lidocaine. The biopsy - which was mammogram guided and from a medical technology standpoint, really cool! - hurt like blue blazing fuck.
‘Hmm,’ said the folks who examined the biopsy. ‘That’s weird but doesn’t appear to be cancerous, at least?’
(It still hurt. It continued to hurt worse as time went on.)
It turns out - because there was a history of ovarian cancer from my father’s side of the family and gene testing was done to check for other factors - that I’m also positive for a BRCA 2 mutation that increases my lifetime risk of breast and ovarian cancers to roughly stratospheric levels.
Thanks, dad.
So. Boobs off? Boobs off.
As it turned out, boobs off was going to take a length of time that was becoming increasingly unbearable since the pain in my breast was continuing to get worse.
‘Can we just get the noodle out?’ I asked, rather despairingly, and apparently we could!
Having a section of my boob the size of half a deck of cards excised did not hurt at all, despite my worries following the biopsy.
It did, however, show that I had cancer.
So, boobs are coming off - in a week and a half, actually, which is engendering very complicated emotions (none of them about gender, funnily) followed by chemo, possibly radiation, then reconstruction, since I’m getting it done with my own tissue rather than implants.
It’s going to be a really long year.
So, yeah, listen to your boobs, regardless of sex and gender. Breast cancer hits plenty of men, too.
And if anyone wants to help make my recovery a little easier I have a wishlist?
Amazon.com
Funnily enough, I forgot that I had signed up to be part of a study that will use samples of tissue taken during surgery for ongoing cancer research until the thank-you card they sent me came in the mail today.
I’m literally donating my boobs to science.
I am radioactive.
Again.
Cue the ‘two nickels but it’s funny that it happened twice’ meme.
(Tracer to locate my sentinel lymph nodes for biopsy tomorrow means I got a nuclear needle to the boob. Medical technology is amazing and I am very tired.)
Mastectomy went well and my scars are healing nicely - I’m already planning the tattoos I’ll get on them in celebration once this is over.
There was no evidence of spread to the lymph nodes, so gods willing it never got a chance to spread and never will. I’m on ‘chemo light,’ a course of Taxol and herceptin - twelve weeks of weekly Taxol, herceptin every three weeks for a year.
They put me on beta blockers to protect my heart from the meds and my blood pressure went up twenty points, which seems both illogical and somewhat unfair.
It’s exhausting but not horrible - I’m on week three, officially one-quarter of the way through my Taxol. (I’m told I may be allowed to ring the bell twice - once at the end of the twelve weeks and then again next March at the end of treatment.) The ‘short’ infusion appointments are three hours and the long ones are five, and I have to wear ice mittens and booties during infusion to prevent neuropathy.
I haven’t started losing my hair yet, although that will probably happen this week. I got it cut at the beginning of March to the shortest and boldest I’ve had it in my life, a pixie cut dyed vibrantly pink. (My least favorite color - figured hating it would make it easier to see it go.) My roots are already showing - honestly I didn’t think I’d have my hair long enough for that to happen.
It’s going to be a long year, but being a quarter of the way through the worst of it already is encouraging.
